"Sidequests and other distractions: the erosion of meaning in CRPG quests"

[Mustawd]

BAK's first quest: "Escort Gorath to Krondor." That's it, four words. Player decides how to get there. Going the long way around and investigating local affairs (like stolen rubies etc) isn't "ignoring the main quest", it's part of getting there in one piece. Or at least it would be if the game had been properly balanced to make the Krondor ambushes more difficult for non-powergamers.

nealiios, BaK quest structure/creation would make a good blog post subject

 

[Mozg]

BaK at most tries to put some fig leaves (we're taking 20 game years to get get to Krondor to give the spies the slip!) on ignoring the main quest. It's all around a serious offender of the "ignore the urgent main quest to do trivial bullshit" type.

 

[GameGear]

The author misses some big points he could have made with his examples, that would have rendered some of his argument meaningless.

1. Fallout 1 had a main quest with many little quests, and there was even a time limit, but because of the shitstorm from the time-limit, RPG's have rarely instituted limits again. It's exactly because of Fallout 1 that we rarely have time limits on the main and side quests

CRPG players: We want our quests to feel meaningful

Devs: Ok, well we'll go ahead and put in time limits where you must finish the quest instead of running around the world like the quest means nothing.

CRPG players: Well....not THAT meaningful. On second thought, just forget about it.

Unrelated, but Dead Rising 1 is probably the best time crunch/management game since Fallout 1, and much like getting as many quests done in FO1, it's really fun seeing how many survivors you can save in the limited time you have in DR1

 

[Siveon]

I won't lie, I don't remember doing many side quests in my full playthrough of Betrayal at Krondor. I spent most of my time solving those lovely fucking puzzle chests. I knew there was some, I recall skipping one having to do with a farm, and I believe that cave with the dwarves in them was a side quest. Main quest/dungeons were way more entertaining though.

 

[laclongquan]

The problem of F1 treatment is not enough time for development and polishment. Mutants attacking major towns anyone?

 

[CryptRat]

Very good posts ITT. I think we won't ever see a proper exploration based MQ in AAA games again because exploration itself is dead and burried. You can't have exploration, not in the age of quest compasses, meta gamey "Witcher senses" and journals that spell out every tiny detail for the player. You're not exploring in modern open world rpgs, what you do is running around in a theme park doing random quest that can be solved without any attention to the dialogues, surroundings and in-game lore because just follow the compass and press x from time to time lol.[...] loved to stumble upon main or side quest related stuff in games that were not explicitly spelled out, just some small NPC hint here and there, a random book that you would find setting you on a trail of breadcrumbs etc. That's completely gone I can't fathom why anyone would even bother with open world rpgs these days.

Old games required you to pay attention to and process the in-game information that was conveyed to the player through NPCs, books, environmental clues etc. This is completely gone now because you have all those meta-game tools that do all the information processing and translate it into detailed, convenient instructions "go here, press X, use this item with that one". It's literally the stuff that your brain used to do before the advent of all those meta-tools.

Detective style "figure it out yourself" MQs a la Fallout or Ultima VII are impossible with today's design conventions.

I agree, I thought that Serpent in The Staglands did the job.

 

[TalesfromtheCrypt]

I have to admit I still haven't played it, looks very promising tho'

 

[Juggie]

He first criticizes distractions from the main quest and then goes on to praise companion missions in Mass Effect 2.

Changing diapers for your crewmates is much more urgent than stopping an ancient alien race from wiping out all life.

 

[GameGear]

Mass Effect 2 though, I don't wanna play nursemaid to a bunch o blubberin babies who can't get their shit together

He first criticizes distractions from the main quest and then goes on to praise companion missions in Mass Effect 2.

One mans trashy romance novel is another mans treasured character interaction

 

[animlboogy]

When I was playing Mass Effect 2 for shit and giggles I didn't know why or what I was doing for half of the time yet I could finish the game just fine. I could have been stoned for the entire playthrough and it wouldn't have made any difference at all.

Can confirm. I only really play games like this when I'm blind drunk after working all day. I have 90 hours of Skyrim that's mainly swapping mods in and out while not of sound mind before eventually abandoning the game for good, and somewhere in there I finished several major questlines including the main one. You can straight up skip reams of text and it doesn't matter at all.

To address Mass Effect 2 specifically, it's actually a decent enough third person shooter. Compared to something like Gears of War, at least you get the option to pause and issue orders while you crouch behind cover for the 4,029th time. But the skeletal remnants of RPG systems are a total joke. Again, no need to actually listen to anything anyone says to you, or explore the tiny hub areas on offer. This is a game where you walk down hallways and make note of all the chest-high cover. That's about the extent of the major decision making involved.

