After getting past that amazing loading screen, I found myself back in the town hall, all ready to get involved in some space politics. I decided that as monotonous as this game already was, that trying to campaign for a NPC was probably not the best course of action. Instead, I went back to the Imperial pilot trainer, and got another space quest. I’ve only talked about these in passing in the past, so let’s get a bit deeper today. Every quest that I have encountered so far, whether it be just a kill X of Y quest or an escort quest has 5 or 6 waypoints that you have to travel to, either killing shit or escorting something while killing shit along the way. These waypoints, at least in the starter ship (and these are starter missions), take forever to get to, so what most of these missions end up being for me is selecting a waypoint, turning on autopilot, and alt-tabbing out, the absolute apex of entertainment and fun. These extremely long transit times also mean it’s faster to calculate a hyperspace jump to land at the planet you are already in orbit above then to actually land on it.
Landing back on the planet I got a little pop-up message notifying me that the Imperials were about to try and retake Bestine, you know, the town that I’ve been getting Imperial missions in. Anyway, I go outside to see the overwhelming attack of the mighty Imperial forces… one guy. Yep, this guy was apparently the only person to care at all about this invasion thing, and was fighting a ton of rebel guards all by his lonesome. I played the part of the annoying tourist by snapping a ton of screenshots, and continued on my merry way.
Reading my next mission on the way to the spaceport, I discovered I was lucky enough to be the recipient of a space escort quest. I tried imagining how much more terrible you could possibly make the escort quest, but it turned out I was far underestimating its capacity for boredom. First I had to check 5 checkpoints for pirates (there weren’t any) then I had to escort a freighter all the way back to the planet. The freighter moved at half my top speed, prolonging the agony. Eventually I delivered the frigate to its destination and returned to the surface.
As it turns out, while I was doing my escort mission, a large number of people had beome involved in the battle for Bestine. Granted, the majority of them were NPC stormtroopers, but there was more than a single person, so good for them! Looking around I noticed that for some inexplicable reason Darth Vader was just standing there directing troops, not getting shot at or getting involved in the fight at all… just standing there looking like a badass. (Which, coincidentally, Darth Vader is really good at) After turning in my escort quest I decided to end it there for the day.
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