Side Quest Syndrome: Designing The Road Less Traveled

 Editor's Note: The following article first appeared in Game Informer Australia Issue #85 and is written by David Milner. You can follow him on Twitter here.

Winning the loyalty of the Normandy’s crew as it prepares for a desperate suicide mission. Performing an exorcism on a wretched soul no longer fit to rule over a wild Skellige province. Discovering a tortured, talking tree in a hidden oasis – a placethat shouldn’t exist but somehow does – amongst the irradiated wastes of Washington D.C.

A good side quest can come to define a video game, giving life to its world, telling tales more intriguing and nuanced than any lying along the critical path.

Over the course of many months, the creators behind Dragon Age, Far Cry, World of Warcraft, The Witcher, Assassin’s Creed and Diablo shared with me their varied philosophies on the art of side quest design. With the leaps made in recent years, ignoring the apocalypse while you gather boar tusks will never again be seen as a satisfying diversion.

Why Have Side Quests At All?
Optional tasks have peppered digital worlds ever since early role-paying games started flirting with nonlinear design. In 1986, The Legend of Zelda featured five hidden heart containers that players could choose to find – or not. In 1988, Pool of Radiance became one of the first games with side quests that shaped the attitudes of characters around you.

At a time when player choice extended little further than controlling how fast you ran to the right of the screen, these were significant steps on the journey away from singular objectives. Over time, these small opt-in activities evolved from mere gear- and XP-dispensers into sprawling, complex narrative arcs of their own. Today, it’s impossible to imagine RPGs or open-world games without them.

But, at least from a surface-level perspective, side quests don’t make much sense. When you consider how expensive development is, committing resources to non-essential content is borderline irresponsible. Combine this with surprisingly low completion rates (PlayStation trophies reveal that only 29-percent of players finished The Witcher 3) and side quests become even harder to justify. So, why offer them at all?

“Aside from the obvious answer of giving players extra things to do, a world that only revolves around the main story feels dead,” says...