I was pretty down reading the patch notes for the new beta because they never fix the incredibly broken shit, but turns out this time it included something for One Giant Leap, the absolute last quest in any version of the main quest, short or long:
- One Giant Leap: Addressed an issue that could appear to prevent grav jumping when artifacts are split between the ship and an outpost.
So what this means is, you can now build the mcguffin that you need to end the game on your bases instead of the ship and the game actually lets you complete it and NG+ now like it was supposed to! I'm fucking astounded at how good "bare minimum" feels, bare minimum being the game works and lets you beat it. I'm gonna work under the assumption the stupid broken screen bug can still happen, there was absolutely nothing about that on the patch notes (unless I missed it), but now you can circumvent that softlock with this fix, I hope every player's able to do this, because dear god it sucks getting to the last mission and the game breaking down. If those reddittors from months ago talking about this quest still being bugged haven't moved on from this game I hope they can finally get some closure on their characters or continue playing.
I know I've got our "podcast game" back on now. I'm fine treating Starfield as "background content", and I mean that with the implication that it's not worth paying 100% of your attention to in the slightest after you've beaten it more than once, it's just a nice thing to see numbers go up on and play around with for me now.
It's been a fucking journey, I'm almost okay with recommending it to people now that the game sort of works and lets you complete it? unless something else breaks before this last quest, I genuinely cannot trust Starfield not to break because it's as stable as a box of dynamite. It broke on my 130+ level character because we fucked around with changing languages (theory: the dragon shout quests needed a specific item name to work, and the japanese localization changes those item names and if you switch back to english you're fucked), it will break due to anything.