Quest for the Sidequest!

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Tears of Blood

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Jul 7, 2009
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I honestly don't remember the Resident Evil 4 one.

Funny, though, that I did that quest in Borderlands yesterday.
 

banthesun

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Apr 15, 2009
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Wait, so you have a go at Champions Online for having a fetch quest for opening an outhouse, and then you say it's alright when it's in a joke game? After you've done an article and a bunch of comics about how Champions Online is a joke game? I just dont get it.
 

Nurb

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Dec 9, 2008
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basicly the entire quest system in borderlands most recently. But I didn't put up with it nearly as long as the author, because I was exremely disappointed by the boring, bland, empty world and fighting through waves of baddies TWICE to get the key to sledge's place, then TWICE again to get in and out of sledge's hideout.

After realizing the entire game is one big grind between bosses, or at least, a very unsatisfying one, I said "No, I won't sit through dozens of hours of this" and uninstalled it. I've not regretted it one bit because behind the style is a creaky old World of Warcraft immitation without the atmosphere.
 

CharlesA

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Nov 8, 2009
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Er, the whole Biggoron Sword quest in Ocarina Of Time.

And any unlockable door in a game where picklocking is a skill, I'm looking at you KotOR.

Also, the unbeatable castle gards in Chrono Trigger.

As far as Fallout 3 goes, it's forgivable because the fetch quests themselves often could be handled in many different ways or skipped altogheter, like the Little Lamplight gates or the fetching of the disk for 3 Dog. It's rarely (never?) an actua key to a door, but more along the lines of triggering certain events in particular.
 

xqxm

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Oct 17, 2008
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Haha, well written.

You asked what the most absurd key-fetch quest i've ever witnessed was - and it struck me, i've seen some people go for one in real life. Whether it was out of stupidity or ingenious manipularity, i do not know.

I'm speaking of the company CipSoft GmbH. They're most known for developing the obscure MMORPG Tibia, which has been in operation since '97. They also apparantly made the worlds first mobile phone MMORPG, but that's not what i'm here to rant about.

No, you see, Tibia was becoming plagued by cheaters. Cheaters in all shapes and forms.

Because PvP combat was heavily based on skill, both tactical and hand-eye coordination, some players took to cheating in some respects. They made bots to automatically aim and fire spells at other players, and healing spells at themselves, thus being able to be much more effective in combat than others.

Cipsoft felt the best solution to this was to integrate the "aimbot" into the client, as to level the playing field.

This, of course, had far-reaching consequences both in PvP and PvM combat. Seeing as how you could now make every attempt to fire a spell hit without doubt, some classes became grossly overpowered. This was solved by lowering damage and prices to shoot them, so that the only way PvP could ever be carried out was if you had a well-coordinated team of at least ten to take on a group of enemies.

There were also people who would use bots to fish, make sellable runes for profit and level their characters for them, alternatively share their characters with other people.

Cipsoft saw only one solution - you need bait to fish, you need soul points gathered by killing monsters for making runes, and you can only level 6 hours a day.

At a later point, they invented a sort of server-based anti-cheating system, which they refuse to give out details on the operation of, which they claim is 100% effective, but which any given player will tell you is total BS.

I feel, that destroying your MMORPG in this fashion, instead of just bundling it with some punkbuster-like application, is completely asinine, and the closest i've seen to a fetch-key-quest i've seen in real life.
 

Orange_Clockwork

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Oct 29, 2009
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I hate quests that do that; "Grab item x to go through path y." almost as much as I hate "Get x amount of y and come back."

It's not really that they're so simple and straight-lined, it's that they want to make you roam around for a bit, even if you really badly want to push the plot.
 

MNRA

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Jun 8, 2009
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Xvito said:
Excellent article!

Also, this [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsqcuB38geI] pretty much sums up Resident Evil 4 (and all the other gaming fetch-quests). Curse you, waist-high wall... CURSE YOU!
I'd rather curse the consoles for seldom including a "jump" button, the PC-gaming-god I am...:p
 

xqxm

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Oct 17, 2008
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MNRA said:
Xvito said:
Excellent article!

Also, this [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsqcuB38geI] pretty much sums up Resident Evil 4 (and all the other gaming fetch-quests). Curse you, waist-high wall... CURSE YOU!
I'd rather curse the consoles for seldom including a "jump" button, the PC-gaming-god I am...:p
http://www.hlcomic.com/index.php?date=2006-07-17

heh.
 

Zydrate

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Apr 1, 2009
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Spelling error; "Shove" for "shovel", I think. I dont know, didn't play that game.
 

Dhatz

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Aug 18, 2009
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Work. that's the fucking problem. if they had to do anything more than nesessary walking/driving/shoting/reloading, it would require animation or making it unrealistic and skip the ingame porcess of doing something. As I was taught the first would cost money. so tehy chose the less costy solution, same thing goes for sidequests, the story is doney, paid for and writer is gone, so they use everything else except that talented person.
 

