I have something to admit; when it comes to games, I’m a compulsive side-quest player. It doesn’t matter what it is. If there’s a side quest, and I can complete the sidequest before any main story mission, I’m going to do it.
There are good reasons to do this, of course; the extra XP you get from side quest chains, the new gear you get, quests getting locked off in some games, and so on. But I really thought this attitude was normal, until recently when I mentioned it to a friend and he looked at me like I was some sort of mutant. It turns out that when he played “Kingdoms of Amalur”, he powered through every story mission and cleaned up the sidequests later, while if I remember correctly, I came back to the second mission of the story maybe eighteen hours into my play-through.
We’re not talking about 100% Completion, here; that’s an entirely different beast. This is just finishing all the sidequests, every last one, because you can.
So, what do you do? Do you play every last quest? Or do you just power through the main story?
image courtesy EA




I’m pretty much the same. I’ve spent so much time on Skyrim, and I’ve barely touched the main story. Usually spend most of my xp points on carrying weight, just because I can’t bare to leave behind weapons and loot…thank god for buying houses!
at the risk of sounding too logical for your site: it really depends on the game and the quality of the side missions.
That’s true. But generally speaking I am a sucker for side quests, especially since they are often more quirky and show more about the game world.
Yeah, I’m big into the side quests unless it involves having to farm for a rare item.
I do for Zelda games. Not so much for everything else.
Basically I’ll do sidequests if a) they provide something new. New areas, new ways to play old areas — something or b) they at least reward you with something new. New ending, new hidden stage, whatever.
Usually once I get down to the “run around and collect X bugs/crystals/whatevers that are just sitting around the overworld” I check out. Also time trials/high scores — never had any interest in that. I almost never bother with New Game+ stuff either.
I’ve recently started an experiment with Kingdoms of Amalur where I complete as many side missions as I can before I absolutely have to go back and play the story quests. So far, I’ve completed the first story dungeon, after having already crawled it for a separate sidequest, and I’m at level fifteen.
Yup, as long as the game’s fun to play, I’ll play pretty much every sidequest I can find, including the kind of “meh” ones (unless they’re just tremendously tedious or impossibly hard). Fallout, Assassin’s Creed, Final Fantasy, Zelda, Mass Effect, etc.
It’s like licking the plate when you’re done eating: if the game is that much fun to play, I’m gonna wanna get every last piece of it.
I always try to complete every sidequest and find almost every object in games I play. It ends up taking a ridiculously long time to complete games and is probably why I barely play rpg’s anymore.
As a rule, I do side-quests until I’m tapped out, and then resume the main questline. Sometimes when you move the main quest forward, it closes some side-quest opportunities, and open others. So yeah, a noblewoman may be kidnapped by a death-cult, but she will have to wait until I dungeon-hack for a piece of gear I will probably never use. You have to have priorities.
All about the sidequests first the mainquests are always going to be there and not be different. Sidequests come and go and you may miss one or close one by lets say mistakenly killing some npc during a botched pickpocket job… gotta do side missions first