Extra Punctuation: Sidequests Good and Bad

[SnakeoilSage]

Personally I've always felt that the main plot is the meat, side-quests are the fix 'ems, and the bread counts for graphics and controls. If you're sinking your teeth into a really great steak sandwich you're more likely to finish it off even if the bread has desintigrated into a pile of juice-soggy scraps in your hand. Conversely, I'll always feel more than a little disappointed if you take a great herb-and-cheese bread and slap on a slice of ham so thin the pig didn't feel it come off his ass.

My point (finally) is that sidequests should be more than filler for a world. The should offer up activities you can't do during your main quest (or don't allow you to do often enough). They should give you unique sites to explore, unique puzzles to solve, and it should have an impact on the main story's progression.

 

[Daaaah Whoosh]

I'd just like to say that side quests are a lot more approachable when the main quest doesn't involve the main character dying of a disease in a few hours. If you've played the game, you know which one it is. I just felt really bad searching for collectables and side-quests when I'd just been yelled at for stopping to go to the bathroom instead of trying to find the cure.

 

[Vault101]

I find it hard to do certain side quests if I dont find them itneresting..OR Idont have a vaild reason

I liked fallout new vegas in that all the "side" quests (there want much of a clear distinction) felt somhow tied up in the main plot....or at least they were interesting

 

[Vault101]

I miss the days of Morrowind... I enjoyed that it gave you nothing but a description of the quest. Maybe the name of an area, or a person... sometimes just a general direction.

I enjoyed the fact that it didn't mark the exact spot on your map. It allowed you to explore and discover on your own. Sure, sometimes it was difficult to find things with this system... but it brought a great sense of accomplishment when you found your goal.

I don't like the continuing trend of mapping the EXACT location of a side quest (Hell, even the main quest) on your map and having the game say "GO HERE, DUMMY"

ahhh green arrow blindness a terrible disease that inflicts modern gamers. unless they have a large blips on their mini map or a big green arrow pointing out exactly where to go they are completely lost. while i can understand the appeal of having the help players tend to end up relying on the help more than actually knowing what the quest is. personally i think its a side effect of mmorpg's where you just accept a quest, and hand it in and have never actually read the background/reasons for it.

though for some reason..in batman arkham city while the game looks absolutly awsome I find it very hard to make sense of my surroundings..its all very overwhemling, Id be a bit lost without the help

but yeah I dont thinkyou really need to blame gamers, itsalways a decision by the developer

 

[Wuggy]

So it seems that Arkham City got the whole Open-World sidequests right by Yahtzee's criteria. I mean, that's pretty much exactly what he's describing.

 

[Strazdas]

great article as always. sidequests are the msot important part, and the one i spend most of my time for in open world games. making thme fun makes whole game fun. it is something games liek Mafia forgets while thier main story may be great, they arent really open world without having nothing else but main story.

 

[Avaloner]

Did Yathzee play the same Dead island as I did, because there is a load of side quests to find other than the safe zones, which of course have alot of side quests aswell, but I guess we all hail his genius, no matter how warped his argument is.

 

[Insideout Ink Demon]

almost like he knew GTA:V was to be announced

 

[vivster]

i would like to disagree to that

for me it would be a total break of immersion if there are side quest just popping up along my way as if they "just waited for me"
it seems just logical that if you have some urgent(or not so urgent) problem you'd go to a place where there are many possible problem solvers to said problems... for example...a town!
i would declare anyone who just waits in the wildness for someone instead go looking for help in a town outright stupid

it's just the symbiosis of the the whole quest thingies
quest givers are weak and have problems and cannot go outside or they get killed
quest solvers don't have problems, lots of time and are strong enough to go outside

Yes I've come to call this the Harry Truman effect (from the Jim Carey movie), and the worst offender tends to be the Elder Scrolls series. It's one thing to build a large open ended game world to explore, but when the impression starts sinking in that everything is revolving around you the immersion starts to shatter.

Haven't played RDR to see it matches up though.

and that's what i'm getting at
how likely is it after days or even months in the vastness of an open world to find someone who JUST had something happened to them
then i'm thinking that the game has just set this up for ME and ME alone(since i'm the only one who walks there anyway)
breaking the immersion

 

[Bostur]

It sometimes feels like sidequest are suffering from the 'feature list syndrome'. The game must have them because it says so on the feature list, but no one remembers why.

Before the time of level scaling, side quests was an opportunity to level up in between story quests. With that specific purpose gone, it's probably harder to make them feel as important.



