Having played Blood of Dawnwalker for dozens of hours now, one thing really stood out to me: the abject lack of fetch quests in the game. RPGs of today, indeed, of the last decade and a half or so, have been so focused on the idea of “content” that quantity became a quality in and of itself, leading to the invention and extreme expansion of the worst possible kind of mission.
But in Dawnwalker, none of them exist—or, at least, not in the same way as they do in major AAA RPGs like The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim. In that game, I believe a very large chunk of its quests in general can be described as fetch quests, and even the first quest you actually come across—the one taking you to Bleak Falls Barrow in search of the dragon tablet—is immediately a quest consisting of “go there, find thing, bring it back.”
MMORPGs in general are plagued by the sheer dominance of fetch quests as a core design philosophy for missions. You basically always go to place X, kill target(s) Y or find item Z, and then go back to X to report on your success. It’s a loop, and not a particularly interesting one, even when it is disguised with additional narrative beats or supposed branching choices that, in essence, do nothing to substantiate the quest as a mission.
The only places in which fetch quests do end up being good are when they are transformed mid-mission into something else entirely. You start on a fetch quest, but then during fetching you’re taken down a completely new path, one that isn’t a fetch quest at all but rather a new mission (even if it is, essentially, still part of the same one).
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Cyberpunk 2077, and, now, Blood of Dawnwalker, focused heavily on having as few fetch quests as possible or, well, having none of them whatsoever.
And many more RPGs are now following suit, while games in other genres like Death Stranding have taken the idea of fetching and evolved it into its own quirk and mechanic rather than using it to merely pad out content so marketing teams could say “OVER 100 HOURS OF GAMEPLAY!” during promotional trailers.
Every quest I’ve done in Dawnwalker revolves around making some hard choices, participating in various activities, taking on various enemies, exploring ancient ruins to discover dark secrets, and so on. Even when a quest is tied to going somewhere to find something, there isn’t a loop that I go back to by delivering said thing back to the person who set me down that path.
It’s a personal journey, one in which Coen has to use every bit of information and every potentially powerful item to his own advantage, lest his family pay the ultimate price.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.destructoid.com/the-death-of-fetch-quests-is-the-best-thing-to-happen-to-rpgs/