Da Ork

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Nov 19, 2008
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Harry Potter and the order of the phoenix. So many "key" quests it felt you like you were the go fetch boy for everyone in the school rather than a wizard.
 

Archemetis

Is Probably Awesome.
Aug 13, 2008
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My example:

The literally hundreds of "Oh, go could you go talk to this guy behind me?" quests in WoW...
I realise it's like free experience (not much I admit) But when it's easily covered by a scripted "cutscene" of the guy TURNING ROUND and talking to the guy himself, it's a bit annoying.

Especially in Darkshire where there is a questline almost entirely CONSISTING of these kind of quests.

Also, another WoW example:

The Attunement quests for Karazhan.
Admittedly I kind of enjoyed it, sharing a quest line with people from my guild in the same situation to achieve what would passage into (for the time) end-game content.

But then Blizzard got rid of the need for it.
Thank you.
 

Woodsey

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Aug 9, 2009
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Chipperz said:
The quest that pissed me off the most has to be the entire Thieve's Guild quest in Oblivion. Mainly the bit where you have to sneak through a monastery where all the monks are blind. Could I not just kill them all, then use the power of the Elder Scroll to bring them back to life? They picked me up in a jail, so they would know already that I'm fairly morally bankrupt...
May I recommend the Dark Brotherhood?
 

Chipperz

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Apr 27, 2009
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Woodsey said:
Chipperz said:
The quest that pissed me off the most has to be the entire Thieve's Guild quest in Oblivion. Mainly the bit where you have to sneak through a monastery where all the monks are blind. Could I not just kill them all, then use the power of the Elder Scroll to bring them back to life? They picked me up in a jail, so they would know already that I'm fairly morally bankrupt...
May I recommend the Dark Brotherhood?
Did all that. Probably should have been more of an indication to the Gray Fox that I would have seen "kill them all" as a decent idea.
 

Zivlok

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Dec 12, 2008
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A game that does this really well is Chrono Trigger DS (yes, I am referring to the new version for a reason), which has a fetch quest in which you must literally CAUSE A TIME PARADOX to get a copy of an item that only one of should exist in the world. These two items then fuse into an item whose apparent only use is to bring to a guy who likes said item, so he can give you a reward. But the thing is, you fuse the two items in the past, and pocket the resulting item, meaning the original first half of the item never would have made it to the future when you took it, then brought it back and placed it next to itself, causing it to fuse, which would... It still hurts my brain thinking about it.

It didn't take a long time to do this, but it did take a fair amount of lateral thinking, and that's really cool.
 

Orange Monkey

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Mar 16, 2009
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I think it was in Condemned, one of the first things you had to do was find a certain type of crobar to open a door, i had about three other perfectly suitable melee items that could of done the job just fine. It was plain ridiculous.

There was another instance in ''Mystical Ninjas: Starring Goemon'' WAAAY back on the Nintendo64. My characters had bombs, bazookas and magic ninja powers and they still had to find a key to open a WOODEN door >_<
 

Orange Monkey

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Mar 16, 2009
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Ahh just remembered another similar incident.
Dragon Quest 8, their is a small segment where you and your party are imprisoned in an underground cave, and the only thing between you and the elevator to freedom are fairly sturdy wooden bars and a couple of guards.
Now fair enough this would contain your average NPC , but my characters were near godlike at this point, Just before we were captured we had taken on the games version of Satan and won!

One of my characters could of set the bars on fire with a snap of her fingers, and paralyzed the guards with her cleavage (i'm not kidding, that was one of her powers). But the ''proper way'' to get out was to go through a lot of talking and trading items with other people in the cell. An information fetch quest is still a fetch quest, these kinds of breaks in in-game logic really bug me.
 

008Zulu_v1legacy

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Sep 6, 2009
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There is justification for this, game heroes are not wanton vandals who blast apart other peoples property to get in to their house. Sure we use mini nukes and Infinity swords +1 to burn them down to little more than a puddle of nasty smelly ash, and scorch the country side for miles to ensure the ecosystem dies a slow painful death and killing the half starving town nearby when the fires of our rage burn their crops to the ground.

But one thing we don't do is shatter rusty locks, that would be wrong.
 

WolfThomas

Man must have a code.
Dec 21, 2007
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Orange Monkey said:
I think it was in Condemned, one of the first things you had to do was find a certain type of crobar to open a door, i had about three other perfectly suitable melee items that could of done the job just fine. It was plain ridiculous
Another bad thing is it made the door opening weapons (axe, crowbar, sledgehammer or shovel) equal or worse to any other weapons like pipes and conduits.

In condemned two, the fireaxe was one of the best weapons I used in that game.