Opinion - How to fix RPG Side Quests

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@The Escapist Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw explains how to fix RPG side quests.

And it occurred to me while we were discussing it that Dragon Age: Inquisition was millimetres away from a logical solution to the sidequest mundanity annoyance. It comes down to two features of that game: the large number of party members, of which we can only employ two at a time while the rest hang around home base braiding each other's hair or something, and all the War Room stuff that allows us to send imaginary soldiers on imaginary quests that return rewards after a specific amount of real time. The same kind of thing Assassin's Creed did from Brotherhood onwards to let you actually feel like you're commanding a big organisation and not just three jackoffs who live in an unusually large house.

So here was my thinking: why not let us send party members that we're not using to complete sidequests offscreen? Not imaginary quests that are solely for completing offscreen, but the actual quests that the player could have completed but were left for too long and the reward is no longer worth it. Not quests we've just been given, so we can fob off all the gameplay; just the ones that in World of Warcraft would be coloured green or grey on the quest log.

I voiced these thoughts and the point was raised that doing the shitty Farmer Dickcheese quests is part of the experience, it's how we get a sense of the path that our character takes as they grow from humble beginnings to greatness. But I would argue that this benefit is lost after our character has achieved a certain level of greatness, and still has old sidequests cluttering up the log that no longer offer any significant growth. The only thing you can do at that point is quietly delete them from the list (if the game even lets you do that), and that doesn't feel like the heroic thing to do. There's no closure. You have to live with the knowledge that the rats might eat all of Farmer Dickcheese's grain and leave him and his family hungry this winter. And that Mrs. Plopknickers will never again see her little boy who mysteriously vanished near the dark forest.
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More information.
 
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I'm not even sure why is anyone still folowing this twofaced guy.

Since the game release it was obvious that DA:I has the filler problem, yet his mother site, Escapist, did not spare praise on that game.
How about instead of waking up after a couple of years, next time criticize something when it appears.
Besides, there is at least one game out there that "fixed" side quests already.

Tomorrow's yahtzee headline:
How to fix Bioware's sonar minigame.
 
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If you don't do side quests yourself, are they even considered side quests?
It sounds like a minigame to me, not a quest.
 
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Implementing a feature to complete quests the player has no interest in completing.
Brilliant.
 
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I'm not sure why there has been such a crusade to "fix" side quests these last few years. Well over 10 years now, I remember people complaining about Fedex quests back around Oblivion release.

Seems like people don't understand that they are optional and there to offer content variety if you don't want your game to be just 20ish hours of cutscenes on a fixed path.
 
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Can't quite get what you mean azarhal? You this that sidequests are ok as they are orm because they are skippable they can be crap?
Since, in TW3, CDPR have managed to do most of the side quests right it's not an impossible task.
 
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Brilliant. I have another brilliant idea. It's a game in which you press "start" and then you just watch, the game plays itself... Oh, wait, this is called watching a "movie"....
 
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Making it so completing quests is the only way for the player to gain exp makes then feel more worthwhile..
 
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Isn't this something like high level World of Warcraft play where you have a "class hall" and you have "followers" that you can send on "quests" while you're doing other quests? You assign, say, your warlock to go do X out of a choice of X, Y, and Z and he or she has a percentage chance to complete the thing while you're off doing something else. If you choose to "take them with you" instead of sending them off to a class hall, they grant a special ability or somesuch.

I'm no WoW guru, but that's how it seemed to work to me.

I'd say why bother with side quests at all that are so boring you'd want to send an AI to do it instead of doing it yourself? It's just fluff filler at that point.
 
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mbpopolano24 said:
Brilliant. I have another brilliant idea. It's a game in which you press "start" and then you just watch, the game plays itself… Oh, wait, this is called watching a "movie"….
Click to expand...

Actually, this might be why Let's Play videos are so popular now.

:D
 
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zahratustra said:
Can't quite get what you mean azarhal? You this that sidequests are ok as they are orm because they are skippable they can be crap?
Since, in TW3, CDPR have managed to do most of the side quests right it's not an impossible task.
Click to expand...

