Car Theft Quest Skips Investigation when Deduction is Too High.

[AnOldMan]

I'm on my 3rd complete play through, with each area played multiple times from load points in order to test abilities, xp collection, decision making, etc.

I noticed for the 2nd time an unusual bug in Ben's Garage when you try to track the mayor's niece's SUX 6000 down. If your deduction is above lvl 3 when you start talking to Ben, as soon as the dialogue ends, he opens Scott's locker.

The actual search of Ben's shop for evidence is passed over. This is a killer as it denies you up to between 100 to 300 XP early in the game. Not sure why it does this, but I do know it only does it if your Deduction is super high.

Having anything in psychology might contribute to this as well, as both times it did this to me, those were the two stats I'd poured into. All other times (rougly 5 tests or so?) I had other builds which seemed to force the investigative steps, and caused no problems.

[AnOldMan]

Update to this.

Wemod released their mods for this game. Thought I'd use it to test a few parts of the game out. The ONLY thing I modified was XP payout (albeit, by a lot).
I used this to max my abilities out by the time I left the Metro Precinct the first time, to track down Soot at the arcade.

Using these maxed abilities, I mostly wanted to test dialogue decisions, and how they affected quests.
Sure enough, if you have psychology 2, or higher, the initial conversation with Ben is supposed to yield an option to warn him that hiding criminal activity is itself a crime. Immediately after this, rather than searching the shop, Ben opens Scott's locker.

If you have 0 psychology, you not only lack for the dialogue option, but have the investigative work to do (scanning things for evidence).

If you have 1 point of psychology, Ben still opens the locker, but you don't have the dialogue option to select so he does just that. THIS SHOULD NOT HAPPEN. Ben should still force you to investigate, allowing you to scan things.

Psychology also fails to manifest a dialogue option for the Graffiti artist, unless it is EXACTLY 2. Anything above fails to yield the dialogue option for Community Service.

Please re-examine the dialogue options and fix them for the necessary ability values.

[TYZzzzzzz]

+1

Just started my third playthrough (not completed, just decided to optimize some things), and with deduction level 4 in skills (everything else is zero), I have the (Psychology 2) option available in the dialogue, and selecting of any dialogue option leads directly to the opening of the locker.

Upd.
I tried to play again from (02 - Metro West). With 0 skills the situation was reproduced

Upd 2.
I re-installed the game and deleted all the save files (%localappdata%\RoboCop\Saved\SaveGames) -- the dialog works as expected, without bug.