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Games with best side-quest design

Urthor

Prophet
Patron
Joined
Mar 22, 2015
Messages
1,872
Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
Honestly Disco Elysium is up there, I'm really reaching to think of better written ones that aren't in Witcher 3 expansion packs and my mind isn't coming up with many
 

eric__s

ass hater
Developer
Joined
Jun 13, 2011
Messages
2,301
There are three quests in Arcanum that I really like:

The first is that Orc union quest that appears in the second half of the game. Led by Don Throg, the orcs in Tarrant's factories go on strike and demand better working conditions. The police surround the factory, ready to kill any orcs that come outside. You have to serve as a negotiator and convince Don Throgg to either sneak out the back of the factory to fight another day, or make a brave last stand and charge the police. Both choices have outcomes that affect the end of the game, and the quest is one of my favorite parallels of the kinds of social changes that were going on in the industrial era.

The second is the quest where you serve as a diplomat for Tarrant in negotiating an alliance with Caladon. Your employer gives you a handbook telling you the terms you should negotiate for, which heavily favor Tarrant, but there are 8 lobbyists in Caladon who will offer you bribes to favor Caladon instead. When you're actually negotiating, you can favor either party or negotiate a middle ground. This quest and the choices you make in it have a very significant impact on the end of the game.

Last is the Half-Ogre Island quest, which has the best story ever told in a video game. I don't want to spoil it, but Arcanum is worth playing for that alone. The quest left me feeling anger and despair, but really paralleled modern power structures, which is probably why it's so compelling. I wonder how many actual, real life conspiracy theorists this quest made.

While the last quest is a pretty conventional adventure with a very good story, the first two have interesting structures that require you to make unusual choices in an RPG with traditional dialogue structures. I like this idea, and I especially like how modular the Tarrant diplomacy quest is; the first time I did it, I went back and changed my negotiation choices several times to see how each variable affected the outcome. It's pretty cool. It's also important that all three of these quests have modern and historical parallels that make them immediately relatable to players and I think part of our investment in them comes from the fact that they are partially used as a proxy to communicate something about our own world.

There also a quest in Gothic 1 that I like:

You're given a bundle of 20 swamp weed cigarettes and you have to sell them to people. It's a really goofy drug dealing quest; you run around offering to sell weed to people. It's a clever way to incentivize exploration of the New Camp and introduce you to its primary characters and concepts. But I also like all the alternative options you have in the quest too: you can sell the drugs individually around the New Camp, you can wholesale the drugs to an alchemist in the Swamp Camp, you can even run away with the money. I really like it!

In Legend of Mana, there's a quest in Lumina where you have to sell three lamps to Dudbears. However, Dudbears speak their own language and you have to learn it. You, the player, have to learn an in-game language. Not, the character you're playing as, you, the player!! I love it! It's a very simple language, but not learning it correctly (or at all) will result in you selling too many or too little lamps and give you a negative outcome. Really cool.
 

whydoibother

Arcane
Patron
Joined
May 2, 2018
Messages
15,479
Location
bulgaristan
Codex Year of the Donut
No love for TES IV: Oblivion? It had about a dozen good "side quests". Of course the game is kind of open, so the majority of content is to the side of the narrow main quest, but it still counts.
Assassins and Thieves quests were great, the whodunit quest was great, I'm sure everyone who played the game remembers these.
 

Trashos

Arcane
Joined
Dec 28, 2015
Messages
3,413
What should be the standard for great side quests has already been covered above.

BG2, as mentioned, is a great example where side quests feel like main quests. As is New Reno in FO2 (even if people complain that it is not well integrated in the setting- that's a different matter).

