Games are better without quests at all, players should be doing things on their own initiative because they want to, not because some npc told them to.
>Games are better without quests at all, players should be doing things on their own initiative because they want to, not because some NPC told them to.
Kek, have you seen what happens when you give players freedom? They do literally nothing and cry the game needs more.
>have you seen what happens when you give players freedom?
Yeah, they play it for more than a decade and create amazing shit with it and the game becomes the most popular game in the world.
Open world and survival games are really popular though, something like BotW and Elden Ring might have quests in them but they're totally optional. The primary motivations for playing is exploring and finding new shit. Then you have games like Minecraft where you pretty much create your own fun.
People don't even do things in real life because they want to. They turn to doomscrolling and drugs. People need unwanted conflict to motivate them to fight or gather resources to win those fights.
Fetch quests are supposed to be masked handouts of free shit for playing the fricking game. If collecting 10 rat anuses takes too long it's a dev issue. If moron speedruns through the area and then cries about having to grind it's a skill issue.
Just ape Future Redeemed's fetch questing system
No need to talk with quest givers, you just have a compendium of all the items on location you slowly fill and get rewarded for it automatically
And rewards are meaningful
Basedo they’re cancer Digimon World 1 progress felt natural which made game one of best of all time. Spamming quests that are repeated just makes game boring
Anything more complicated than "collect 10 pieces of poo" and people will whine the game is too confusing and they couldn't get into it. If one NPC asked for 30 turds, they'd think it's too much trouble, but if it's three different NPCs each asking only 10, players will be happy to do it. Welcome to human nature
I don’t think fetch quests are necessarily bad, but they can feel excessive if they’re a large swath of the quests, or if you really have to go out of your way to complete them.
At the end of the day the basic act of playing the game itself should be pleasant, whether the enjoyment comes from combat, taking in the atmosphere, or simply the feel of character-progression and numbers going up. "Kill x of y" style of quests simply nudge the players towards exploring the game world (that is, going to the area where the bears live), facing a variety of opponents (now it's bears, the next day it's lions for their manes), providing a manageable set of mid-term goals (perhaps you have to gather 20 bear asses and only quarter of the bears have an ass, but in this case the light at the end of the tunnel is brighter than if the next obvious goal was reaching level n+1, which requires killing 500 bears), and quests invite the player to think about efficient routing.
Like, consider what the obvious alternative to "kill x of y" quests is in games where these sort of quests are present? Well, it is just farming the most efficiently grindable enemy type forever (or until you're powerful enough to tackle a more dangerous foe and then grind those up)! Which is exactly what we tend to see players doing when they ARE self-directed.
In the context of "this sort of game", I think quests are simply good. Of course, one might gesture towards other types of possible games where the problem doesn't come up: for instance, a 30-year old knight who has trained since he was 10 and is a veteran of many wars probably isn't going to get meaningfully better at fighting, so the idea of levels doesn't make sense. Likewise, the knight would be financially supported by his fiefdom so hauling bear asses to a merchant for gold rewards, or despoiling your fallen enemies and selling their stuff to a vendor (for a pittance), doesn't make sense. But if you want to hold on to ideas of progression mechanics or combats being frequent (as opposed to a knight likely seeing no more than several battles in his entire life), well, bear ass gathering is 100% purposeful.
quests shouldn't open up only when you unlock them at the quest giver. fetch quests are annoying precisely because you have to talk to a guy, do a thing, and then go back and talk to him again. good games have the quest engaged at all times and players can stumble upon items that someone needs and you only deliver them once you find someone who's looking for them.
I ignore any fetch quest like that.
