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

[Siveon]

Yeah, Bethesda isn't exactly known for their quest design. I had more fun walking around blasting shit with my magic then reading their wikipedia articles.

 

[Lilura]

BUT DEM DARKE BRUDDAHOODZ KWEST!

 

[sullynathan]

Good read. Gothic 1 really did this well with the main plot being very vague in the beginning.

 

[laclongquan]

Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 expose a serious problem with gamers: the lack of empathy.

Fallout 1 got a time limit main quest that force game over when limit is reached. No other expression in the game is required to describe this state. You dont have any clue to force you going faster. Even the water thief quest doesnt have much in that aspect, as you can do it at one point or another and nothing is different between two points. I wont say anything bad about it because obviously It is sufficed for players.

But Fallout 2 goes beyond that. Players got nagging clues to go faster in the form of communication dreams from your old teacher, Hakunin, with increasingly tone of desperation. If you feel the need to check, you can go back to Arroyo and can get many descriptions of things get worsened: lost harvest, the dog that you rescued at the beginning of the game "get lost" so your cousins have a meal, etc... The clues are many and strike at your empathy. I say they are effective because I almost never let the dreams proceed to the third stage or beyond. Get the fuck to Vault 13, and trying to reach home in speed. Even if I play long route and find proper clue to get to vault 13, every lengthy sidequest get ignored to later....

And people complain that Fallout 2 is not enough, or ignore the clues entirely. :shake head:
Yall lack a sense of empathy.

 

[Werdna's Revenge]

I think bad sidequests would be more tolerable if modern RPGs didn't insist on shoving them in your face so much. If I talk to some random farmer and he wants me to kill 10 rabbits or something and I ignore it, then why do I have big front and center journal entries on it and a dumb quest compass.

 

[V_K]

I am playing Morrowind now and it is pissing me off. So many quests... and nearly all of them are shit. Deliver this... kill that. It's just meaningless busywork!

Play Oblivion, it arguably has the best sidequests of all TES games.

 

[V_K]

I am playing Morrowind now and it is pissing me off. So many quests... and nearly all of them are shit. Deliver this... kill that. It's just meaningless busywork!

What in the fuck were you expecting??

Well, I've seen MW praised for its quests here more than a few times, always left me wtf-ing.

 

[vonAchdorf]

I think bad sidequests would be more tolerable if modern RPGs didn't insist on shoving them in your face so much. If I talk to some random farmer and he wants me to kill 10 rabbits or something and I ignore it, then why do I have big front and center journal entries on it and a dumb quest compass.

Well, if it was reactive to the player it would be kinda o.k. Like the farmer sees your sorry cloth armor and wooden sword and thinks this fellow could use some cash, but of course doesn't offer you the quest if you come wearing fancy robes and a pointy hat.

Even worse when people immediately tell you their hidden secrets / crimes to force you on a quest or admit you to their super secret society (which they told you about on the spot) after a simple fetch quest.

 

[Namutree]

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.

Oblivion is easy even at a high level for a well-made character. So going to Kvatch at a high level isn't really a problem. Not that the game isn't shit.

 

[Hyperion]

I think that when designing a big RPG world on a limited timetable, it can be a challenge to identify ahead of time the elements of the setting that are worth exploring in sidequests. It probably takes a good deal of intuition, experience and passion for that particular kind of setting.

So I wonder if the article writer's distaste for sidequests isn't really just a distaste for those "poorly selected" sidequests.

Do you consider a big RPG world something in the vein of Baldur's Gate, or did you mean it literally in regards to the gigantic, open empty worlds we get in games now? In the case of the latter, we all know there's no reason to not condense content outside of not being able to dick measure your game with buzzwords like open-world 5x the size of Skyrim!

I find it odd the article failed to mention World of Warcraft, and the general MMO boom during the mid-2000's as the real source of downfall of questing in general. Every game that has come out since wants a piece of the pie and designs all of their introductory systems, and fetch quests in the same vein as WoW, MMO or not. Hell, even NWN2's prologue felt like a carbon copy of starting one.

Using The Witcher as an excuse for fetch quests is a bit farfetched as well. There's no reason those quests couldn't be shaved down into something that utilized your Witcher tracking senses that opened into something bigger than grabbing 6 drowner taints. Look at what The Witcher 2 did with the insane asylum in Act 1. I wasn't a fan of the game to the point where I quit at act 2, but that was by far the most memorable portion of what I did complete.

 

[gaussgunner]

I left gaming entirely for like 8 or 9 years. Leaving around 2002 and coming back around 2011. I dipped back in to play a bit of Vanilla WoW, but mostly I kind of stopped playing altogether as work and school took all my time away. After coming back I've been shocked at how much RPGs have borrowed from MMOs. In my view all these open world games just feel like single player MMOs. Kill ten of these. Capture 5 of these. Fetch quests are fine, IMO, when you have a linear narrative and as long as it's kept to a minimum.

