A Well-Known Starfield Inside Joke Actually Reveals A Huge Missed Opportunity

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An inside joke contained within 's random NPC chatter suggests a fascinating gameplay feature. 's NPCs have a lot of dialogue, which can help the game feel more alive. This is especially apparent when traveling through one of the major cities. While walking through New Atlantis, players will hear dialogue in a wide variety of languages — Arabic, Swedish, Korean, et cetera — reflecting the diversity of the space age and the cosmopolitan nature of the United Colonies' capital.

That's always been the point of idle NPC chatter: it's a subtle, but immersive way to get across some worldbuilding. Still, developer Bethesda has a long history with NPC dialogue, and some of its most iconic lines have become popular inside jokes. follows that legacy with a much-memed NPC voice line of its own. However, this innocent seeming line of dialogue betrays a missing mechanic, which could add a lot of depth to some of 's most overlooked features.

's most iconic NPC voice line suggests that heatleeches can infest the player's ship, even though there's no such mechanic in the game. Anytime the player walks through a major spaceport or the surrounding area, they're bound to hear at least one NPC incessantly intoning, "." This has become 's answer to 's "," an excessively common voice line the player eventually learns by rote. While it hasn't achieved quite the same iconic status yet, anyone with a few hours in the game has surely heard it at least once.

Now, heatleeches are a little more mechanically relevant than 's guard who took an arrow to the knee. While the player never really finds out where, how, or why the guard got his injury, they'll encounter quite a few heatleeches as they jet across 's cities and planets. They're among the most harmless enemies in the game, akin to radroaches in their insectoid forms and low overall stats. However, despite what the dialogue implies, heatleeches are never seen on the player's ship.

It may seem like a minor thing, but the addition of