In arecent interview,The Witcher 4’s narrative director Philipp Weber said thatCD Projekt Red’s forthcoming RPG will continue the trend of avoiding fetch quests at all costs.
“A quest has to be something interesting,” Weber said. “I have to feel, as a player, that if I played that quest, my time was well spent and not just spent. I was busy doing stuff, and didn’t think about work or taxes. I experienced a story, or something else that was worth it.”
Go Fetch? No Fetch!
The result is that the game is avoiding a quest that would, say, have Ciri simply walk up to an NPC, receive a mission to go find an item, ride her horse to a destination, get the item (usually after a sprinkling of combat), then ride back. If your trip to the grocery store to get eggs has a similar story arc, it’s a quest The Witcher 4 probably won’t include.
This isn’t too surprising.The Witcher 3’s quests were what made it special. It wasn’t the best feeling game, its combat was pretty one-note, and it didn’t have the most engaging RPG systems. But it delivered intriguing quest after intriguing quest, each with its own thorny choices and knotty moral quandaries. It’s a classic because it had a whole lot of quests that hit hard, not because Geralt did.
As Weber indicates in theGamesRadar+ interview, that meant cutting out quests that simply had the White Wolf run to a location, get a thing, then bring it back. Fetch quests have been a staple of video games for decades and remain popular in games today. FromThe Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Maskall the way to this year’sKingdom Come: Deliverance 2— which has an important quest that centers on tracking down nice clothes so you can get into a wedding.
Are Fetch Quests Always Bad?
That KCD2 mission is a typical fetch quest. But it’s fun. I’m not so sure there’s anything wrongwith fetch quests. Are they lazy? Sure, they can be. Open-world games need content and a fetch quest gives you more to do with minimal new assets or writing. Just send the player to a part of the map that already exists with some thin motivation, rinse, and repeat.
Theycanbe lazy, sure. I look at fetch quests as the video game version of a MacGuffin, those narrative objects that exist solely as devices to move the plot along. A MacGuffin can be a compelling set-up for a plot — think:Indiana Jones' quest for the lost ark in Raiders — but it can also be incomprehensible or boring — think: the Rabbit’s Foot inMission: Impossible 3. In an adventure story, there is often a hero who wants to find something important and a villain who wants to stop them and/or get the object first. This isaplot structure. It shouldn’t be the only one, but there’s no reason to stop using it.
I’m not so sure the alternative is all that compelling either. When I think of the average experience of a TW3 quest, I think about Geralt arriving in a location, noticing that something happened there before he arrived, then activating his Witcher vision to search for clues. That isn’t a fetch quest, but it isn’tfuneither. And, after a decade of other RPGs copying The Witcher 3’s homework, forcing you to follow footprints highlighted in blue with your special sixth sense, I would gladly run and fetch something if it meant I didn’t have to sniff around yet another suspicious scene.
Like plotting a story, there are only so many ways you may structure a quest, and fetching is one tool in the toolbox. An open-world game needs many quests to function and my main concern is that those quests be interesting and varied. A game shouldn’t rely too heavily on fetch quests, just like a season of TV shouldn’t be all bottle episodes. So, while it’s admirable that CD Projekt Red is aiming to avoid lazy quest design in The Witcher 4, I’m not so sure it needs to cut fetch quests altogether. Just make the time spent fetching interesting.