New Vegas is a great example where the side quests flesh out the world, and they are interesting to do in their own right. Get this airplane out of the lake! Sabotage that train and cover up your tracks! Infiltrate the Repconn HQs! All great ways to pace the fighting well.
The Boomers, in particular, had a great questline. It had an interesting overall theme (isolation), first you had to run in a pattern to get there, then one quest was about killing with a twist (you were limited in what you could use to avoid explosions), a couple of them were about skill checks, one of them was mostly lore, and the last step was completely new gameplay (going underwater to search for a sunk airplane). Your success in the questline affected the ending battle. Kept it fresh, tested your build, fleshed out the lore, went full-awesome at the end. Great stuff!

Underrail is also impressive. The set up of the side quests is usually simple, but the gameplay of each side quest has a twist and often its own systems. In one extreme example, in one side quest you had to control a robot remotely to do the work for you. And most of the side quests have their own little twist regarding gameplay. Must be a nightmare to develop, but it is totally impressive.
Special mention to the Oculus quest, where each step of the way you have to do something different and cool (spy, infiltrate, free prisoners, investigate, tie various clues together) and it feels open ended.

Special mention to 2 other side quests that blew my mind. I found them absolutely fresh:

- Arcanum's Caladon Negotiation. I had to fucking study in-game material to see what each side wanted in order to do the correct compromises and perform a successful negotiation. Mind. Blown. (edit: ninja'd above)

- Gothic 2's I Beat Up Valentino. You just wanted to beat the shit out of an arrogant prick. You had to follow him, figure out his daily schedule (plays nicely with the game's NPC schedules), and beat him up when noone is around. Extremely fun, makes the most out of the game's systems, and the quest had a fun and unexpected ending when I realized that
I had to pass on the torch so that someone else could beat him up too
. Very deep.
 
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JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
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Jan 4, 2007
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33,052
Location
KA.DINGIR.RA.KI
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
There are three quests in Arcanum that I really like:

In addition to those three, I really liked the Find the Iron Clan quest. A legendary lost dwarven clan, the home of which you can only find if you read an obscure book owned by a book collector in Caladon, and to open the doors into the mountain hall you have to find a mysterious key first. This quest got some real nice investigation stuff in it.
 

Starwars

Arcane
Joined
Jan 31, 2007
Messages
2,829
Location
Sweden
The Witcher 1 investigation quest felt like it had all the right ingredients but just failed to pull it together to something really coherent. It was still enjoyable to me though.

Quests serve different purposes but I always miss the grander quests where you as the player has to, or at least can, unveil interesting information about what's going on. Where the player actually has to be active in some way besides A) just going where the quest tells you to and B) fighting a bunch of enemies on the way. And it's great when you feel rewarded for the work besides the game A) giving you a bunch of loot or B) stroking your ego and tellin you what an awesome, awesome dude you are for completing this quest.

But yeah, a good quest can be so many different things. The sidequest where you find the lost husband for the woman in Disco Elysium isn't exactly amazing in how deep it is, but it hit me right in the feels. So did the quest in Planescape: Torment where you help the girl in the Hive get back to her own world through a portal. And that was prety much *all* about the writing and it stood out to me as a real highlight when I first played the game.
 

v1rus

Arcane
Joined
Jul 14, 2008
Messages
2,253
I really love "sidequests" in Quest for Glory, because they tie in so wonderfully with the main plot. Same thing goes with Mask of the Betrayer
 

Deleted Member 16721

Guest
I like side quests in pretty much every RPG. I like how side quests in general break up the gameplay from just following the main quest. Some of my favorites would be Bloodlines' side quests. I enjoyed being a police bounty hunter, finding rare artifacts for the cannibal chick, infiltrating the hotel to kill the Russian mob boss, taking care of the gargoyle and so much more. They really fleshed out the world as being a weird and mysterious, and also dangerous place.

I enjoyed the side quests in Baldur's Gate too. Simple and to the point, but they led to a sense of adventure that not many RPGs really convey that well. The game encourages adventure and open exploration. There's a lot of games that have good side quests so I can't name them all. Side quests in general are incline.
 

