No fetch quests

[Jarmo]

The thing about fetch quests I actually hate the most, is when you'd be forced to run back and forth for no good reason.

 

For magic coat we'll need a wolfskin. So you run to forest, snuff a wolfpack, get back.

Then we'll need a rope. So you run to the nearest gas station and get one.

Then we'll need deers antlers. So you... run back to the forest, slay a deer and get back with the antlers.

Then we'll need turpentine. So you go omg this bloody questgiver is so going to die, ...before running back to the nearest gas station.

 

PS:T Played well on this, but on average it's the pits of hell realizing you're just running about so the game will reach its "50+ hrs gameplay" target.

If the game is 15 hrs good stuff and 15 hrs filler, please just remove the filler and give me the good stuff.

[Gorth]

Planescape: Torment parodied the fetch quest with stuff like the Pandora's Box quest, and the Rat Catcher, so I don't think Obsidian will be filling this game with them, or if they do have fetch quests they will somehow make it interesting.

It also had the fetch quests to become a mage that was made exactly for the purpose of testing your patience. In fact, most IE game quests fell in one of two categories, fetch or kill. Sometimes both. If you remove fetch, you are pretty much reduced to kill type quests. There have been a few exceptions (body guard and escort type quests), but they have rarely been more interesting than fetch and kill.

 

I remember that mage quest! It was brilliant. Besides fetch and kill quests, there's the deliver/inform class of quests too ("meet & greet" as a subset), but I don't remember too many of those in the IE games as they're always used as transitions. Escort quests--I don't remember those in IE games at all, huh.

Probably not escorting as much as bodyguarding, but come to think of it, it may have been a kill quest too. It's been too long. The one I had in mind is one of the Paladin stronghold quests where you have to protect somebody in the safe house in the docks district.

[The Guilty Party]

To some extent, you can boil down *any* quest into a few very basic, very dry sounding elements. It's the same thing with stories. Strip out enough detail and you're basically reading the same dozen or so stories over and over again.

 

So saying 'no fetch quests' isn't really helpful or accurate. I am guessing what you mean is 'Please, no quests that are plotless, meaningless character builders/time wasters'.

 

I mean, even the basic format of the ME3 fetch quests could be made something good. You come across some journal on your travels and you have to find out who owns it, and it segues into what they were doing in the middle of the forest in the first place. Or it's filled with incriminating information. Or some old lady sending you to get something from her house that she had to abandon when war swept over the region. But it was never there, and she's working as an informer because her son is held hostage and all you have waiting is an ambush by imperial patrols. I'd be interested in both of those quests, even though they are ostensibly fetch quests.

 

The upshot is quality over quantity, maybe? Or that doing something for the sake of the reward is not interesting.

[LadyCrimson]

Don't mind a certain level of fetch questing, as long as it's mixed up with other stuff (killing, multi-part story, whatever). It's a matter of balance plus time/difficulty vs. reward, to me.

In terms of fetch quests specifically, my opinion tend to be something like this:

 

"This boy is sick and I really need a certain flower that only grows in the Cave of Glowing Mushies a couple miles away, but I'm just a frail old doctor. Are you willing to try and get this flower for me so I can cure this child? I don't have much but I can give you some old gems" = ok by me. I can feel like a good samaritan and I might find cool stuff in that cave.

 

"I'm hungry for a specific kind of omelet. Fetch me 30 GooeyHarpy eggs from their nesting site (very dangerous) and I'll give you some crappy leather boots you'll never wear." = not so ok. Go fetch them yourself if you're that hungry.

[Piccolo]

As others have said, there's absolutely nothing wrong with fetching / killing being the 'bone' of a lot of quests.

 

It's only when the developers don't add any meat to the bone that such quests become really tedious.

[Tsuga C]

Fetch quests are de facto unavoidable without investing huge amounts of time in crafting alternate forms of quests to provide possible courses of action for our protagonists. As LadyCrimson said above, if they're done well I'm not going to mind them at all. Done poorly, I'll be shutting off the computer and reading a book.

[Catharsis]

Don't mind a certain level of fetch questing, as long as it's mixed up with other stuff (killing, multi-part story, whatever). It's a matter of balance plus time/difficulty vs. reward, to me.

In terms of fetch quests specifically, my opinion tend to be something like this:

 

"This boy is sick and I really need a certain flower that only grows in the Cave of Glowing Mushies a couple miles away, but I'm just a frail old doctor. Are you willing to try and get this flower for me so I can cure this child? I don't have much but I can give you some old gems" = ok by me. I can feel like a good samaritan and I might find cool stuff in that cave.

 

"I'm hungry for a specific kind of omelet. Fetch me 30 GooeyHarpy eggs from their nesting site (very dangerous) and I'll give you some crappy leather boots you'll never wear." = not so ok. Go fetch them yourself if you're that hungry.

