TOW: Groundbreaker

I grilled ADA on the system and got some dialogue I'd forgotten about. ADA despises Edgewater and actively roots for you to kill everyone there. She says she sent a distress signal when the Unreliable landed because Hawthorne was injured, but instead of sending medical help they sent people to collect illegal landing fees. Hawthorne apparently had a concussion (?) when he set up the landing beacon, and that's why he remained in the landing zone after he activated it. For the longest time, I could not figure out why Hawthorne died that way.

I also learned you cannot go back to check on Guard Pelham. There's a collision block preventing your return to the starter area. He'll end up in the constabulary at some point, if you helped him.

The Groundbreaker has all kinds of interesting nooks and crannies, as well as lots of side story tidbits, environmental storytelling, and a few deadends. It is neat from a level design perspective. They did a good job of giving the impression of different factions coexisting in an enclosed space. Last playthrough I discovered the secret skeleton (climb up above the entrance and make a few running jumps to get onto some platforms with loot and find a skeleton stahed behind some pillars). If you enter the Groundbreaker this way, you can avoid triggering the ship impound conversation at the front gate, but I assume doing so breaks the game or at least creates some continuity weirdness.

• This level has some pretty funny conversations if you pretend to be Hawthorne (or deny you're him, in some cases).
• You can't recruit Felix until you talk to Udon about the ship impound. I usually take Felix and Max at the beginning of this area, because of Max's personal quest, but this time I took Pavarti and opened some interesting asides, including a bit where Pavarti expresses interest in Junlei and gets teased by the security officer. Felix defends her.
• If you pay a bribe, you can enter the security office and mardet quarters without the holographic shroud countdown timer. Not sure if it's really worth the bits, but I appreciated taking my time snooping around.
• I'm not sure why there's a Doc Maybell wanted poster on the Groundbreaker, but if you investigate Welles' poster your companions will weigh in.
• MacRedd is like, the peak TOW NPC. Everything about him--allegedly 26 years old, offers to let you "parlay with the king," wants to go corporate, had a carnal relationship with Sanita--is exquisite. It really doesn't get better than this. He's basically the Toledo Killswitch of Halcyon.
• The Groundbreaker has an "unmarked" quest, Greasy the robot, that you can investigate for the heck of it. There's evidently no kitchen key (I certainly looked) so you have to pick the lock.

There are also a few weird dead ends, including a mysterious series of emails that are deleted and a few named NPCs that seem like they ought to be attached to a quest somewhere but they just.... aren't. One of the devs remarked they cut more content than the probably should have (paraphrasing), but as far as I can tell they haven't really confirmed what they cut beyond the fact they cut an entire planet and later regretted it. I assume these strange little loose ends are related to cut content or a lack of time. But it also makes the game world seem bigger and messier, and not as tidy as it might if everything was neatly contained.