I'm saying that side quests are important to break the linearity of linear storytelling and them being optional means you don't have to do them. The article suggest to have companions do them for you as a "fix".

The crap part of a side quest is very subjective though. I don't think there is a good or bad type of side quest. There is a good and bad way of presenting them to the player. I don't require my "deliver a package to some dude in the next city" side quest to have cutscenes where both the person asking me and the person delivered to tell me their life stories. But if the story is about resolving a crime, them yes I kinda want to know more about the characters involved.

People loves to compare TW3 and DAI side quests, but few seems to realize that there is a difference between how the two games present those quests and what they are about.

All the TW3 meaty side quests are directly tied to the main quest characters and given to you while playing the main quest. They explore those characters via cutscene while Geralt perform some tasks for them *cough*getting stuff for Dandelion's cabaret*cough*. The story-devoid stuff require exploration to find them and are easily ignored.

In DAI, it is the opposite, the story-devoid stuff is thrown at your face. If you want meaty side quests you need to explore optional map/content (like the Exalted Plains) and they are mostly about revealing new lore (minus companion's quest which are about the companion, I'm not talking about the reputation grinding one, but the real companion side quests).
 
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ElderGnome said:
Actually, this might be why Let's Play videos are so popular now.

:D
Click to expand...

I use Let's plays to decide whether or not to buy games nowadays as demos are very rare.

Demos used to be the way for me to try games out, but I do not see those anymore :(
 
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Well *push this button to complete sidequest* is one solution to the problem. But I just avoid the issue altogether by playing fun games.
 
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To successfully complete side quests requiring unused party members, you should need to invest something besides an unused party member's time. It should be more of a calculated risk. Spend some funds to improve the odds, for example. Risk something if you lose. Otherwise it's just... meh.
 
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This has to be the worst possible "solution" I've heard in a while. Can't we just stop with the attempts to bring already unpopular mmo features into our singleplayer games? There isn't a solution for bad writing. Either a game has well written side quests or they become a boring chore.
 
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This is one of the most stupid ideas I've ever heard. This guy's a complete moron in my book. Make quests interesting and I'll gladly do them.

I've got nothing against the PoE way of using your other roster members for missions (it was that way in PoE right?). But using them to do quests you should've done yourself? Geez.
 
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tomasp3n said:
I've got nothing against the PoE way of using your other roster members for missions (it was that way in PoE right?). But using them to do quests you should've done yourself? Geez.
Click to expand...

PoE had normal side quests. What you are thinking off are the Stronghold adventures meant to grant some XP to unused companions. It wasn't real side quests your character couldn't never do them and most of the time those events happened outside of the playable zones. It was more like short stories with some rewards for making a companion unavailable for days of in-game time.
 
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Side quests don't need to be "fixed" as they're not broken. A simple "Fedex" quest could be interesting. An interesting quest is about the writing, how it's presented and the overall package. Add in an unexpected twist now and then, an unexpected or silly dialogue or some small detail (it could be anything; a skill check, some interesting location or NPC to be discovered, etc.) to make it memorable and you're good. It's about the small, subtle details in questing. They go a long way to making quests interesting.

The issue I see is that a lot of players skip quest dialogue completely in some games. They make it 100% about the task. Think World of Warcraft or LOTRO, as an example. I've seen people in LOTRO just completely disregard all the quest dialogue (which is well-written, interesting and just fun to get absorbed with) and just rush from point A to point B to complete it as fast as possible. Then they rinse and repeat. At that point it's not even worth playing, IMO, because what's the point of an RPG if you're just going to rush through it and not pay attention to the things that are supposed to draw you into the game in the first place? So then this sort of mindset carries over into single-player RPGs, hence people starting to complain about "Fedex" quests. These people seem to become completely oblivious to the in-game world or any of the small details that would make the quest interesting.
 
It's hard to imagine the lack of intelligence it would take, to have his beliefs.
 
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