 

[ED-209]

Seyda Neen, truly the festering boil on the arse that is Vvardenfell. And I thought the bowels of that ship smelled bad. So what's this damn note I was given? An Imperial cypher? Of course. And some sickly Emperor a thousand miles away wants me to hoof it across this wasteland, risk life and limb for the very people who tossed me into that Vehk-forsaken Imperial prison? S'wit can go fornicate himself with a Daedric spear. First order of business: toss away this note. Next, a bottle of sujamma. Then, some work at a local guildhall.

 

[Azarkon]

I talked about this in the Pillars of Eternity threads, but one of the main narrative problems with motivating players to do optional content is that developers never quite figure out what exactly the player does for a living, and so it is impossible to design quests except by falling back on "CRPG tradition." Any game that knows what its player is supposed to do for a living, usually has a lot easier of a time designing for them. For example: Geralt's a witcher. Witchers hunt monsters for a living. Just like that, you have the basic narrative structure for all quests in the Witcher games, and a theme with which to fit them together.

By contrast, what does the Watcher do for a living? Nobody knows, so you're put into the position of a generic adventurer in Pillars of Eternity. Except, of course, that the world's idea of an adventurer is a treasure hunter and not someone who goes around town solving everyone's problems, yet the latter is what you do in most of the quests. And on top of that, it's never explained why being an adventurer has anything to do with your main goal - finding a way to stop yourself from going crazy - or the goals of your party, so the entire narrative feels off and the experience suffers for it. Why didn't you try to, say, become an animancer to investigate/control your souls, which would actually make sense? These narrative problems are so fundamental that it's hard to believe they could've gotten past the first play test, and the more I think about it, the more I find it difficult not to criticize.

We don't need all this next generation edginess in CRPG narratives. I don't know when or why developers decided that wealth, fame, power, and, for certain characters, doing what's right stopped being sufficient motivations for the player and other characters. I miss those games where it's just a group of adventurers going after fame and fortune, and where the development comes from them discovering more about themselves and their beliefs in the process. Those are perfectly sympathetic goals, especially since it's what most of us try to do in life, and it allows for a wide variety of quests, themes, and ideas, much more so than "save the world/you're going to die/your family is in trouble" stories.

 

[mondblut]

Players don't need any motivation to do optional content, "because it's there" works splendid on its own.

op and thread tl;dr: storyfags crying over safe space railroading being taken away from them. Because no one gives a fuck about those boring "narratives", and nothing of values is lost.

 

[Hitoshura]

The problem I have with clear separation of main and side quests is that many games that have these elements are supposed to be adventures. Figuring what's important and what's not is part of the adventure! Figuring out where to go and what to do is also part of the adventure. Each time I have in mind that I have side quests to do, you have failed as a designer. Let me experience the adventure, don't show me explicitly your "paint by number" design!

 

[GameGear]

I talked about this in the Pillars of Eternity threads, but one of the main narrative problems with motivating players to do optional content is that developers never quite figure out what exactly the player does for a living, and so it is impossible to design quests except by falling back on "CRPG tradition." Any game that knows what its player is supposed to do for a living, usually has a lot easier of a time designing for them. For example: Geralt's a witcher. Witchers hunt monsters for a living. Just like that, you have the basic narrative structure for all quests in the Witcher games, and a theme with which to fit them together.

By contrast, what does the Watcher do for a living? Nobody knows, so you're put into the position of a generic adventurer in Pillars of Eternity. Except, of course, that the world's idea of an adventurer is a treasure hunter and not someone who goes around town solving everyone's problems, yet the latter is what you do in most of the quests. And on top of that, it's never explained why being an adventurer has anything to do with your main goal - finding a way to stop yourself from going crazy - or the goals of your party, so the entire narrative feels off and the experience suffers for it. Why didn't you try to, say, become an animancer to investigate/control your souls, which would actually make sense? These narrative problems are so fundamental that it's hard to believe they could've gotten past the first play test, and the more I think about it, the more I find it difficult not to criticize.

And then of course that faggot Josh Sawyer is sniffing his own farts by bitching about RPGs where you play a murder hobo and then proceeds to make another murder hobo simulator

I think he's just mad nobodies made a murder homo simulator for him

 

[miles teg]

I'm a bit surprised no one mentioned Ultima IV here, which has a real main "quest" and the whole exploration is functional to that main goal.

