This is How You Fix RPG Sidequests

[Atratzu]

I feel like saying "well, I've been making my characters pick up apples, slay level 1 slimes, kick stray cats, and do severe finger waggling after beating the last boss for years and year." But I think that anyone who even plays RPG's MMORPGS, or Open World RPG's can lay claim to that statement.

But I guess I'm just resilient to the whole questing process, I think I have another year or two before I finally get as fed up with the whole process. What can I say? Apparently I like grinding out trivial processes when I finish them by flicking little sparks of fire from my finger tips and watching the "boss" burst into flames and die.

From a game development perspective, I would think that some game designers would be offended by having NPC's complete a quest they personal designed for the player. "What? You don't like collecting flowers for our house? Well then!" I definitely agree that the arbitrary questing really does feel pointless and it would be nice to have an NPC to just go do it for us, thereby also solving an additional problem: Collecting companions. Specifically I think of how you manage your "party" in Star Wars The Old Republic, where you can send away everyone and then quest by yourself. (I'm a loner, what can I say?)

But I do wonder what kind of impact that would have on people who actually get some enjoyment out of completing the game without NPC assistance? If I was given the chose to have Colin the dwarf to a mission FOR me, or do it myself... what would I choose?
Maybe the addition of a "non-player-quest" option would be nice. People always say "Give the player the power of choice", more decision is good right? ....unless it gets overwhelming.
Anyway, I don't know how to wrap up my thoughts... It would definitely be an interesting mechanic to see in games, I think it's worth at least a few games giving it a try.
The whole facebook-app feel for having your companions go out and do unseen things to unseen creatures has definitely lost it's novelty for me. I get plenty of that from clicker heroes.

 

[Blood Brain Barrier]

I don't get it. Didn't DA:I have the exact same idea Yahtzee is proposing here? You could delegate tasks to party members, but didn't have to go through the drudgery of performing them. You just came back a few hours later and they were done. God knows that game's gameplay is awful enough that I sure as hell didn't want to have any more menial tasks to do.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

You don't even need to penalize the player; you can just tie the decision made to the personality and experiences of the party member, so that the player has to get to know his mates if he wants to make sure missions are carried out in his best interest.

This isn't a bad idea. The outcome depends on who you send. It doesn't just fix the problem of side-quests, it also makes you think about your team members more. It give mores weight to their personality. It makes it meaningful.

 

[Auron225]

Mass Effect did have the shell of this idea at times - when choosing from your party members who to give specific responsibilities to. The suicide mission at the end of MS2 is a prime example of this, where people would permanently die if you messed it up.

I'm all for seeing this in more games, particularly those in which you described; where it's you and a dozen other people but for some arbitrary reason you can only bring like 2 of them with you on missions, and everyone is staring at walls while you're away.

 

[MiskWisk]

I don't get it. Didn't DA:I have the exact same idea Yahtzee is proposing here? You could delegate tasks to party members, but didn't have to go through the drudgery of performing them. You just came back a few hours later and they were done. God knows that game's gameplay is awful enough that I sure as hell didn't want to have any more menial tasks to do.

Not really. He does bring up the Inquisition system of sending NPCs on invisible missions that you can't do yourself a la Assassin's Creed but it doesn't change the fact that the game still hands out entirely inane and pointless quests that are often little more than "fetch x" or "kill y and bring me their z." Plus it wasn't the other party members, just an endless force of mooks and redshirts.

What Yahtzee is suggesting is something to cover those sidequests you can't be bothered to do because you are too horribly over levelled/far in the story for them to be worthwile but could have actually completed yourself.

 

[Barbas]

I'm not sure a game about delegating quests fits in with a heroic RPG. They're fundamentally different games. It's more appropriate in strategy games, where you can send your heroes on quests and hopefully they come back with something good.

You may be the only hero, but if you could do it all yourself then there wouldn't be any point in a party system. I think OP's suggestion should fit well with party-based RPGs, particularly ones like DA:I in which you're meant to be running a vital organization. It'd be nice to have more to reminisce with your companions about whilst enjoying a crumpet back at base.

I hope developers decide to try this system out in the future, because the last Dragon Age was a lot of fur coat and shamefully little knickers.

 

[crypticracer]

I don't feel like this would improve side quests, rather it would give developer's an excuse to make them worse, since the player has an out.

What if that rat sidequest actually has greater implications or twists into an optional but awesome quest line. Why would anyone bother doing that, if the player is only going to do the quests that seem awesome from the outset?

