Nothing makes me feel more like an epic gamer than downloading eroge RPGs solely for the gameplay and immediately turning off all of the sexually explicit content at startup so it will not get in the way of my engaging tactical and strategic experience

been digging around in the Creation Kit for the past Too Many hours trying to refamiliarize myself with it after over a decade. Feels great to fumble around a bit while things click back into place, both from stuff that I already knew and also figuring out a few of the extra bits that've been added in the interim (not much, this tool is almost identical to the one I used before. Blender looks more different at the outset than this tool does, comparing from similar timeframes).

now that I think I've spent enough time dusting off the parts of my brain I needed to be able to navigate around this tool somewhat more competently, I'm starting to poke into the actual data that's available to me. One of the fun things about messing around in Creation Kit\GECK\whatever tools is that you get to check out a bunch of content that otherwise is invisible from normal gameplay and still pretty unwieldy to access\view even when you know what you're doing with console commands ingame. Sometimes it's just stuff that is actually in the game, even visible in "normal" gameplay, but maybe just very very unlikely to actually happen to you, specifically, unless you're explicitly attempting to cause it to happen. I'm winding down from spending time in this tool for the day, but one thing that I stumbled into in the dialogue files is some interesting situational dialogue that would presumably happen ingame between you and Barrett. Also really fun to see the little script notes that would presumably be given to the actual actors (the people, not the ingame data references of 'actor'):

" Description:
BARRETT ONLY. When the Frontier ship is destroyed (the ship Barrett gave to the player) by the Player, Barrett may have a comment or affinity reaction.

The player just blew up the ship that Barrett gave them at the start of the game.

'A fitting end to a surprisingly hardy little ship. I honestly didn't expect it to make it this far.'
'It feels like an eternity and no time at all since I gave you that ship. What a glorious ride it has been, don't you think?'

The player just blew up the ship that Barrett gave them at the start of the game. Barrett is angry with the player already and is more mad now.

'Did it make you feel better or just bigger?'

Eye roll.

'Are you trying to tell me something?'"

nothing about these lines are terribly remarkable to me, but what caught my eye at first was the condition under which they would trigger: wracked my brain and honestly, the only situation that currently exists with the architecture of the game as it is that would allow this line to be played is the extremely precise series of events: a) you'd have to be piloting the Frontier as your active ship b) have Barrett presumably somewhere around, either as crew or follower I don't know c) find an enemy\other ship in space that is both boardable and pilotable\able to be stolen d) board the ship and take it as your own e) undock from the Frontier with your new ship and then f) deliberately target your previous vessel after taking control of a new one and manage to destroy it before it jumps out (this part is purely speculative: as best I understand\remember, once you undock from your previous ship after commandeering a new one, it will automatically "return" to a planet to be used later in your spaceship garage or whatever: I do not know how long it sticks around before peacing out). All of these things would have to happen, in this exact order, in order for even one of these lines to be played, and that's ALSO under the assumption that 1) at least one of these lines are actually guaranteed to trigger when the condition is met and not just a roll of the dice maybe it does maybe it doesn't and 2) the player is actually in a position to be able to hear the line read in the first place i.e. maybe Barrett isn't nearby\within earshot or something. iunno this is just kind of a wildly specific circumstance that would have to be fulfilled in order to hear this in "normal" gameplay. I also know there's a way to play the actual audio of the dialogue through the Creation Kit interface, but it's been a hot minute since I've been digging around in here and I can't recall exactly where to find the command and I don't feel like looking any more for it at the moment. It also may just not be in the exact same place it used to be, even though most of these menus look basically identical to what I can recall of them. Even if that feature has, for whatever reason, been deprecated, I've also got the voice filename for the dialogue audio too, which is afaik the exact string or whatever that I'd have to plug into a console command in order for me to listen to it ingame. so that's cool.

anyways I'm off next time to see if I can find out what I can about any loose ends for questlines that were either cut from normal gameplay, or, more likely, just buggy as shit and don't trigger the proper stages the way they're supposed to. Sometimes parts of quests will just disappear from the game because a trigger doesn't work properly and you just. magically lose entire narrative arcs because of [gestures vaguely]. It just works! I've got a very specific vendetta against the Ron Hope questline, saw something earlier when poking at some endgame-related cells that reminded me of a "random" encounter that is presumably only meant to trigger a single time at some point during\after the Ranger questline. Except I get the encounter constantly while in space. Can't go 10 jumps without heaRING ABOUT YOUR SAINTED RON HOPE

Usually I do like daily posts for Steam Next Fest, but, well, erm. I have been a bit overambitious this time around. So, since it's about the halfway point, a list of the demos I liked so far and a very brief blurb because I really need to get back to playing more demos!