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personalapocalypseThe world is depending on you and your friends. Or the galaxy, or the universe - either way, someone's depending on you, and they're in danger. Pressing, imminent danger. Maybe you're the last resort after everyone's failed, or maybe you're the Chosen One, or maybe you're just that good, but only you can save the entire world, and you have to do it soon. The Big Bad and his allies are actively working against you - they've already put their plan into motion, and it's going to destroy everything, unless you do something.
So yeah, no hurry. Take your time.
We've all seen rants about it. Some of us have ranted about it ourselves. How do we have time to breed generation upon generation of chocobos when Meteor is crashing down on us? If the galaxy really IS at stake and we're racing against time, how is it that we can spend untold hours fighting in a battlegame simulator on some tiny DLC space station?
Or, to be more general: Sidequests. How do they fit into the story? How can they fit into the story that a game is telling, when the story is that you're racing to stop untold horrors from coming, but the sidequests alone would take long enough that the world would be gone by the time you finished?
So yes, as you might have realized up there, this is one of my gaming pet peeves. I understand why they're there, I really do! If games were nothing but their basic plot, they would be very short, and it would perhaps be impossible to make your characters powerful enough to actually face the big bad and win, let alone anything stronger that might be out there (which are usually sidequests in and of themselves.) Sidequests add value to the game, and they often add character depth, and that's all fine and dandy from a gameplay perspective. But this is one of those cases where what is good for game structure and play is not good for plot structure. Plot structure demands a certain amount of tension. And it's hard to maintain tension when you've been doing sidequests for so long that you've forgotten what you were supposed to be doing to save the world, anyway.
Not every game does this. In some of them, the big bad already HAD taken over the world, so there was really no reason to believe he was going to destroy it right away if the heroes didn't hurry (Final Fantasy VI.) Or they didn't really have a big event coming that was going to depend on time (the first InFAMOUS.) Or they had a point at which if you stalled any more, there would be actual consequences to you or to people around you (Mass Effect 2, which further had the option to go back after the "final mission" and finish the sidequests you didn't do... you didn't know this, though, so for the first playthrough it still felt pretty urgent.)
The consequences are the important part for me. If you're going to make the choice to neglect the big world-saving quest and do these side things instead, then there really should be a price to pay. Maybe not for you, since the sidequests usually give you really nice weapons and powerful new abilities and such, but for the rest of the world that's waiting on you to save it? Yeah, pretty much. I'm not saying that there should be a possibility that the player should lose the game outright, short of doing something really crazy, essentially giving up their quest. But I'd like to see some consequence for what is basically procrastination.
And that's something I'd like to see more of in fanworks - those consequences. If the characters are spending too much time on something that isn't part of the main plot, then fanwork is an ideal time to bring up the fact that, hey, maybe that isn't the best idea, and maybe the bad guys have been doing "sidequests" of their own to make themselves more powerful, and maybe you're stronger now because of the time you've spent, but you're going to need that strength because they're stronger now too. Maybe they've been going on Voyages of Self-Discovery of their own, and it's having an effect on them and their own plans.
Anything, other than just waiting on the heroes to show up - that can be good sometimes, as I've said, when the hero and the villain are closely connected and it's obviously a conflict between hero and villain that happens to have the fate of the entire world at stake as an aside. But if they don't really care, if all they want is power or destruction or whatnot, then it really doesn't make any sense for them to perpetually be on the verge of fulfilling their tasks while the heroes do whatever it is that they're doing.
That's one way of dealing with the sidequest issue in fic... there's another that's far more common, that pretty much just ignores the sidequests altogether. And I can see the value in that, except that honestly, some of those sidequests are pretty interesting. Not all of them are just about getting neat stuff, some of them are about learning new things about themselves and the world, and it's kind of a shame to cheat oneself out of such interesting fic details.
It's a balancing act, in my opinion - exploring the world and the characters' backgrounds while still keeping the sense of urgency. There are some sidequests I like to keep intact in my own fanworks because I think that they say something valuable about the world and the characters. Some of them, though, I generally ignore, if only because I'm not a skilled-enough writer to figure out a way to make them fit. Not during the context of the game's plot, at any rate; post-game or pre-game fic can work to explore it.
So yeah, no hurry. Take your time.
We've all seen rants about it. Some of us have ranted about it ourselves. How do we have time to breed generation upon generation of chocobos when Meteor is crashing down on us? If the galaxy really IS at stake and we're racing against time, how is it that we can spend untold hours fighting in a battlegame simulator on some tiny DLC space station?
Or, to be more general: Sidequests. How do they fit into the story? How can they fit into the story that a game is telling, when the story is that you're racing to stop untold horrors from coming, but the sidequests alone would take long enough that the world would be gone by the time you finished?
So yes, as you might have realized up there, this is one of my gaming pet peeves. I understand why they're there, I really do! If games were nothing but their basic plot, they would be very short, and it would perhaps be impossible to make your characters powerful enough to actually face the big bad and win, let alone anything stronger that might be out there (which are usually sidequests in and of themselves.) Sidequests add value to the game, and they often add character depth, and that's all fine and dandy from a gameplay perspective. But this is one of those cases where what is good for game structure and play is not good for plot structure. Plot structure demands a certain amount of tension. And it's hard to maintain tension when you've been doing sidequests for so long that you've forgotten what you were supposed to be doing to save the world, anyway.
