When you meet him, Crane is very ambitious and monomaniacally focused on working his subordinates to the bone so he can get to Byzantium, but he’s much less heartless than he initially appears. While he seems like a two dimensional caricature, over the course of the quest you can learn that he has a lot more depth. He’s a pretty good character (thank you Megan Starks, I think). If you fail to rescue Crane’s assistant in time, he’s overcome by regret and kicks himself for being such a ruthless bastard.
And if you have the right stats—IIRC there’s a medical check, an intelligence check and a persuasion check—you can figure out what his appetite surpressant is really for and what the collateral damage will be beyond the side effects Crane already knows about:
Aunty Cleo’s wants to market the weight loss toothpaste as a mass market product for the proletariat rather than as a luxury product for the elite in Byzantium. Meaning it’s not for weight loss, it’s for placating workers who are already starving. If you give an appetite suppressant to the malnourished, quite a few of them will die.
Once you explain what’s going on, he shoots himself. You might also need to botch the quest to save his assistant (I think it’s on a timer).
Go back to Roseway and check, Crane’s corpse might be lying there. I thought I only convinced him to destroy his research, but when I went back for the second special gun from the weapons researcher, I popped in on Crane and his body was just lying there. Then I read the quest description to figure out what happened. I must’ve left too quickly after our last conversation and missed seeing him commit suicide.
It’s a little more complicated than that. The establishment leaders in TOW tend to be foolish for a variety of reasons, but they’re not necessarily idiots. While Reed’s not the brightest bulb, it’s more that he’s too hidebound to cope with reality. The OSI teaches that you can overcome disease through sheer will and he believes them, in part because Edgewater doesn’t have any doctors or scientists left to set him straight. However, that same hidebound streak is the reason you can convince Reed to do the right thing and commit suicide by marauder.
Sanjar on Monarch isn’t stupid, he’s a clever guy, but he’s so detail oriented that he can miss the forest for the trees (just like his employee evaluation says). Anton Crane has layers as mentioned above—definitely not an idiot. The chairman’s no dope, even if it turns out that his ruthless gameplan is not the best decision for Halcyon.
The leaders who’re fighting the establishment tend to be smart, yes, but also heartless with horrible motives. Adelaide is vengeful bitch who’s totally cool with letting most of Edgewater die. The woman who leads the raiders in Roseway explains that she’s fine with killing bootlickers because that’s also liberating them from the board’s oppression. Graham Bryant is a sociopath who wants to set the world on fire.
The only truly good leaders in the game—people who do the right thing for the right reason—are Zora and Junlei. I think this is one pure good guy too many.
The problem with this whole setup is that it’s so paint by numbers. The bad guys do the wrong thing for the right reason, the good guys do the right thing for the wrong reason or they do it in a bad way. I love stories with morally gray characters, but you need shades of gray. The Outer Worlds too ethically balanced.
Even worse, nearly all the characters could afford to be a lot darker. Like, is this a fucked up dystopia that’s running low on resources or what? Other than Slaughterhouse Clive, who’s a cartoon, you don’t see many characters actually doing shit that’s straight up evil. You can read about strangers doing terrible things on the terminals, but somehow you rarely seem to see any of that in person. IMO, Sublight’s particular brand of amorality really should’ve been closer to the baseline for every faction because necessity is a cruel bitch. And Sublight should’ve been much, much worse.
You should have asked. We already have somebody working on a non-quickie review. (I don't think it's going to be positive btw)
