Urgency and Side Quests

My last post was on binary choices in games and how they can break immersion and narrative. Another immersion killer for me is side quests. I have a love/hate relationship with side quests; they are often the place where great quests that don’t fit into the narrative can be showcased (like the Mile High Club in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare), but they can also serve as the world’s most convoluted ATM. The greatest flaw though is that they break any sense of urgency in a narrative.

Sure, I have to retrieve the sword of shadows from the mountain of evil before Lord Kythun gets it to be sure that its power is never used for evil, but before I do that I have to run out and get ten wolf pelts for Johnny-Nobody here so he can pay me a copper.

It gets rid of any sense of urgency. You know that the world won’t end if you take ten years to complete the main quest. I spent maybe five hours exploring every world in Mass Effect despite the fact that I was on a manhunt (Turrianhunt?) for the most dangerous individual in the galaxy. The problem is, side quests are player initiated whereas the main quest is not. In most games the main quest is initiated by forces outside the player’s control and that are some kind of threat. Whereas side quests are within the player’s control and often do not change the outcome of the game by any great degree. We have an incentive to complete side quests: it makes the main quest easier, we have more money, better equipment or are more experienced but the story gives us an incentive not to do side quests. There is a great threat we have to deal with but there is a disconnect between the incentives of the story and those of the game. The game itself does not punish us for dawdling around despite the fact that the world is coming apart at the seams.

The ways I see to fix this is:

1) To have the parts of the main quest initiated by player actions. In other words remove the urgency from strategically placed sections of the narrative and in those give incentives for players to do side quests and in areas where time is not an ally punish (in a minor but realistic way) players for engaging in rather low-priority tasks.

2) Create a risk/reward system for side quests: you risk losing valuable time but your reward for successful completion of a lower-priority task is in line with how valuable time is in the narrative.

3) Remove time as a constraint of the story. This would be of course the hardest to pull off in a way that did not wreck the story but if you did manage it you would totally nullify the immersion breaker that is the side quest. An example of removing the time issue in a story would be a story of revenge. The main character is the one causing the narrative to move forward instead of outside forces.

Of course actually giving a time limit to complete certain sections of the main quest would be stupid. To actually give a time constraint is to make you play the game at its pace instead of your own. Which would get rid of a lot of the fun of gaming. No, we need to create a sense of urgency without actually tying ourselves to a fixed timetable.