Anyway, I agree that the sense of urgency doesn't cope very well with with an open-world game, where you are encouraged to loot every wardrobe of the continent to become the reachest person of the game world.
So yeah being sidetracked works better in games like witcher, ultima, risen than in productions where the main plot is about "OMG the world is in danger and you are the chosen one, save us all, but be quick or there will be no one left to be saved!!11!!".

 

[vivec]

This is pretty funny but sadly very typical. Idiots who do not understand worldbuilding, because they played badly made games, demonize the feature instead of fixing the bug.

The role of sidequests is to flesh out the world, maybe even introduce branching and somehow change the game main quest.

Of course, if the sidequest is the PoE, NWN1/2 variety fetch/murder quest then it is a distraction.

How do you fix that? Throw the baby out of course. Get rid of sidequests...

 

[Lilura]

Oblivion was horrible in that way.
Apart from uninstall.exe and OOO, the best way to enjoy Oblivion was to totally disregard the main quest. After all, the only thing in the game that hinted at urgency was the Emperor's word. The rest of the game world didn't agree with him.

The problem with that is, if you never advance the plot then you will miss out on "content": the Oblivion areas themselves, their Sigil Stones, and their native alchemy ingredients. That's not a HUGE deal, but I prefer to advance to the point of Oblivion Gates popping up, because it gives me more incidental shit to kill. You have to be careful about the Gate mobs killing quest-critical NPCs, though.

For your way of playing, you have to be damn sure that you never want to advance the plot, because entering Kvatch at a certain lvl means it's almost impossible to beat, due to the level scaling of spawns and their number.

God, that game is awful. OOO saved it from pure shit status, but you still have to fight back the uninstall compulsion on a half hourly basis.

 

[resilient sphere]

I'd like to see side-quests limited to being more subtle branches of the main quest - not "please fetch me my staff that I left in a cave (?) and I'll give you 50 zenny" but rather "please fetch me my staff which (character the party has heard of and wants dead) confiscated and I'll show you a way around the castle that doesn't walk you into the main guard postings" so that you still end up playing the main line but with a slightly different experience.

frankly some of my fave games have only incidental side-questing anyway and they were sources of novelty rather than rote padding - Ultima Underworld's language puzzle where you negotiate to save Murgo the wizard apprentice is a fond gaming memory. (even if the handbook spoils it a little) crucially you only solve that problem once and do so on your own initiative rather than to please Jarl Radiant.

 

[belowmecoldhands]

Different players, different strokes. It's that simple! I think the reason some people prefer linear-ish games is because they prefer character and story driven games. They want emotion. Less linear games don't deliver the emotion at the desired intensity because there's so much wandering and inbetween filler content. Whereas someone like me doesn't care about emotion or character depth as much. I just want lots of paths and fillers and challenges. It's the challenges which're the most important. It has to be HARD--survivalish. I use all those things to make my story. I know prewritten stories and character progression can be somewhat loose, allowing for multiple paths, but I always find them to be limiting despite their efforts.

Not saying I've never enjoyed a linear-ish game. They're just few and far between in my gaming history. An example might be Myst or esp. Anachronox. I liked Anachronox. I'm not completely square turns out.

I played Fallout. Lots of people point to that in this thread as a good example of balance between the main quest and side quests--given the main quest had a timer on it. When I played (and finished) Fallout I mostly thought it was ok, except the criticals and what felt like limited content at the end of it. I levelled to 15 trying to stop the criticals, not realizing they don't ever go away. Because I levelled to 15, I hit a limt in the content. I couldn't find new stuff.

EDIT: When I played it I respected the time limit on the water chip. I didn't know it was fake.

Do I think Fallout was linear? Well sort of and sort of not. Fallout 2 is supposed to have more content. I can think of many games which come off as being more linear. Fallout rides on a fine line inbetween the two. Jagged Alliance 2 seems to be about on the same fine line, but JA2 has a better UI and tactical strategic elements--making me prefer it.

 

[Karellen]

Broadly speaking I think that when it comes to "content-driven" RPGs, a strong, narratively-driven main quest and large amounts of side quests are inherently at odds. It's not simply a matter of how they're written, though that is a large part of it, but also a structural problem - basically, once you introduce sidequests, that almost inevitably leads to a completionist "gotta-catch-'em-all" mentality on part of the player, which bogs the game's pacing down, which obviously hurts the narrative impact of the actual main storyline. More seriously, if the "main quest" significantly alters the world state - which is almost inevitable if the game has a strong plot - specific side quests would only be available or relevant at a particular juncture. This wouldn't be a problem if the player was seeking out sidequests strategically for gameplay purposes, but in a content-driven RPG, the player's goal usually is trying to experience as much of the content as possible, which almost inevitably means that in these types of games, the optimal play style is to do as much of the side content as possible first before progressing the main quest and, therefore, the world state. This is obviously a bad thing, since it undermines the sense of freedom and richness which exporable side content is meant to invoke in the first place.