That's why Dragon's Dogma had the best implementation of fetch quest as you just accept them all without really reading and get the reward instantly upon killing 10 wolves
Fetch quests aren't the problem, bad writing is. The same quest, regardless of task, can either be really interesting or dull as frick depending on how it's presented, and whether you give the player a reason to care. If I'm helping Billy over here execute a convoluted revenge scheme against the dingo that ate his leg, I don't give a shit if I at one point need to fetch a couple of chickens for him. But when I arrive at a new area and some guy is like "we got a dingo infestation, so how about you kill a few and bring me their tails as proof" I'll be bored before I finish reading the description
Often times it's actually >go to the desert, heading to griffin roost >kill dingos you come across and looting their tails as proof >come across and kill the giant sandwyrm that was terrorizing the village and take its tooth as proof >reach the griffin roost, fight the griffins while looting their eggs for a giant omelette some guy wanted to make >once you have enough eggs, head back, finish killing the dingos >once back in the village, village elder fashions you a crysknife from sandwyrm tooth, you get a couple of consumable griffin omelette consumables from the innkeeper, and taking revenge on dingos for Billy rewards you with some experience
vs
>run to the farmyard outside the village and chase around chickens running around like headless chickens >run back to the village Billy lives in >set up chickens as a trap >wait >wait >wait >kill the dingo as it appears >take the dingos tail as proof >talk to Billy, now it's time to tackle the sandwyrm
One leads to high-density gameplay with low downtime, the other doesn't, and in any event 1) the hero of the story chasing around chickens is nonsense, why didn't Billy do that part himself while only asking for help to kill the dingo, and for that matter where is your dignity as a nobleman, or your sense of priorities since you have the world to save?; 2) it's really just so convenient the village happens to have these troubles when dingos rarely attack people and monsters are on their way to extinction, so convenient that it beggars belief. The very concept of these sort of "side quests" is thematically nonsense, and if you include them for (arguably misguided, but anyway) gameplay reasons, then might as well design the quest gameplay-first, so the classic bear ass gathering style.
The writing isn't as important as the gameplay implementation, a quest can be totally linear where you go from one objective to the next, with none of the quest items or enemies existing before you're at the appropriate step in the chain.
Then you have a better implementation where the quest is integrated into the world in a logical way and there is multiple paths to completing it. Maybe you passed the dingos on your way to the quest giver so you already know where they are, maybe you already killed them before arriving at the quest giver so your visit will be brief.
Maybe you could sidestep the part where you get chickens as bait by using your tracking ability to track their footprints and find them that way.
Often times it's actually >go to the desert, heading to griffin roost >kill dingos you come across and looting their tails as proof >come across and kill the giant sandwyrm that was terrorizing the village and take its tooth as proof >reach the griffin roost, fight the griffins while looting their eggs for a giant omelette some guy wanted to make >once you have enough eggs, head back, finish killing the dingos >once back in the village, village elder fashions you a crysknife from sandwyrm tooth, you get a couple of consumable griffin omelette consumables from the innkeeper, and taking revenge on dingos for Billy rewards you with some experience
vs
>run to the farmyard outside the village and chase around chickens running around like headless chickens >run back to the village Billy lives in >set up chickens as a trap >wait >wait >wait >kill the dingo as it appears >take the dingos tail as proof >talk to Billy, now it's time to tackle the sandwyrm
One leads to high-density gameplay with low downtime, the other doesn't, and in any event 1) the hero of the story chasing around chickens is nonsense, why didn't Billy do that part himself while only asking for help to kill the dingo, and for that matter where is your dignity as a nobleman, or your sense of priorities since you have the world to save?; 2) it's really just so convenient the village happens to have these troubles when dingos rarely attack people and monsters are on their way to extinction, so convenient that it beggars belief. The very concept of these sort of "side quests" is thematically nonsense, and if you include them for (arguably misguided, but anyway) gameplay reasons, then might as well design the quest gameplay-first, so the classic bear ass gathering style.
I see you already touched on this in this post but I already wrote all this and it would be a shame not to post it.
OP and his shared hitpiece reads like one of those "life systems in platformers are outdated and should be banished" when the point of it aside artificial length in choice cases is to let people have experience in the game if proven lacking, before going on with the rest of it
>fetch quests >HSR image
Star rail doesn't even have fetch quests...
Daily log-in gacha chore quests, but no fetch me 10 bare asses. Bare asses being banned by chinese censor which is why buttcapes are prevalent
Invent a new type of quest
Games are better without quests at all, players should be doing things on their own initiative because they want to, not because some npc told them to.
>Games are better without quests at all, players should be doing things on their own initiative because they want to, not because some NPC told them to.
