How does Jason operate his robots?

[NeoSacratif]

I completed quest where player helps Jason to expand to Akila City, Neon and Cydonia. And I probably found minor lore issue: Jason appears to be controlling all his bots remotely, in real time, which is impossible in Starfield.

Settled Systems are, well, settled thanks to Grav drive — a device to almost instantly jump into any system, even bypassing the need to travel FTL. But there's no FTL communication — SSNN uses pre-recorded broadcasts, LIST colonists can rely only on system network satellites. Remote colonies don't know any news from big worlds (NPC dialogues). Only one indication of any form of intergalactic tracking is bounty reward — even that is more of game mechanic to remove tediousness of returning to quest giver. Robot in Trackers Alliance HQ also tracks fugitives throughout the galaxy, but it's never mentioned to be real-time comms.

And while I may understand occasional glimps of cross-planetary comms in messages (i'd imagine settled systems full of drone ships cruising around systems and uploading messages to satellites like some space postal service), how does Jason remotely operate robot in real-time for the conversation with player is unknown for me. Does Starfield actually have hidden interplanetary direct transmission tech? Or it's just an oversight?

I know it's very minor thing but if no one talks about it, someone has to.

 

[twolargepepperoni]

Hi there! Someone else has asked this on our discord channel before, I'll find you the response from our lead writer:

"The reason Jason operates the way he does is mostly for game mechanic reasons (otherwise we’d either have to record new lines for new characters for all of his and Busters dialogue options, or just remove the feature of multiple stores).

However, if you want an in-universe explanation, Buster does drop a very tiny comment about his program actually installed to and running from the McClarence store mainframe (he's too tiny to have all the hardware needed inside of him), and the same can be said for Jason (in that the robot he acts through operates off the mainframe). The handwave explanation that is never said -- is that the Jasons and Busters in the other stores are running off of a rudimentary AI, which syncs up to the main McClarence store mainframe as often as it can. So, whatever you tell Jason and Buster, they’ll remember. But you may not always be operating with them directly!But all that explanation seemed a little too much to put into the game directly. So I didn’t."

 

[mgb125]

Sounds like sometimes you're speaking to Real Live Jason, and sometimes you're speaking to JasonGPT.