T w e n t y S i d e d
– Shamus, Monday Nov 20, 2006
Wise words, Dad. Wise words.
From The Archives:
In Defense of Crunch
Crunch-mode game development isn't good, but sometimes it happens for good reasons.
Linux vs. Windows
Finally, the age-old debate has been settled.
Deus Ex and The Treachery of Labels
Deus Ex Mankind Divided was a clumsy, tone-deaf allegory that thought it was clever, and it managed to annoy people of all political stripes.
Trusting the System
How do you know the rules of the game are what the game claims? More importantly, how do the DEVELOPERS know?
Good Robot Dev Blog
An ongoing series where I work on making a 2D action game from scratch.
We all that if the GM had instead given a scathing very negative description of the elves, the players would have been like “what? no, they’re great actually!”
And that’s how it should be.
The “no side quest” line is particularly funny to me, mostly because side quests are so funny in many DnD stories.
Hey, I know you guys are on a desperate mission to save the entire world, but while you’re here can you help us dig a well so we can wash down the party pavilion before the big concert tomorrow night?
It’s almost like they take stuff from video games (and video games return the favor).
I mean have you seen some of the side quests in Skyrim?
I don’t have any suggestions to resolve it though. How many quests can you have in your quest log to save the world before you roll to disbelieve?
I suppose you could have the main quest to be something smaller, but then you run into party motivation…
At least in Skyrim it’s possible to start the game doubting that there’s actually world-ending stakes. I mean, the only person who says that in the beginning was also going to execute you for no reason.
Fallout 4, on the other hand, has a psychic character whose sole role in the story is to promote exactly this type of dissonance.
Morrowind does one better. “Hey, you’re now a secret agent and you need a cover. Go do some sidequests.” Admittedly the excuse starts wearing thin as you progress the main quest and it gets more urgent, but at least it’s there.
Skyrim also deserves a special mention for continuing after you’ve Saved The World – with no changes.
Seriously, the only reason I bothered with the main quest was to stop the random dragon attacks – and they just kept happening!
All I got at the end was a realisation that I should have spent more of my time farting around doing nonsense before the wonky difficulty settings made playing the game too annoying.
This is one of the things I’m running into in Baldur’s Gate 3. It can get kind of annoying when someone asks you “Can you kill X, Y, and Z?”, you select “I’ll take care of it”, and you instantly get
Shadowheart disapproves
Astarion disapproves
Lae’zel disapproves
We get it, you’re literally risking their lives to go off on these silly side ventures while there’s a ticking time bomb, but dang it, this is not only an RPG where side quests are the norm, but also a Larian game where the difficulty assumes you’re scrounging for every XP point you can.
So now I’m curious.
What would a GOOD sidequest look like? One that it would actively make sense for a party trying to ask something huge like destroy the one ring or save the would to stop and do?
I can think of some off the top of my head:
1) Something that explicitly gives a reward — money, an item, or whatever — that could clearly benefit the mission. The tricky part here is to avoid triggering “Why don’t they just give it to us?”, but if the hero knows more than they do than even trivial quests for an item that they don’t know will be of huge benefit can work.
2) Adding in, like in LotR, a need for your allies to prepare or do or have things, either to help you or else cause them to lose less in the upcoming battle. You could win without doing that, and it doesn’t hurt you much, but it would hurt them and so there’s a reason for the hero to do it as long as it doesn’t take too many resources away from the final battle.
3) Things that need immediate attention. So, for digging a well, if they have no water and are likely to have to abandon the village before you can get back to them, that would be a reason to do it and delay the main quest a bit.
4) Introduce a delay, where the party has to wait for something anyway and so might as well run some quests and fix some things up while they’re waiting (as the Personas do).
The big idea is to balance the risk to the main mission with the reward you get. If there’s a delay anyway, then even trivial side quests can be run because there’s nothing more important to do. The more it seems to be delaying and so risking the main mission the more important the side quest must be to someone to avoid triggering the “Why are we doing this instead of the main mission?” response/
I know Torchlight had a quest that involved learning the backstory of the main villain, that’s a fairly easy one. Something like destroying the One Ring could involve trading your help for their guidance; instead of Gollum you’ve got Joe the Farmer and Jacoby the Jackhammerer. Food is always good, but you’d probably have to have an actual mechanic for that to work; every four food quests you get space for a new party member, or something. Like Zelda heart pieces, but it’s full-grown men.
Anything involving enemy forces, really; The Dark Lord Lordark is building his army, but his lowly servant Dirtbag Dave is already invading this here town. It’s not a super important town, you could just leave it, but Dave’s still Lordark’s boy, it’s a morale boost if nothing else.
Save The World quests often revolve around strength of character, so character-building sidequests would work well for that. A boy’s trapped in a burning building; you can coward out, or you can run in without thinking, or you can figure something out to keep you safe, and that’s a lesson you’ll take with you when you finally face Mad Mage Mirrormar.
But I do enjoy a good dissonant quest. Trails in the Sky still has the best one. You get news someone set the orphanage on fire and you have to hurry to save the children. It’s at this point you get access to a sidequest to help a man find his keys, which he thinks he dropped in the river. So let’s just… comb the entire river to find these keys, I’m sure the burning orphans in the opposite direction will wait.