I consider it the lost decade of gaming. Everything had to be 3D, then multiplayer. I didn't feel like spending the dough for a new GPU and/or console every year just to player the latest cookie cutter FPS RTS MMO shit. Doesn't impress anyone anymore. Now it's all about milking gamers for more money, tracking them via social/mobile, and zombies. Fucking zombies. But it's a getting a little better.

 

[Mustawd]

I consider it the lost decade of gaming. Everything had to be 3D, then multiplayer

Yup. I remember how cool multiplayer was when it first started getting big with MMOs and Counter Strike, etc. Then it just got old as you are reminded that people in general are usually dicks online. Besides, multiplayer gaming requires so much of your damn time. You either need to play and git gud or you need to grind and grind and always be online for guild stuff in MMOs.

 

[mondblut]

Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 expose a serious problem with gamers: the lack of empathy.

Fallout 1 got a time limit main quest that force game over when limit is reached. No other expression in the game is required to describe this state. You dont have any clue to force you going faster. Even the water thief quest doesnt have much in that aspect, as you can do it at one point or another and nothing is different between two points. I wont say anything bad about it because obviously It is sufficed for players.

But Fallout 2 goes beyond that. Players got nagging clues to go faster in the form of communication dreams from your old teacher, Hakunin, with increasingly tone of desperation. If you feel the need to check, you can go back to Arroyo and can get many descriptions of things get worsened: lost harvest, the dog that you rescued at the beginning of the game "get lost" so your cousins have a meal, etc... The clues are many and strike at your empathy. I say they are effective because I almost never let the dreams proceed to the third stage or beyond. Get the fuck to Vault 13, and trying to reach home in speed. Even if I play long route and find proper clue to get to vault 13, every lengthy sidequest get ignored to later....

And people complain that Fallout 2 is not enough, or ignore the clues entirely. :shake head:
Yall lack a sense of empathy.

You probably cried when Aeris died

Fuck Arroyo. Fuck water chip. We don't give a flying fuck. We're only there to kick ass and loot gum, suck it.

 

[laclongquan]

You probably cried when Aeris died

Fuck Arroyo. Fuck water chip. We don't give a flying fuck. We're only there to kick ass and loot gum, suck it.

Bitch please~ Aeris is for hipsters who fell for the flower girl bullshit. Real gamers fall for bargirl Tifa. What you should feel at that moment is the rage of unable to do shit to that long hair faggot who just kill one of your companion.

 

[mondblut]

Real gamers fall for bargirl Tifa.

Real gamers don't touch weeaboo filth with a 10 feet pole.

What you should feel at that moment is the rage of being closet homo playing faggot fantasy.

fixed

 

[laclongquan]

A 'real' gamer who refuse to acknowledge the validity of japanese games is just a closet faggot who refuse to believe his own hardon over dicks

 

[bddevil]

Sidequests always were a vital part of several things in a RPG, depending on the developer:

1) they helped create illusion of choice/freedom/nonlinearity. ie, which one do I want to do first ? or which one suites my role first ?
2) they helped create filler and extend gamelength (especially for completionists) if main quest/storyline was linear/short
3) they helped create xp/resource boosts for players who might have not been good. ie, grind a bit in these areas for xp/gold/gems/whatever to then be able to progress smoothly

And honestly, who doesn't like choice of what to do first ? Constraints are usually looked down upon because it puts the game on rails, unless the story/plot/mechanics demand it to be in certain way. And that's not trivial to do. There are usually triggers that open up other quests after progressing down the main one, and yes- Witcher, for example, did sidequest progression quite well, I agree with the author.

At the end of the day though, it's all about how good are the sidequests. If it's all fetch quests, most of those are boring unless devs heavily pad it with story/characters/c&c - and if it's obvious it's a fetch quest you're just viewing it as a chore unless the game is really, reaaaally good in role playing element (most modern games aren't).

If we're still talking about The Witcher, its sidequests were actually quite good and refreshing for when it first came out. It also had those dumb bounty ones purely for grind reasons. I can only imagine how many wyverns the completionists were were grinding in the swamps

 

[Coma White]

Sidequests always were a vital part of several things in a RPG, depending on the developer:

1) they helped create illusion of choice/freedom/nonlinearity. ie, which one do I want to do first ? or which one suites my role first ?
2) they helped create filler and extend gamelength (especially for completionists) if main quest/storyline was linear/short
3) they helped create xp/resource boosts for players who might have not been good. ie, grind a bit in these areas for xp/gold/gems/whatever to then be able to progress smoothly

And honestly, who doesn't like choice of what to do first ? Constraints are usually looked down upon because it puts the game on rails, unless the story/plot/mechanics demand it to be in certain way. And that's not trivial to do. There are usually triggers that open up other quests after progressing down the main one, and yes- Witcher, for example, did sidequest progression quite well, I agree with the author.