The solution would be to introduce an urgency mechanic, but those barely ever exist anymore, for the simple reason that in practice, everyone hates them. The reason for that is that even with an urgency mechanic, if the game is mainly content-driven, the player's priorities don't change - the player still wants to experience as much of the game's content as possible. The urgency mechanic simply makes that more difficult and tedious, since the player needs to plan out an optimal "path" through the game, often using meta-game knowledge, which is why a lot of people would turn to FAQs instead. For an "urgency mechanic" to work, the emphasis of the game would have to shift away from gathering as much content as possible or shooting for the best ending or whatever - it'd need to be focused on solid strategy-level game mechanics, with the decision to commit time and effort to side content essentially becoming a strategic decision. Aside of a few oddballs like King of Dragon Pass aside, however, no one's ever really even done anything like that, and I'm not sure it's necessarily even desirable. There's nothing really wrong with content-driven RPGs, they just should be structured more intelligently instead of just throwing a bunch of stuff in to pad out the game.

Increasingly I think that, for games with an emphasis on narrative, the way it's done in Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI might just be the most pragmatic after all - basically, keep the game constrained and linear and only open up the world along with all of its side quests at the endgame stage, when the only mandatory thing remaining is the final boss. In this way, you kind of get the best of both worlds - a well-paced main quest with strong narrative and a highly explorable game world with interesting secrets and side content that deepens the story. Of course, this only really works if the final confrontation is non-urgent, which is true of Chrono Trigger and FFVI but not so much of many other JRPGs in which it's a tad puzzling that you can spend ages doing sidequests when the world is literally five minutes away from destruction. Still, it's at least a model that actually works, in terms of how people actually play games.

 

[vivec]

"I am autist hence, stuff is bad."

Also, there is nothing wrong about completionist if the quests are actually fun instead of being "fetch".

 

[NotAGolfer]

I liked the part about quests in a traditional sense being personal and linked to the development/growth of the player character (thematically, not meaning XP and levelups).
And for me that's also one of the main reasons why most RPGs, not only new ones, also the classics, have kinda bad narratives.
The main character rarely has any real motivation for doing the main quest except that he seems to be the only one who can get the job done and some NPCs asked him to do the right thing.
These NPCs usually have way more backstory and are better embedded in the world than the PC who often just seems like he was thrown into it as an afterthought. And then he goes and saves all of their asses because ... well because he can I suppose. Boooring!
Save the world plots are usually boring, they are just soulless and a lazy cop-out for blank slate player characters. For those it's difficult to make clear why they would care about anything going on - except when the end of the world is looming ahead of course.

So all these NPCs are sitting on their asses and have all these nice and interesting stories to tell, but where does my char fit into this?

Playing CRPGs is often as depressing as moving alone to a foreign city where you don't know anyone and have to do some shitty job for complete strangers so you can pay the rent while crying yourself into sleep at night. You just don't feel like you belong.


I fucking hate the "the PC is a blank slate" concept.

 

[vonAchdorf]

I liked the part about quests in a traditional sense being personal and linked to the development/growth of the player character (thematically, not meaning XP and levelups).
And for me that's also one of the main reasons why most RPGs, not only new ones, also the classics, have kinda bad narratives.
The main character rarely has any real motivation for doing the main quest except that he seems to be the only one who can get the job done and some NPCs asked him to do the right thing.
These NPCs usually have way more backstory and are better embedded in the world than the PC who often just seems like he was thrown into it as an afterthought.

So all these NPCs are sitting on their asses and have all these nice and interesting stories to tell, but where does my char fit into this?

Playing CRPGs is often as depressing as moving alone to a foreign city where you don't know anyone and have to do some shitty job for complete stangers so you can pay the rent while crying yourself into sleep at night. You just don't feel like you belong.


I fucking hate the "the PC is a blank slate" concept, it's lazy and boring.

The JRPG subform welcomes you with open arms :D

 

[NotAGolfer]

Trying a few more of them is one of the things I always wanted to do tbh.
They seem to be superior when it comes to storytelling.