Yeah it sucks ass.

Technically you can join the pirates without every becoming an undercover cop but they suck anyway and somehow it makes the plot line even stupider. To do this, you need to tell the spook to get fucked. They'll fade to black, tell you in a placeholder text box that you were in jail and a nameless NPC compliments you on "how you handled them" before telling you the german guy has the next quest.

It's all extreme lazy and like... what the fuck is the logic here? How much do they know about what happened? If they just know the spooks dropped you off in jail, you should be radioactive and they should avoid you. If they know for exactly what happened, then how do they not know you're a narc if you go down the other path? Clearly they've got their own spies in there.

Also, you can double cross the cops at the end if you agreed to be a narc. But the pirates capture their flagship and the senior officers. They're going to know you were a narc, how stupid does you character have to be to do this? You're going to get keelhauled.

thanks todd

And that's why you should choose the only game where you can be an Apocalypse Cop instead

And this is why I flatly refuse to get Starfield, even though I was able to be convinced into Fallout 4. I'm not playing as a fuckin cop.

It's easier to imagine a whole galaxy full of planets than to imagine something other than cops and capitalists

Just play EV:Nova again.

Bethesda Developer A: hey so what's the big ideological battle between the big factions in our game going to be and don't forget that it is set 300 years in the future and in a world in which we destroyed our planet? Bethesda Developer B: uuuh i guess san francisco liberals vs. muh taxes libertarians who like to dress up like cowboys for some reason. but for political correctness sake lets have both of them be salad pot style ethnically diverse by the numbers Bethesda Developer A: tru tru oh and what about some corporate cyberpunk guys Bethesda Developer B: oh that sounds cool and original. let's make those guys one hundred percent asian tho Bethesda Developer A: yeah dude that just makes sense lets ship it