SIDEQUESTS/ERRANDS

I think as indie developers, we need to really carefully budget our time and energy. Finishing the main quest and adding sidequests at the end might be the best thing to do. You don't want to exhaust too much time and energy on a cool sidequest and then not have the energy to finish the main game.

The main quest should be like the spine. It should be what's laid down first. Even if a game is just a series of battles (I'm looking at you, Mage Duel) if some of those battles are optional, the mandatory battles should be set up first.

A problem with figuring out rewards for a sidequest is that what qualifies as a good reward varies from person to person.

Imagine two different players. One player wants rewards that in one or another way makes him notable stronger. Now, imagine another player who wants the game to stay challenging, so he doesn't want to get ahead of the expected power curve. However, he spots a sidequest that involves NPCs he finds interesting.

If you give the first player what he considers good rewards, chance is the second player hits a dilemma where he either has to skip the quest or have the game get easier than he wants it to be.

You can try tricks such as giving the player a piece of equipment that is only a bit better that what's otherwise available, but do have uniques properties that while hardly needed, are fun to have access to. Still, I think that eventually you simple have to ask yourself what kind of player is supposed to enjoy the sidequest.

Personally, I hope that the player is somewhat flexible. I consider it a bad idea to, without somehow cluing in the player in advance, make one sidequest that gives out a huge power boost and then one that gives you no form of tangible reward and instead has a lot of story. However, I'm not going to measure every sidequest and make sure they have about the same ratio of story vs tangible rewards or something like that.

Imagine two different players. One player wants rewards that in one or another way makes him notable stronger. Now, imagine another player who wants the game to stay challenging, so he doesn't want to get ahead of the expected power curve. However, he spots a sidequest that involves NPCs he finds interesting.

a great and easy way to solve this is by having the player know the reward before he takes up the quest. have the NPCs hint at owning a special item, or maybe the NPCs talk about doing it because "it's the right thing" to tell the player that the reward is story-based.

personally my favorite kind of reward is opening up new areas to explore. that can get sort of goofy and blur the line between sidequest vs main quest but whatever fuck it.

one of the best side quests of all time man has to be (from majora's mask of course) filling out the bomber's notebook and ultimately the kafei/anju storyline. the story of it was so emotionally-packed and as you played it you had to interact with LOTS of NPCs and go to lots of places—it was intertwined with the rest of the game in a way that almost made it feel just as important as the main quest itself. it even had its own dungeon.

That was kind of a response to the idea that sidequests were meaningless fluff, which now that I look back at the thread I don't think anyone was actually arguing and it was just Craze straw-manning.