 

[Blood Brain Barrier]

I'm not sure a game about delegating quests fits in with a heroic RPG. They're fundamentally different games. It's more appropriate in strategy games, where you can send your heroes on quests and hopefully they come back with something good.

You may be the only hero, but if you could do it all yourself then there wouldn't be any point in a party system. I think OP's suggestion should fit well with party-based RPGs, particularly ones like DA:I in which you're meant to be running a vital organization. It'd be nice to have more to reminisce with your companions about whilst enjoying a crumpet back at base.

I hope developers decide to try this system out in the future, because the last Dragon Age was a lot of fur coat and shamefully little knickers.

I don't get it. Didn't DA:I have the exact same idea Yahtzee is proposing here? You could delegate tasks to party members, but didn't have to go through the drudgery of performing them. You just came back a few hours later and they were done. God knows that game's gameplay is awful enough that I sure as hell didn't want to have any more menial tasks to do.

Not really. He does bring up the Inquisition system of sending NPCs on invisible missions that you can't do yourself a la Assassin's Creed but it doesn't change the fact that the game still hands out entirely inane and pointless quests that are often little more than "fetch x" or "kill y and bring me their z." Plus it wasn't the other party members, just an endless force of mooks and redshirts.

What Yahtzee is suggesting is something to cover those sidequests you can't be bothered to do because you are too horribly over levelled/far in the story for them to be worthwile but could have actually completed yourself.

Yes, but doesn't levelling up in DAI apply across your whole party? Meaning there are no weaker party members?

 

[Barbas]

Yes, but doesn't levelling up in DAI apply across your whole party? Meaning there are no weaker party members?

Yeahhh, but this is meant to be an epic RPG with a compelling cast of companions, right? So show, don't tell. Rather than having it happen silently in the background like so much else, let's see them level up by being able to have a hand in their training! The more time we spend with these characters - as these characters - the closer we will become.

 

[Veylon]

This is the kind of solution that would never exist or, if it existed, would almost never be used. Developers too lazy/cheap to make good quests are also too lazy/cheap to make an elaborate system to avoid them. Developers willing to go through the effort to make this system would make fun, engaging quests that people wouldn't want to skip.

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

And with this one fix, all those 100+ hour games become 15 hour games. The quests are timesinks so the devs can pad out the runtime of their games. I don't know, we want big games that take weeks to complete, but once we have one we all (myself included) complain that the sidequests are annoying.

Maybe fewer quests, but flesh them out more so they are their own little mini-stories. Maybe then it won't feel like grinding.

(And Witcher 3 has a fun little option in the menu that enables enemy scaling, so you can never be too high level for quests.)

 

[Blood Brain Barrier]

Yes, but doesn't levelling up in DAI apply across your whole party? Meaning there are no weaker party members?

Yeahhh, but this is meant to be an epic RPG with a compelling cast of companions, right? So show, don't tell. Rather than having it happen silently in the background like so much else, let's see them level up by being able to have a hand in their training! The more time we spend with these characters - as these characters - the closer we will become.

I know what you mean, but honestly, it's so far from being an epic RPG that watering it down with even more "meaningless journeys with companion Z" is going to kill the illusion off entirely.

 

[freaper]

"No, I don't think it would matter so much if you left the choice in Colin's hands; after all, there should be SOME penalty for fobbing the quest off instead of doing it yourself."

You don't even need to penalize the player; you can just tie the decision made to the personality and experiences of the party member, so that the player has to get to know his mates if he wants to make sure missions are carried out in his best interest.

So for the rat mission the player could either send Colin, who comes from a mushroom farm himself and hates rats, or he could ask Peta-Lia, the elven animal rights druid.

I was gonna post this. Sending a "Lawful Good" party member to solve a crime will give a different solution that sending the "Chaotic Neutral" one. Quest completion will still be achieved, but in the first instance the criminal might get apprehended and the villagers avenged, and in the second the criminal might bribe the party member to let them escape.

 

[JamesStone]

I think it's too simple an answer even if it's a good start.

I'd just leave it at someone else's hands when I know shit-all about the quest. Let's say the Farm McGee's daughter has been kidnapped by some raiders. So I send my bruiser type companion to deal with the mess because I figure "hey simple kill-all quest, right?". Problem being in that particular quest Farmer McGee's daughter wasn't kidnapped, she went willingly, and the raiders were actually just some run-of-the-mill rebellious young adults who were mostly harmless. But my bruiser companion was a bit simple minded, so he just slaughtered everyone without asking questions first, McGee's daughter included.


