More games should let you remove quests from your quest list

[Boblee]

Seriously, that would be a complete waste of time and resources making side quests that are bound to be removed by the gamers. 

[Heatman]

13 hours ago, Boblee said:

Seriously, that would be a complete waste of time and resources making side quests that are bound to be removed by the gamers. 

These guys don't just do something or anything out of the goodness of their heart. There is always a reason behind each one they make. 

[Boblee]

10 hours ago, Heatman said:

These guys don't just do something or anything out of the goodness of their heart. There is always a reason behind each one they make. 

Definitely, it's all about the money they are going to make first from adding all the side quests before gamers fun in playing. 

[Kane99]

Also, don't most games with quest lists put the side quests and less important quests in their own menu? Maybe there's a way to just view the main missions only?

[Heatman]

14 hours ago, Kane99 said:

Also, don't most games with quest lists put the side quests and less important quests in their own menu? Maybe there's a way to just view the main missions only?

If they made that possible, they are definitely going to lose out on the benefits they could have gotten from getting gamers to go through all the side quests. 

[Boblee]

I strongly believe that most games that such features to remove side quests are enabled are most likely regretting it. 

[Withywarlock]

On 12/29/2021 at 7:27 PM, StaceyPowers said:

Does anyone else find it super annoying that most games do not let you remove quests you will never, ever do from your quest list? In fact, I haven’t played any game that lets you clear out quest list clutter.

MMOs tend to let you remove them but that's more because of server limitations, or more cynically, making you spend more time picking them up in a subscription based game (time is money, after all.)

I think the desire to remove them is tied to two problems:

1. Fool me once, shame on you. Little Timmy Sticks has been kidnapped by a very hungry bear, and you've been offered a quest to rescue him. You take the request, and continue collecting other quests in town. You decide to do the nearest quest first, which is counting potatoes, and Momma Timmy Sticks isn't going to tell you to hurry up saving her boy. This is because few games have time-sensitivity, unless it's fear of missing out (FOMO) in the microtransaction shop. Be it due to limitations with coding NPCs to chase after you to remind you of progress, or rather lack thereof (which could be done in the days of the Infinity Engine), or the audience of today's games not liking time-sensitivity, side quests can be done at any pace you like, so there's no reason to get rid of them because they may be useful to you at some stage.
2. Fool me twice, shame on me. As Kane points out, many games allow you to collapse them in their own seperate menu. Sometimes, especially in older games, the side quests aren't sorted from the main ones. This is particularly annoying in titles such as Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale, where you can't know what quests are safe to progress in case you pass the point of no return with others. So the answer here is to make the user interface clearer: give quests different levels of significance (The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim does this spectacularly well with main quests including those belonging to DLC, side quests, and miscellaneous quests) and their levels of completion. "Current quests," "Completed quests," and "Quests nearest to completion" are all good filters to have.

Some solutions, including ones offered above, are thus:

• Scale Mail. A controversial topic in RPGs is the idea of zones scaling to you, meaning that enemies will always be a roughly appropriate challenge for your character. The difference in difficulty between The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and IV: Oblivion is night and day for a number of reasons, but most obvious is that in Morrowind the game doesn't change its enemies and their capabilities depending on your level, whereas Oblivion does. If you go somewhere too high level in Morrowind you'll die. In Oblivion, there's no such thing as any place too high levelled; difficulty is determined by your level and the incredibly generous difficulty slider. My point is that if you were to scale quest requirements, enemies and rewards to the player's level (if they finish the quest several levels higher) they should get rewards appropriate for the investment of time and skill. Therefore they spend (roughly) the same amount of time doing the quests as before but now get rewards they can use. No longer are you getting that lv.3 reward, you're getting that current level reward that makes it worth the time spent.
• Gone Shootin'. As said before, MMOs typically allow you to remove quests from your journal. They may also have achievements for doing all the quests in that zone, such as World of Warcraft's Loremaster achievements, which grant you a tabard as a status symbol. It's tangible proof that you've done the content, perhaps even absorbing the information. Plus achievements are frequently used by developers and publishers as a metric for who's doing what, to my understanding. I forget the specific word, analytics or something?
• Quality over Quantity. I will always prefer a good game over a long game. If the side quest adds nothing meaningful, I'd go as far as to say it shouldn't even be in the game, let alone be easy to ignore. Developers and I will undoubtedly disagree as to what adds how much to a game, but as someone who is grossly in favour of more games getting editors in to chop out the chaff, I'd say I'd rather have too few side quests than too many. Add DLC later if you must, and do it properly, not like the journals you get for the Skyrim anniversary edition.

TL;DR - The removal of side-quests is a nice idea, but is an admittance of UI and game design failure and shortcomings. Rather than remove them, let's make them worth doing when we get them.

Edited January 30, 2022 by Withywarlock

[Boblee]

7 hours ago, Withywarlock said:

 

TL;DR - The removal of side-quests is a nice idea, but is an admittance of UI and game design failure and shortcomings. Rather than remove them, let's make them worth doing when we get them.

This is where I make my stand, I'd like the side quests to stay and also for the developers to make it worth our play. 

[Heatman]

8 hours ago, Boblee said:

This is where I make my stand, I'd like the side quests to stay and also for the developers to make it worth our play. 

Seriously, if the developers makes their game's side quests worth being played, I'm sure if we would be having this conversation at all. 

[Boblee]

12 hours ago, Heatman said:

Seriously, if the developers makes their game's side quests worth being played, I'm sure if we would be having this conversation at all. 

That's a fact for sure!! But when was the last time these guys gave us something that's really worth it. 

[Kane99]

On 1/30/2022 at 5:15 AM, Heatman said:

If they made that possible, they are definitely going to lose out on the benefits they could have gotten from getting gamers to go through all the side quests. 

True. Most gamers will likely go back to them later after beating the main mission, but not everyone does. Some people just quit a game after a while and that's that. The thing about side quests, is that you could simply ignore them if you don't want to play them. Most games feature the main missions ahead of the side quests anyway, so you wan't have to worry about doing a side quest first unless you mark it or follow it or something. 

[Boblee]

On 1/30/2022 at 11:15 AM, Heatman said:

If they made that possible, they are definitely going to lose out on the benefits they could have gotten from getting gamers to go through all the side quests. 

That's something that's very likely to happen when such features is enabled. Gamers are likely to stick to the main missions most of the time. 

[Heatman]

12 hours ago, Kane99 said:

True. Most gamers will likely go back to them later after beating the main mission, but not everyone does. Some people just quit a game after a while and that's that. The thing about side quests, is that you could simply ignore them if you don't want to play them. Most games feature the main missions ahead of the side quests anyway, so you wan't have to worry about doing a side quest first unless you mark it or follow it or something. 

Isn't the main mission what's more important to the game? It's why most gamers wouldn't hesitate to follow that. 

[Boblee]

On 1/31/2022 at 8:40 PM, Kane99 said:

True. Most gamers will likely go back to them later after beating the main mission, but not everyone does. Some people just quit a game after a while and that's that. The thing about side quests, is that you could simply ignore them if you don't want to play them. Most games feature the main missions ahead of the side quests anyway, so you wan't have to worry about doing a side quest first unless you mark it or follow it or something. 

If the side quests are really done in a way that they can be very important to the game, it's definitely going to be something that gamers can't want to skip ordinarily. 

[Justin11]

Provided the quest never covered the views, I mean the playing surface of the game, I wouldn't get bothered since it's an awesome way of roadmap in the game.