Terenty

Liturgist
Joined
Nov 29, 2018
Messages
1,367
Disco Elysium tasks felt very organic and seamless, there was always something exciting to do and it never felt forced or contrived. I would also say the game has one of the best exploration
 
Joined
Mar 14, 2012
Messages
1,464
Divinity: Original Sin Torment: Tides of Numenera Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath
One of the biggest problems with the side-quest design is that usually a PC lacks any real motivation to pursue all these quests. The player's motivation is easy to explain - money, exp, loot; but it is quite hard to imagine a plausible explanation why your character should get sidetracked doing things which are not directly related to his more urgent and plot-motivated goal.

So, I believe that the best way to design side-quests is to somehow interwine them with the main quest/main plot. Baldur's Gate 2 is a great example. You need a lot of money, and it's up to you how you gonna get 'em. Every particular side-quest is, thus, motivated by the over-arching goal. The similar design can be found in Dragon Quest IV (Taloon's chapter) and, to some extent, in Gothic 1/2. In the latter you do side-quests in order to get questgivers' support for joining their fraction.
 

HoboForEternity

sunset tequila
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Mar 27, 2016
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9,175
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Disco Elysium
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Last is the Half-Ogre Island quest, which has the best story ever told in a video game. I don't want to spoil it, but Arcanum is worth playing for that alone. The quest left me feeling anger and despair, but really paralleled modern power structures, which is probably why it's so compelling. I wonder how many actual, real life conspiracy theorists this quest made.
siamese twin conspiracy is legit one of the best quest i have ever played. this quest is so memorable that one of the few game content that i remember the name, and i last played arcanum in 2014
 
Joined
Dec 17, 2013
Messages
5,110
Generally, what makes good side-quests is what makes good main quests. Depth, cool writing, different options and consequences, active gameplay. One added element is tying the side-quest to the main quest or game world.
 

Deleted Member 22431

Guest
AoD, cause Miltiades.
16njL3A.jpg
 

LilWololoMane

Novice
Joined
Nov 9, 2019
Messages
9
New Vegas is a great example where the side quests flesh out the world, and they are interesting to do in their own right.

Fallout 2 has a lot of this as well. In New Reno you get to align yourself with four different crime families, each with their own motives and characteristics. Half of the quests themselves aren't particularly special, you got your usual fetch objectives. But there are highlights, like the investigation into Richard Wright's overdose, and the delivery of Mordino's package to his stables leading to the introduction of Myron. If you're lucky you may even become a made man, although the rewards consisting of just a few new buyable weapons (which you may not be able to get enough ammo for to make them viable) and free licks to the end of your Tootsie Pop probably aren't quite worth it. I wish there was more though, because each of the families only have a few quests each. I wonder if the Restoration Project mod extended these quest lines.

Modoc's quests are another great example, but becoming a mafioso, if only for just a few in-game days, is just good fun and serves as a great example of Fallout 2's move from showing the suffering of the wasteland to showing its culture.
 

fantadomat

Arcane
Edgy Vatnik Wumao
Joined
Jun 2, 2017
Messages
37,087
Location
Bulgaria
To be honest i really like PB's quest type,especially Gothic 3. And yes i know that they are fetch quests generally,but i have a cathartic experience finishing them :). Also i do like how you get experience for everything you do,it feels nice how doing small shit makes you grow. I really liked how you choose a side in a whole war in gothic 3 and you have to help the towns one by one and in the end you have wipe the enemy from the whole country.

Witcher 3 have some very well written side quest that felt realistic. For a storyfags it is the best part of the game.

Morrowind,Oblivion and Skyrim have thieves guild,i like stealing shit also good stealth mechanics!

Torment have interesting side quests with interesting lore in them.

Shadowrun games are all about the side quests :).

NV have good faction quests that actually made a change and mattered.

Generally i don't think of side quests as side content since i try to do a 100% when i play rpgs.
Oh i almost forgot,The outer worlds,you get to kill a dyke in front of another dyke :smug:
 

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