Not every game does this. In some of them, the big bad already HAD taken over the world, so there was really no reason to believe he was going to destroy it right away if the heroes didn't hurry (Final Fantasy VI.) Or they didn't really have a big event coming that was going to depend on time (the first InFAMOUS.) Or they had a point at which if you stalled any more, there would be actual consequences to you or to people around you (Mass Effect 2, which further had the option to go back after the "final mission" and finish the sidequests you didn't do... you didn't know this, though, so for the first playthrough it still felt pretty urgent.)
The consequences are the important part for me. If you're going to make the choice to neglect the big world-saving quest and do these side things instead, then there really should be a price to pay. Maybe not for you, since the sidequests usually give you really nice weapons and powerful new abilities and such, but for the rest of the world that's waiting on you to save it? Yeah, pretty much. I'm not saying that there should be a possibility that the player should lose the game outright, short of doing something really crazy, essentially giving up their quest. But I'd like to see some consequence for what is basically procrastination.
And that's something I'd like to see more of in fanworks - those consequences. If the characters are spending too much time on something that isn't part of the main plot, then fanwork is an ideal time to bring up the fact that, hey, maybe that isn't the best idea, and maybe the bad guys have been doing "sidequests" of their own to make themselves more powerful, and maybe you're stronger now because of the time you've spent, but you're going to need that strength because they're stronger now too. Maybe they've been going on Voyages of Self-Discovery of their own, and it's having an effect on them and their own plans.
Anything, other than just waiting on the heroes to show up - that can be good sometimes, as I've said, when the hero and the villain are closely connected and it's obviously a conflict between hero and villain that happens to have the fate of the entire world at stake as an aside. But if they don't really care, if all they want is power or destruction or whatnot, then it really doesn't make any sense for them to perpetually be on the verge of fulfilling their tasks while the heroes do whatever it is that they're doing.
That's one way of dealing with the sidequest issue in fic... there's another that's far more common, that pretty much just ignores the sidequests altogether. And I can see the value in that, except that honestly, some of those sidequests are pretty interesting. Not all of them are just about getting neat stuff, some of them are about learning new things about themselves and the world, and it's kind of a shame to cheat oneself out of such interesting fic details.
It's a balancing act, in my opinion - exploring the world and the characters' backgrounds while still keeping the sense of urgency. There are some sidequests I like to keep intact in my own fanworks because I think that they say something valuable about the world and the characters. Some of them, though, I generally ignore, if only because I'm not a skilled-enough writer to figure out a way to make them fit. Not during the context of the game's plot, at any rate; post-game or pre-game fic can work to explore it.
no subject
Date: 2011-12-03 01:47 am (UTC)Mass Effect! :fistshake:
It's weird how they charged for that and gave away the "batarian terrorists" one for free. That one was actually pretty good.
Now I kind of want to write a fic that ends with the hero showing up all side-quested out and bragging "I will put a stop to your evil plan with my +12 sword!" and then the villain just goes "I did that last week, where the hell have you been?" Not sure about the setting, though.
no subject
Date: 2011-12-03 04:15 am (UTC)*dies laughing at icon*
no subject
Date: 2011-12-03 02:19 pm (UTC)My bald, pink-wearing dudeShep is one of my favourite user-created protagonists ever. Most of them look pretty generic, and then ME2 came along and let me wear hot pink armour with purple camo patterns, and, well.
no subject
Date: 2011-12-03 02:36 am (UTC)It's in my head that there is a game I've played (or seen) where dinking around doing sidequests actually does fuck you as far as specific in-game consequences, but I have no idea what game it was. That's incredibly irritating.
no subject
Date: 2011-12-03 11:24 am (UTC)One thing I think that came across here is that I actually dislike sidequests, and really, I don't. I spent hours breeding chocobos and playing at the various DQ casinos. But... when you're reading and writing fic, unfortunately, it's hard to make stuff like that fit in. :/
no subject
Date: 2011-12-03 05:06 am (UTC)So in a way you have consequences for procrastinating, in that the game keeps you from seeing the storyline for one of the cooler and more mysterious characters if you run around helping everyone find their lost dogs, and also for not procrastinating.
no subject
Date: 2011-12-03 11:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-03 05:28 pm (UTC)And the Clive/Elza deal is very strictly time-limited - if you don't reach certain points within a certain number of hours of play (the first is 11 hours, the last is 20) it's permanently lost to you. Though I did find a walkthrough that says you can get all the characters while doing the Clive and Elza plot, so I guess it's not as much of a tradeoff as I thought. You'd still need to know exactly what you were doing, though.
It's a shame some of the games are so rare - it seems like they did re-releases the first two around the time Suikoden III came out, but even that was eight years ago.
no subject
Date: 2011-12-04 11:41 pm (UTC)This would probably annoy me a lot more in games if I didn't find it so entertaining to breed dozens of chocobos while fiery doom bears down upon the planet. Actually, come to think of it, games that don't allow infinitely protracted time for sidequests sort of stress me out, because I want to do ALL THE THINGS and am accustomed to taking my sweet time doing them. Hmm.
no subject
Date: 2011-12-07 02:25 am (UTC)Maybe they've been going on Voyages of Self-Discovery of their own, and it's having an effect on them and their own plans.
Haha, now I really want a two-disc game where one disc you play the hero's story and the other you play the villains, and somebody has to lose.
I also really want to see games that actually do stuff with save points.
I find that the more RPGs I play, the more I appreciate how FF7 basically had a sidequest for every player character that taught you more about them and gave them a chance to grow. Plus the quests slotted nicely in to the plot, and made it clear that pretty much everyone has a personal reason to go after Sephiroth. Which is awesome, and not something any of the FFs since have managed. I haven't played any pre-7 FFs; are they good about that sort of thing?