Kek, have you seen what happens when you give players freedom? They do literally nothing and cry the game needs more.
>have you seen what happens when you give players freedom?
Yeah, they play it for more than a decade and create amazing shit with it and the game becomes the most popular game in the world.
KYS
The average gamer of today would just quit the game if there wasn't an arrow to follow
Just give the world interesting environments with big bosses for each area. The real issue was trying to make things immersive or like the real world.
Open world and survival games are really popular though, something like BotW and Elden Ring might have quests in them but they're totally optional. The primary motivations for playing is exploring and finding new shit. Then you have games like Minecraft where you pretty much create your own fun.
Yet in both of those games you have plenty of arrows to follow
You're right about that but an arrow doesn't have to be a quest. You can place a marker yourself and follow it.
Remember the people b***hing about the timer in Dead Rising drop the game within an hour of free play
moron
People don't even do things in real life because they want to. They turn to doomscrolling and drugs. People need unwanted conflict to motivate them to fight or gather resources to win those fights.
KYS
Sorry I don't do what NPCs tell me to do.
YES YOU DO homosexual
Better watch out or I'll delete you with a console command.
So you don't do your job when asked?
Games aren't jobs
Go to bed Yahtzee
>Why won't fetch quests die?
Because developers are lazy and aren't good writers.
Fetch quests are supposed to be masked handouts of free shit for playing the fricking game. If collecting 10 rat anuses takes too long it's a dev issue. If moron speedruns through the area and then cries about having to grind it's a skill issue.
I love the Xenoblade series to death but holy shit what does teleporting to 5 locations for a single quest do for me
Just ape Future Redeemed's fetch questing system
No need to talk with quest givers, you just have a compendium of all the items on location you slowly fill and get rewarded for it automatically
And rewards are meaningful
Basedo they’re cancer Digimon World 1 progress felt natural which made game one of best of all time. Spamming quests that are repeated just makes game boring
Anything more complicated than "collect 10 pieces of poo" and people will whine the game is too confusing and they couldn't get into it. If one NPC asked for 30 turds, they'd think it's too much trouble, but if it's three different NPCs each asking only 10, players will be happy to do it. Welcome to human nature
Digimon Redigtize Decode asked for 20 poos bro it’s too much
I don’t think fetch quests are necessarily bad, but they can feel excessive if they’re a large swath of the quests, or if you really have to go out of your way to complete them.
Just stop playing rpg
If you only needed one bear ass the quest would only be 10 minutes of "content."
At the end of the day the basic act of playing the game itself should be pleasant, whether the enjoyment comes from combat, taking in the atmosphere, or simply the feel of character-progression and numbers going up. "Kill x of y" style of quests simply nudge the players towards exploring the game world (that is, going to the area where the bears live), facing a variety of opponents (now it's bears, the next day it's lions for their manes), providing a manageable set of mid-term goals (perhaps you have to gather 20 bear asses and only quarter of the bears have an ass, but in this case the light at the end of the tunnel is brighter than if the next obvious goal was reaching level n+1, which requires killing 500 bears), and quests invite the player to think about efficient routing.
Like, consider what the obvious alternative to "kill x of y" quests is in games where these sort of quests are present? Well, it is just farming the most efficiently grindable enemy type forever (or until you're powerful enough to tackle a more dangerous foe and then grind those up)! Which is exactly what we tend to see players doing when they ARE self-directed.
In the context of "this sort of game", I think quests are simply good. Of course, one might gesture towards other types of possible games where the problem doesn't come up: for instance, a 30-year old knight who has trained since he was 10 and is a veteran of many wars probably isn't going to get meaningfully better at fighting, so the idea of levels doesn't make sense. Likewise, the knight would be financially supported by his fiefdom so hauling bear asses to a merchant for gold rewards, or despoiling your fallen enemies and selling their stuff to a vendor (for a pittance), doesn't make sense. But if you want to hold on to ideas of progression mechanics or combats being frequent (as opposed to a knight likely seeing no more than several battles in his entire life), well, bear ass gathering is 100% purposeful.
I'm not reading this
Well, in that case you were able to at a mere glance identify it as a high-quality post, so thank you for your vote of confidence.