The GTA games was always good at making side stuff, they genuinely rewarded exploration.

 

[Something Amyss]

it's not immersion breaking if it is realistic inside the game world
it's absolutely plausible for a fantasy town to completely rely on heroes and other guards to protect them at their daily work... because it's extremely dangerous outside

That's not "realistic within the game world," that's "accepting something unrealistic."

if that happens more than once in a game i'll get suspicious of the game just setting me up
thus breaking immersion
i mean how likely is it to run into someone in a vast open world who has "JUST been attacked"

In a living, breathing world? Very likely.

The game "setting me up" seems highly selective and the word "immersion" thrown around haphazzardly. AS IS THE WAY OF THINGS IN THE GAMING COMMUNITY, mind, so I'm not horribly shocked.

A town that needs heroes to protect it but exists fine when the heroes are not there is every bit as ridiculous as someone standing in a field waiting for a quest giver. If "immersion" is broken by one, it should be broken by both. You're just bending over backwards to justify the one and not the other.

But again, as Red Dead was extolled, it would seem that Yahtzee doesn't want people just standing around in fields waiting for you, either. He wants an active and lively world where things happen. Or at least, he seems to.

 

[Mike Fang]

This is an interesting subject; how are side quests best handled? Yahtzee makes a good point with his example of Red Dead Redemption. Thinking back on my own playing time of that game, I did enjoy how while doing all the free roaming, I could encounter a stagecoach holdup, a random passerby getting attacked by wild animals, even a tricky s.o.b. who comes up and claims to need help but just wants to steal my horse.

But there's one point I wonder about here; can you really call these things side quests or are they more like random encounters? When I hear the term "quest" I think of something a bit more involved than just a sporadic event that's solved with a quick dust-up. Now a side quest shouldn't have a more involved plot than the main storyline quest, but something that's a bit more entertaining than just some 10-second shootout with a couple bandits. Redemption had those too, like the crazy inventor who needed you to help gather materials for him, or the film director who needed you to help him get the house he wanted for his new movie theater (I think that's how it went anyway...).

The issue here seems to be should side quests be something you have to hunt around for around the map or should they all be clustered around the safe havens in a game. I think it depends entirely on the short story behind each mission. If it's an immediate, pressing problem, like someone's fiance or kid just got kidnapped, then it's probably best if it was something you encountered out in the field, because it's hard to imagine it's a pressing matter if the person had time to run all the way back to town and stand around, waiting for someone to recruit to help find them.

If, however, it's a more long-standing dilemma, then it could conceivably be handled by a stationary NPC in a town or other save location. For example, if someone's been unable to travel to some distant location because their horse/coach/whatever mode of transportation got stolen and someone needs to find the thieves and where they took it, then it's conceivable that the quest giver could be stuck in town until someone helps them. Looking at a fantasy setting, if a wizard has been seeking adventurers to retrieve a long-lost artifact he's discovered but can't go after because he's too old or there's some kind of curse on him or whatever, then it again makes sense for him not to be wandering outside of the city he's in or his tower or what have you.

Like a lot of things, it's all about balance here. Some side quests would carry a better sense of urgency and weight if they were dropped on you unexpectedly through exploration. But other things can be handled the traditional way too. A lot of it depends on the story behind the side quest and how it relates to the main plot.

 

[Richardplex]

I like the delivery boy analogy. Even if they're not fetch quests, they usually feel like it. And part of it is because you take the "order up!" approach.

Saints Row 2 didn't really require sidemissions, though. They mostly just require you to play the game. It's hard to walk five steps and not gain respect. You get it for killing people, driving, buying clothes, taunting, possibly even robbing people, tagging gang signs, streaking, taking hostages....

Unless you count all activities as side missions, in which case even travel from point A to B is a side mission. I wasn't even halfway through the story when I earned max respect (Which becomes unlimited), and I wasn't particularly trying.

This is part of what I love about SR2.

Pokémon anime damn it.

On that note, what do you think the odds are he said cartoon to be deliberately inflammatory?

Pretty high, but pokémon is generally thought as a cartoon because of the whole it-was-my-childhood thing.

 

[Zeekar]

To the extent that side-quests are available, they should be SIDE-quests and purely for entertainment, extra non-essential gear/cash/xp, and exploration.

Nothing annoys me more than "side-quests" that are actually necessary. The GTA series has it right. You can do the pizza-delivery quests if you want and the rewards are worth the time and effort, but it's 100% optional and not necessary to finish the main storyline. On the other end of the scale is the Final Fantasy series where it seems that EVERYTHING is a side-quest and most of them are mandatory to successfully complete the game (I'm looking at you, FF7 and your bullshiat Golden Saucer games to get Omnislash and Knights of the Round Table!).