At the end of the day though, it's all about how good are the sidequests. If it's all fetch quests, most of those are boring unless devs heavily pad it with story/characters/c&c - and if it's obvious it's a fetch quest you're just viewing it as a chore unless the game is really, reaaaally good in role playing element (most modern games aren't).

If we're still talking about The Witcher, its sidequests were actually quite good and refreshing for when it first came out. It also had those dumb bounty ones purely for grind reasons. I can only imagine how many wyverns the completionists were were grinding in the swamps

Side quests should also really tell a story which contributes to the world in some way. Something we wouldn't see or necessarily think about if we weren't given the opportunity. In fact side quests are really IMO the BEST way designers build and present their worlds. Production values (visuals, score, design, etc) are all well and good. But side quests get the player engaged with the world in a way nothing else really can.

I suspect this is in large part why modern AAA RPGs fail in the world-building department so horribly. They lack ways for the player to engage with the world in ways he might not have expected or anticipated.

 

[laclongquan]

PST got good sidequests as they paint the world. You get more background filling in without feeling forced. Ditto with Witcher 1.

F1 and F2 do it with good balance. You will gain stuffs at reasonable speed, and not overpower compare to the challenge at each stage.

Arcanum is actually a bit bad in this aspect, as it make the game too dragging their feet. Ditto with NWN2 OC.

Fallout Tactics is bad in this aspect, as in NONE. Or as we put it, as minimally as they can get away with it. Think of JA2's level/number of sidequest? Yeah, about same ratio.

Overdoing it is probabbly Fallout New Vegas. You need some slower levelup mod to keep your level at middle range longer or your loots/rewards will be OP for the area you are in.

 

[Carrion]

If we're still talking about The Witcher, its sidequests were actually quite good and refreshing for when it first came out. It also had those dumb bounty ones purely for grind reasons. I can only imagine how many wyverns the completionists were were grinding in the swamps

I think MMO quest design is a crime against humanity, but I never got the complaints about those particular quests. They pretty much completed themselves without any grinding whatsoever, and their main purpose was to introduce some of the important characters in the game world (Kalksstein, Abigail, Thaler etc.) aside from offering you some actual witcher's work. This is one aspect that didn't carry over to the sequels, which had much more elaborate quest design but which didn't tie the witcher contracts into the main quest or characters in any way.

 

[Azrael the cat]

If we're still talking about The Witcher, its sidequests were actually quite good and refreshing for when it first came out. It also had those dumb bounty ones purely for grind reasons. I can only imagine how many wyverns the completionists were were grinding in the swamps

Thing is, I think the Witcher games did a much better job at separating that stuff from the more substantive side-quests, and at justifying them. I always viewed the bounty jobs as just that - jobs that you might take on if you needed some extra cash or xp, but that you wouldn't do just for the sake of it. Like a fall-back system to reign in the ultra-completionists and help out the crappier players, so that they didn't have to adjust the substantive material too much (i.e. so that there's always an option for characters who are under-itemised or under-levelled, and there's always more stuff for the 'must have 300 hrs of gameplay, even if 294 of them are repetitive grinding' types).

 

[Lurker King]

No game represents this maxim more than Age of Decadence.

 

[bddevil]

If we're still talking about The Witcher, its sidequests were actually quite good and refreshing for when it first came out. It also had those dumb bounty ones purely for grind reasons. I can only imagine how many wyverns the completionists were were grinding in the swamps

Thing is, I think the Witcher games did a much better job at separating that stuff from the more substantive side-quests, and at justifying them. I always viewed the bounty jobs as just that - jobs that you might take on if you needed some extra cash or xp, but that you wouldn't do just for the sake of it. Like a fall-back system to reign in the ultra-completionists and help out the crappier players, so that they didn't have to adjust the substantive material too much (i.e. so that there's always an option for characters who are under-itemised or under-levelled, and there's always more stuff for the 'must have 300 hrs of gameplay, even if 294 of them are repetitive grinding' types).

Agreed. like I've said, Witcher made them non-intrusive: you knew what they were exactly, and decided for yourself whether they were worth it.

 

[Morality Games]

If a gamer did nothing for the rest of their gaming life but replay modded versions of all the cRPGs developed during the Black Isle/Troika/Old Bioware era it would be completely normal and appropriate exercise as a gamer because developers pretty much stopped making games after that era.

I mean also games like Deus Ex and System Shock 2, btw.

 

[Coma White]

If a gamer did nothing for the rest of their gaming life but replay modded versions of all the cRPGs developed during the Black Isle/Troika/Old Bioware era it would be completely normal and appropriate exercise as a gamer because developers pretty much stopped making games after that era.

I mean also games like Deus Ex and System Shock 2, btw.

This is really depressing and mostly true.