Realistic? Sure, but you gotta think replayability. If a game's good and I wanna play it again, I'm already going to know that the outcome isn't that simple. So I'm going to plan around it, ruining my immersion. Or I'm gonna stay in character and do what feels like the right thing but I as the player will know that what I'm doing is shit, and feel bad for it (or at worst, apathetic, which is never a good thing to feel on an emotionally driven sidequest).


I'd support this idea if you could spend some resources to have some initial intel of the situation. Like, using Dragon Age Inquisition as a base for this system, you could spend some money to have your scouts do a preliminary report on the person needing help.

First quest description would read "Farmer McGee's daughter has been kidnapped"

Second entry could be something like "Farmer McGee claims his daughter has been kidnapped, but there's no sign of forced entry and all her private possessions have been taken but not her valuables. Perhaps the situation is more complex".

If you wanted to go real deep on this, combine it with Skyrim's radiant system. So when you start a new game all sidequests get a random roll dice to determine what would happen if a companion were to do it (just for the record, they'd remain unchanged if you did them personally because programming multiple dialogue options for all sidequests based on a RNG system must be a ***** to get right). So sometimes Farmer McGee's daughter would actually have been kidnapped, and the scouts would note that indeed that was the case, by signs of forced entry. Some other times she'd have faked the kidnapping to get her pa's money and start a new life. Others it was as per my first suggestion.


Could give an interesting system, but it'd be the type of thing you build from the ground up.

 

[Barbas]

I know what you mean, but honestly, it's so far from being an epic RPG that watering it down with even more "meaningless journeys with companion Z" is going to kill the illusion off entirely.

Whaaaaat??? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CtUd0yuYN4&t=6m4s] Sir, you are the mayor of Crazytown! Good quests and character development should be the core of that game, rather than just reading reports of other people's more interesting tales and pushing chess pieces around the war room board!

 

[beleester]

There should absolutely be at least one quest which is minor enough and out-of-the-way enough that the average player won't bother completing it, but spins off some utterly batshit crazy adventure. So you send Colin the Dwarf to clear the rats from the farm, and a month later he comes back, with a daedric artifact in one hand and the skull of a dragon in the other, saying "It's a long story..."

(Alternatively, instead of making it a legitimate quest, it just randomly replaces a kill-the-rats quest with an epic world-saving quest when you send a party member to do it. So it only ever happens offscreen, because it's funnier that way.)

 

[mrdude2010]

It would have been nice if I could delegate collecting all those fucking flags to my lower level Guild members in AC: Brotherhood. The good thing about ~4 onward is they showed them on the map when you were near them. The bad thing was you felt almost obligated to do them right away, because you knew you were never going back to that shitty island.

 

[mrdude2010]

Where is the thumbnail image from?

That's a picture of Varic from Dragon Age: Inquisition. One of the many times he's looking up at the rift and just hating how messed up everything has gotten.

I like the idea of being able to send out other people to deal with the busy work. Rats in the basement again? Jansen, take Claire and Syndis and deal with it. I'm busy planning our next move against the world-ending evil demon thing we woke up earlier this year.

Because yeah, there are times where it's like, "Shouldn't I be dealing with something other than this?" Starting out having to take every miserable quest you're given makes sense. You need to build your reputation, and your party's level, but after you hit a certain point, you should be able to send out other people.
Of course, the choice to go yourself should also be there all the time too, because I'm one of those people that do fall into, "Is it going to be part of a story? I must know what happens!"

As much as I like the idea of infinitely generated missions, Skyrim is awful at this. Go to #{dungeon} and recover item #{rand.int}, which is inevitably worse than everything you already have.

 

[RealRT]

Yeah, nice idea... only the sidequests are often the most interesting things about those games, so it would be an insane waste to skip them by letting the NPCs complete them.

 

[immortalfrieza]

The problem is not the number of sidequests nor their difficulty, the problem is that they keep on making all these sidequests that any idiot and his mother could do, not ones that only the Chosen Hero could pull off. Any guy with a sharp stick could kill a bunch of rats or pick up some package and deliver it to somewhere. If they were to limit these sorts of sidequests to epic battles against armies of bad guys and massive monsters and so forth, things a supposed hero would be dealing with these sorts of sidequests would go over a lot better.

On the other hand, those kind of quests are essential to open world games. The very nature of open world games is the player crafts the story, and these little time wasters are as much a part of that as the massive world destroying threat. It's not Bethesda's or CD Projekt RED or any other developer's fault that the player didn't end up running into some quest designed for a player while they were still a level 1 weakling until after they've become a max level God Killer, that's the consequence of the ability to go and do pretty much anything we want.