General News - 7 Games with Great Side Quests

@Gamasutra Seven games with great side quest design with pointers from Chris Avellone , George Ziets, Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz, Brad Johnson and Bruce Nesmith.

Fallout 2's open-ended quest and skill systems

The Witcher 3's lead quest designer Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz thinks that Fallout 2 has particularly good quest designs. "Tasks are simple, but open-ended," he explains. "You can complete many of them in a variety of ways and it’s done very organically — they don’t seem forced, nor do they involve much hand holding, if any at all." Indeed, the game is so open-ended that most quests can be bypassed altogether — meaning that nearly every quest could be described as a side quest. And the player's actions have consequences — even in the more innocuous quests — that can play out both over the course of their remaining journey and in the ending.

Fallout 2 also cleverly works the skill system into the dialogue, with every stat affecting dialogue choices and results, rather than following the common approach of only checking communication-related skills. 

"If you invested heavily in small guns, for example, you might end up using that knowledge to impress someone," says Tomaszkiewicz. "If you know a lot about computers, you could’ve used that fact to reprogram a robot, etc. This use of gameplay-related skills in dialogues and quests was very unique and immersive — something I’d come to expect from a pen & paper RPG, not a video game."

TAKEAWAY: Side quests, like main quests, benefit from an open-endedness that allows for different solutions and playstyles and that ideally also acknowledges all of the player character's relevant skills.

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