If you needed Omnislash or Knights of the Round to complete the game, something is terribly wrong. I beat the game just doing what was required, with the caveat being that I would never run from a random encounter; No boss posed any threat to me. I was actually disappointed by how easy it was to beat Sephiroth.

I remember that same fight took me HOURS to beat when I was a kid. I must have been a retarded child or something.

If anything, what bothered me about the Side Quests in FF7 was just how -pointless- they were in the long run. I know the Final Fantasy series has been all about grinding and finding all the little trinkets and summons you possibly could, but in the end, what do you have to use it on?

The extra bosses practically couldn't be beaten except by cheating, so even with all the best equipment, it never really felt like the extra work was worth anything. That's my definition of bad side-quests.

Granted, I still loved FF7 for what it was.

 

[RA92]

I miss the days of Morrowind... I enjoyed that it gave you nothing but a description of the quest. Maybe the name of an area, or a person... sometimes just a general direction.

I enjoyed the fact that it didn't mark the exact spot on your map. It allowed you to explore and discover on your own. Sure, sometimes it was difficult to find things with this system... but it brought a great sense of accomplishment when you found your goal.

I don't like the continuing trend of mapping the EXACT location of a side quest (Hell, even the main quest) on your map and having the game say "GO HERE, DUMMY"

Playing Vampires: Bloodlines - The Masquerade, I can't help but agree with you. I remember this side mission where I was supposed to help a ghoul by tracking down someone who was stalking him. My only clue was a driver's license the stalker had dropped by accident. Then I had to track down the person using a computer (using a text-based interface!) by searching through a license registry, only to find out that the guy in the driver's license was actually *GASP*... dead! Then I checked out the hospital morgue of the city looking for the body, and my next clue was a key of a packaging shop I found in his list of possessions the hospital staff retrieved from the dead body. I went to that shop, opening the front door using the key, and finally to confront the Chinese ninja vampire who had killed that guy and made that place his base of operations. Hacking his computer and reading his emails (before he saw me), I found out that a Chinese triad of vampires was planning to come overthrow the Camarilla of downtown LA and install their own influence! Phwooar!

Sorry, kinda got carried away... *misty eyed*

In contrast, the game I played before that, Crysis 2, had a constant quest marker on the map and the screen, even though the map was linear as fuck and there was only one obvious direction to go all the time.

 

[Bostur]

I miss the days of Morrowind... I enjoyed that it gave you nothing but a description of the quest. Maybe the name of an area, or a person... sometimes just a general direction.

I enjoyed the fact that it didn't mark the exact spot on your map. It allowed you to explore and discover on your own. Sure, sometimes it was difficult to find things with this system... but it brought a great sense of accomplishment when you found your goal.

I don't like the continuing trend of mapping the EXACT location of a side quest (Hell, even the main quest) on your map and having the game say "GO HERE, DUMMY"

Playing Vampires: Bloodlines - The Masquerade, I can't help but agree with you. I remember this side mission where I was supposed to help a ghoul by tracking down someone who was stalking him. My only clue was a driver's license the stalker had dropped by accident. Then I had to track down the person using a computer (using a text-based interface!) by searching through a license registry, only to find out that the guy in the driver's license was actually *GASP*... dead! Then I checked out the hospital morgue of the city looking for the body, and my next clue was a key of a packaging shop I found in his list of possessions the hospital staff retrieved from the dead body. I went to that shop, opening the front door using the key, and finally to confront the Chinese ninja vampire who had killed that guy and made that place his base of operations. Hacking his computer and reading his emails (before he saw me), I found out that a Chinese triad of vampires was planning to come overthrow the Camarilla of downtown LA and install their own influence! Phwooar!

Sorry, kinda got carried away... *misty eyed*

In contrast, the game I played before that, Crysis 2, had a constant quest marker on the map and the screen, even though the map was linear as fuck and there was only one obvious direction to go all the time.

I miss that type of old style questing as well. Many RPGs used to have main quests that deliberately started very vague and part of the gameplay was to get more leads. Side quests acted as possible angles for those leads. When the story is more linear and more urgent sidequests sometimes seems misplaced.
- "The world as we know it is about to blow up in 24 hours, please hurry and save us. Oh and while you're doing that, we have 224 deliveries we would like you to handle."

A story that develops at a slow pace seems to be more fitting for side quests.