Reminds me of one of the Shadowrun Returns campaigns, the Hong Kong one, where there was a sidequest to learn the origins and rules of the supernatural threat you were facing. Yeah, you could beat it in combat, and speech checks to talk the villain out of their villainy are always fun, but tricking a God into giving up by binding it with it’s own code of honor is just the best, like playing out a clever character in a fairy tail who beats the devil at his own game.
Curious. Shadowheart never disapproved of me taking on sidequests (and she never left my side).
Can’t speak of Astarion since I tend to only bring him when I need to lockpick something or deactivate traps (which is happening more and more often so I may have to change that).
As for Lae’zel.. that’s in character for her. Her preferences are bound to clash with most RPG players, since she likes ruthless efficiency (emphasis on ruthless) and focus on the mission (the main quest) above all else (like a good soldier), and dislikes wasteful benevolence and pointless do-gooderism.. while most RPG players tend to try to do as many sidequests as possible, explore every nook and cranny (treasure!) and tend to play good-aligned characters, since being evil is neither as easy nor as fun as it may first appear, at least for most people, and we just can’t resist helping a kitty down from a tree.
The only people I can see getting along with Lae’zel are evil-aligned speedrunners.
Personally, I think the problem is that urgency in the main quest doesn’t mesh well with the typical RPG structure full of sidequests and exploration and such. Which is why I hate this trope so much, it tends to interfere with my enjoyment of the game in question.
I’m reminds me of something Shamus wrote about the original Mass Effect: The main over-arching quest of that game is called “RACE AGAINST TIME” or something like that, and going by the comment section of that thread back then, at least one or two people skipped a lot of content in that game because they took that title literally, and feared that wasting too much time on sidequests would lead to a bad ending.
Unfortunately, many developers seem to think that there are no stakes to a story unless there is a ticking clock constantly reminding the player of said stakes and urging them to hurry up. Even if it’s a metaphorical one that has no in-game consequences.
How would I solve it? I’d either change the main quest to be less time sensitive, or somehow make the sidequests look like they contribute to the main quest, even if they’re still optional.
A game that tried to do something like this is Dragon Age: Inquisition, with the whole “power” (or was it influence?) mechanic where you increased that metric by doing sidequests in each area and you needed to reach a certain number before you were allowed to continue in the story.
It wasn’t well implemented, and most people hated it. “Why is the game artificially limiting my progress? I’m more than ready to do the next part of the main quest!”, “How does helping a farmer find his lost cow help my goal of stopping the big bad? Seems like a waste of time”.
I don’t know, Shadowheart seems to be weird. I’ve been surprised by the things she’s approved/disapproved of sometimes. The impression I’ve gotten from her backstory thus far (I’m still in Act 1, mind you), is that she’s a good-aligned cleric of an evil goddess, so her behavior does seem idiosyncratic at times.
Astarion is just an asshole. https://www.reddit.com/r/BaldursGate3/comments/101cagp/astarion_disapproves/
Different take: let’s just not Save The World. It’s so common in games that it’s boring, and it actually makes a game that deviates from the standard template seem innovative.
Or at least take away any ticking clock elements. That way, sidequests aren’t a big issue.
I remember Pillars of Eternity had a personal quest abut saving your character from madness (your companions were tagging along for personal reasons) and it worked fine. I think Planescape: Torment was similar?
Same with Dragon Age 2 – while I’m not a great fan, I did appreciate that Hawke was just a (well-armed & broadly competent) bystander for a lot of what happened, not your bog-standard CHOSEN ONE. You got involved because it was your home under attack, or your friends being threatened.
As long as the story’s interesting, it still works.
*My favorite example:
Cloud: “In 7 days, Sephiroth will crash a meteor into the plannet killing everyone! We’ve got to hurry!”
Me: “Welp, time to go breed chocobos!”
“What would a GOOD sidequest look like?” – MrGuy
I suspect part of the problem lies in the semantics. If we go by the definition that a side-quest is an optional extra that isn’t a required part of the main plot-quest, then a side-quest to go do something plot-relevant or to train up is effectively just a discrete part of the main quest line – the fact that it ‘actively makes sense to stop and do it’ means it’s no longer really a side-quest. As such, plausibility for sidequests relies on having a fairly predictable block of downtime to go do them in, when there’s nothing the PCs can do for the plot-quest besides wait for some external calendar or process to complete its cycle. Everything’s as ready as it’s going to be, we know we can’t get over Caradhras until the snows melt, so we may as well contribute some minor usefulness around Rivendell for the next month or so.
Persona 3 and Persona 5 both set up getting as much XP as you can really well. In Persona 3, you are deliberately grinding to make yourself as powerful as you can, and so your companions actually keep asking you to go grind while you’re waiting for the next event. For Persona 5, they set up the side quests so that they’re important and can very much impact people but aren’t as big a deal as the main ones. So again your companions are totally on board with you doing this even though it’s a bit of a risk.
From a game perspective, it also helps that they have recognizable events that advance the plot which gives you time to do things like that, and that grinding is basically just running through the dungeons killing things and so is what you do WHILE trying to get those side quests done.
I think Persona games are especially great about side quests and side content. Major events are often clearly signposted with how long you have until them – P3 especially was a very rigid “shit happens on the full moon” – and between major events there’s not a lot you can do except… wait, really. So you have time to grind, or sidequest, or just exist because you’re still kids and not professional adventurers.
Really, I think making it clear that “there’s nothing we can do for a bit except wait” is a great way to allow for side content. Sometimes there really is nothing you can do Right Now.
As a Californian, this hits different.