WHEN DO YOU HAVE TOO MANY SIDE QUESTS?

author=Kaempfer
If you look at Morrowind, Caius Cosades straight up TELLS you "GO DO SIDEQUESTS FOR AWHILE" and you actually need to go and do sidequests before you can progress (although there are ways around this, like there are ways around everything Morrowind). In Oblivion you're told "go to X place and meet Y", but you're free to blunder about on your own. The main quest encourages you to close Oblivion gates, its biggest sidequests. It wants you out there, exploring. Skyrim, on the other hand, has story missions like "LET'S RUSH TO THIS POINT AND FIGHT A DRAGON OMG RIGHT NOW" and then you are free to fuck off and loot 9012 tombs. The story missions are almost all structured this way- time is of the essence, let's get to it right now!- which is totally opposing to the meat of the game. In my opinion, the faction related quests (which are almost as in depth as the main story is) are better structured for the reason people play Elder Scrolls. If you have sidequests, they need to compliment your game's style.

I enjoyed reading this. More and more reasons come up as to why, while Skyrim is certainly impressive and fun in its own right, Morrowind is hands down more magical and memorable, even with horrible things like crashes, cliff racers, and inferior graphics/mechanics.

I like my "side quests" to be more like the result of natural play. It's kind of odd to be a specific thing on a specific mission, but then some old lady lost her cat in some village. If the game is supposed to be *that* open world and sandboxy, I guess that's forgivable.

I really dislike sidequests in general, but if there have to be some then I'd prefer:
1) They aren't "marked" as sidequests, they just happen.
2) You can never "collect" them. If you have one, you follow that story to the end before starting a new one.
3) They are all unique and don't feel like sidequests.

If there are only boring sidequests, then there should never be a limit to how many you can have. Because it just makes backtracking even more tedious. I mean it's time to reinvent these. Why not make a "fetch all sidequests in town" button where you just automatically get those 20 sidequests without having to talk to every NPC. A lot of otherwise wasted time saved like that.
But really, don't do those.