 

The problem is you don't need an excuse to do that, RPGs are all about adventuring so it's not as if without fetch quests there would be no other way to get loot or see caves or talk to NPCs, what I'm saying is that anything a fetch quest does can be done better by another kind of quest.

[limith]

If there are fetch quests, please let us fast travel anywhere, as well as set up custom (within restrictions) fast travel locations or put custom markers on the map.

[DocDoomII]

If there are fetch quests, please let us fast travel anywhere, as well as set up custom (within restrictions) fast travel locations or put custom markers on the map.

Then why not autocompleting quest all together?

[Jarmo]

The problem is you don't need an excuse to do that, RPGs are all about adventuring...

 

Nowadays I do need the excuse. If I'm playing a thief, I'm probably going to sneak about and loot every building, but if not, I'm not going to peek in every building to see what's there, unless I have a reason to. And if there's a forest on my map, I'm not going there unless there's something specific I'd like to do there. Maybe if I'm a ranger or a druid I'd go wandering for no reason but "it's there".

 

Replaying BG2 right now and there's tons of buildings I haven't been to and several map locations I've yet to visit.

Maybe I should/could, but can't see the reason when there's a bunch of unfinished quests around anyway.

[limith]

I said within restrictions for fast travel locations (Kingdoms of Amalur fast travel is anywhere with restrictions and it still has fetch quests. DA:O has the world map but it's a time waster sometimes to have to backtrack a long distance to go to it).

 

Custom markers on the map is something I want though.

[Catharsis]

The problem is you don't need an excuse to do that, RPGs are all about adventuring...

 

Nowadays I do need the excuse. If I'm playing a thief, I'm probably going to sneak about and loot every building, but if not, I'm not going to peek in every building to see what's there, unless I have a reason to. And if there's a forest on my map, I'm not going there unless there's something specific I'd like to do there. Maybe if I'm a ranger or a druid I'd go wandering for no reason but "it's there".

 

Replaying BG2 right now and there's tons of buildings I haven't been to and several map locations I've yet to visit.

Maybe I should/could, but can't see the reason when there's a bunch of unfinished quests around anyway.

 

That's what quests are for, you don't need a fetch quest for that.

[Catharsis]

If there are fetch quests, please let us fast travel anywhere, as well as set up custom (within restrictions) fast travel locations or put custom markers on the map.

Then why not autocompleting quest all together?

 

Exactly, streamline it enough and suddenly you have something like Dragon Age 2 and at that point what's to stop you from cutting it altogether as I said at the start of this thread.

[WDeranged]

I don't mind some fetch quests, it'd be rather unnatural to have a world where no one needs anything fetching, I'd also argue that fetch quests can be interesting if there's some plot based motivation beyond getting old Granny Jones her bag of apples.

 

*edit*

 

The Chanter's board from Dragon Age is a good example of crappy fetch quest filler, it's just busywork with barely a single interesting result

Edited October 23, 2012 by WDeranged

[Frisk]

Of course, a seemingly simple fetch quest may turn out to be anything but simple - it may start a chain of quests, and only a long time later will you actually be able to return to the original quest giver with the item you went after in the first place...and at that time you might even discover that the whole chain was planned from the beginning by a manipulative NPC.

 

 

.

[Rabain]

Boring fetch quests are fine, I doubt we will have dozens of them. If some farmer wants 10 pig livers I'll be happy to go get them at level 1 or 2, the only thing I hate is when it requires killing 25 pigs to get 10 pig livers, though to be fair we rarely see that kind of grindy fetch quest outside of MMOs.

[BBBD]

I'm ok with some fetch questing as long as it serves a part in a larger story. Where I find the frustration sets in is when, as mentioned earlier, you either have to battle respawns or boredom in getting back out of the area. The only alternative I've really seen is the Skyrim style quick exit from a dungeons end point back to an impossible to reach door near the start of the area. It worked but it felt a little forced most of the time

[Amentep]

I've always liked the idea of using an optional "job board" for most fetch quests.

 

If they decide on this I can live with it. But I didn't like the board in the witcher games because you had no motivation to read the text and get into the story why you had to fetch that things. You knew it was just about fetching X of Y right away when you searched something on the board anyway. I think that is much better done if told in person by an NPC imho, where u can tell a story and "disguise" the fetch-quest with something interesting.

 

For me the problem is that fetch quests are often so minor that you wonder why someone would bother a complete stranger walking down the street with them. To me the Job Board leaves room for the player to choose to accept/ignore the quests that are "I want 3 apples" and if the devs have a more involved fetch quests can add them to the job board or have an NPC give them in a way that makes sense.