Good post
Fetch quests are fine, you just need to spin the narrative better about the thing you are going to fetch.
quests shouldn't open up only when you unlock them at the quest giver. fetch quests are annoying precisely because you have to talk to a guy, do a thing, and then go back and talk to him again. good games have the quest engaged at all times and players can stumble upon items that someone needs and you only deliver them once you find someone who's looking for them.
I ignore any fetch quest like that.
That's why Dragon's Dogma had the best implementation of fetch quest as you just accept them all without really reading and get the reward instantly upon killing 10 wolves
Fetch quests aren't the problem, bad writing is. The same quest, regardless of task, can either be really interesting or dull as frick depending on how it's presented, and whether you give the player a reason to care. If I'm helping Billy over here execute a convoluted revenge scheme against the dingo that ate his leg, I don't give a shit if I at one point need to fetch a couple of chickens for him. But when I arrive at a new area and some guy is like "we got a dingo infestation, so how about you kill a few and bring me their tails as proof" I'll be bored before I finish reading the description
Sadly, AAA writing is dogshit these days
>kill 3 dingos and get their tails as proof
VS
>get 2 chickens
>place chickens in the pen and wait for dingos to show up
>kill the dingos
I would be equally bored out of my mind doing both of these quests.
Often times it's actually
>go to the desert, heading to griffin roost
>kill dingos you come across and looting their tails as proof
>come across and kill the giant sandwyrm that was terrorizing the village and take its tooth as proof
>reach the griffin roost, fight the griffins while looting their eggs for a giant omelette some guy wanted to make
>once you have enough eggs, head back, finish killing the dingos
>once back in the village, village elder fashions you a crysknife from sandwyrm tooth, you get a couple of consumable griffin omelette consumables from the innkeeper, and taking revenge on dingos for Billy rewards you with some experience
vs
>run to the farmyard outside the village and chase around chickens running around like headless chickens
>run back to the village Billy lives in
>set up chickens as a trap
>wait
>wait
>wait
>kill the dingo as it appears
>take the dingos tail as proof
>talk to Billy, now it's time to tackle the sandwyrm
One leads to high-density gameplay with low downtime, the other doesn't, and in any event 1) the hero of the story chasing around chickens is nonsense, why didn't Billy do that part himself while only asking for help to kill the dingo, and for that matter where is your dignity as a nobleman, or your sense of priorities since you have the world to save?; 2) it's really just so convenient the village happens to have these troubles when dingos rarely attack people and monsters are on their way to extinction, so convenient that it beggars belief. The very concept of these sort of "side quests" is thematically nonsense, and if you include them for (arguably misguided, but anyway) gameplay reasons, then might as well design the quest gameplay-first, so the classic bear ass gathering style.
The writing isn't as important as the gameplay implementation, a quest can be totally linear where you go from one objective to the next, with none of the quest items or enemies existing before you're at the appropriate step in the chain.
Then you have a better implementation where the quest is integrated into the world in a logical way and there is multiple paths to completing it. Maybe you passed the dingos on your way to the quest giver so you already know where they are, maybe you already killed them before arriving at the quest giver so your visit will be brief.
Maybe you could sidestep the part where you get chickens as bait by using your tracking ability to track their footprints and find them that way.
I see you already touched on this in this post but I already wrote all this and it would be a shame not to post it.
How would you feel if there was a single quest in an RPG game? Such as 'Cast the ring into Mount Doom.'?
>We need them
i.e Black personcattle needs them
At the heart of every great video game is a overarching fetch quest. (it's true)
Fetch quests are easy and cheap ways to pad out a game's run time. They won't go away until gamers start demanding shorter games
>stop trying to make fetch happen
heh
OP and his shared hitpiece reads like one of those "life systems in platformers are outdated and should be banished" when the point of it aside artificial length in choice cases is to let people have experience in the game if proven lacking, before going on with the rest of it
>fetch quests
>HSR image
Star rail doesn't even have fetch quests...
Daily log-in gacha chore quests, but no fetch me 10 bare asses. Bare asses being banned by chinese censor which is why buttcapes are prevalent