The kingdom is burning. An ancient evil has returned. Reality itself may collapse by Thursday. Anyway, somebody in the village has lost their cat.
We have priorities. RPG side quests have a peculiar ability to derail even the most urgent heroic journey. The main story may insist that every moment counts, but put a suspicious exclamation mark above someone standing beside a well and suddenly the apocalypse can wait. Sometimes that's simply because we want the XP.
But the best RPG side quests do something more interesting. They give us stories we remember years after we've forgotten exactly why the ancient evil wanted to destroy the world in the first place. That isn't necessarily because side quests are better written than main stories. They simply have freedoms the main story doesn't.
The main quest has to carry the plot. Side quests get to carry almost everything else.
RPG side quests can afford to care about smaller things
Main stories have obligations. They need to establish the central conflict, introduce important characters, explain what’s happening and keep the player moving toward some sort of conclusion. In an RPG, that conclusion frequently involves saving a kingdom, a planet, several dimensions or existence itself.
There’s nothing wrong with enormous stakes. They’re rather useful when you need somebody to spend 80 hours fixing things, but enormous stakes can also become strangely abstract. The world will end is certainly bad. This particular person is going to lose someone they love can be easier to feel.
Side quests have room for those smaller problems because they don’t have to justify the entire adventure. They can spend half an hour on one family, one friendship or one thoroughly inadvisable decision. The problem may mean nothing to the fate of the kingdom, but it means everything to the person who asked for your help. That difference can make a small story hit surprisingly hard.
Optional stories let us discover people rather than plot points
There is another advantage to being optional: the player chose to be there. The main quest needs us. If we want to finish the game, sooner or later we’re going through that door.
A side quest is different because we stopped. Maybe we followed a strange noise, talked to an NPC who looked interesting or wandered into a building that wasn’t marked as particularly important and discovered that somebody inside had an entire disaster underway.
That sense of discovery changes the relationship slightly. The game didn’t drag us here because this character was required for Act Three. We found them because we were curious enough to look.
The Witcher 3 was deliberately designed around this kind of exploration. Lead quest designer Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz explained that optional quest lines could affect the wider world and even the main story. The goal was to make exploring beyond the central quest feel worthwhile rather than like wandering away from the interesting part of the game.
That philosophy extended to how CD Projekt Red treated optional quests themselves. Side quests weren’t intended to feel like lesser content simply because the player could walk past them. Optional doesn’t have to mean disposable.
Side quests can show us what a world is actually like to live in
The main story usually tells us what’s important to history. Side quests tell us what’s important on Tuesday.
They’re where we discover that the village has a local feud, somebody’s business is failing, two people are desperately in love, the wildlife has become inconveniently murderous, or a perfectly ordinary citizen has made a decision of such staggering stupidity that only a passing adventurer can possibly sort it out.
These stories provide information that lore books often can’t. They show us what people worry about when they aren’t discussing the Dark Lord. That’s part of why good side content can make an RPG world feel alive: convincing places need evidence that lives and problems exist beyond the player’s central adventure.
A war becomes more believable when we see what it does to ordinary people. A city’s politics become more understandable when we’re helping someone affected by them. A culture becomes more than architecture and codex entries when we see how its people actually behave.
The main quest tells us the king is dead. The side quest tells us cabbage prices have become absolutely outrageous as a result. Frankly, somebody needed to investigate.
They have permission to get weird
Main stories usually need some degree of tonal discipline. If Act Two ends with the tragic destruction of an entire city, Act Three probably shouldn’t open with the hero entering a competitive chicken-dressing tournament.
Probably.
Side quests have considerably more freedom. They can become comedy, horror, romance, mystery or complete nonsense for twenty minutes and then politely return the player to the regularly scheduled apocalypse. Few RPG series embrace this as enthusiastically as Like a Dragon, where substories can veer wildly away from the tone of the central crime drama.
At GDC 2025, Like a Dragon series director Ryosuke Horii described side content as essential to balancing the overall RPG experience. His team’s priorities include using substories to complement the main narrative, deepen characters, vary emotional tone and give players freedom over pacing.
That means the ridiculous detour isn’t necessarily distracting from the game. It may be helping the game breathe. After several hours of betrayal, death and political intrigue, perhaps helping an extremely strange man solve an extremely strange problem is exactly what the story needs.
Side quests can spend more time on characters
The hero has somewhere to be, and so does the villain. The main story has approximately 46 unresolved plot threads and would appreciate it if everyone could keep moving. Side quests, meanwhile, can stop.
That’s especially valuable for characters who don’t have enough narrative importance to command hours of the main storyline. A companion can get a personal story. A minor NPC can become someone we understand. A person who initially looked like Quest Distributor #27 can turn out to have motives, history and relationships that make them memorable.
This was an explicit goal during development of The Witcher 3. Tomaszkiewicz said the team wanted every side quest to contain something memorable, and strong characters were one of the ways they tried to accomplish that. Chris Avellone has similarly argued that good side quests should deepen the main plot, the surrounding area, its lore or its NPCs.
That’s an important distinction. A side quest doesn’t have to advance the central plot to matter to the larger story. Sometimes understanding one person better changes how we understand the place, faction or conflict around them.
Optional can make caring feel more personal
There is something slightly different about becoming attached to a story the game allowed us to ignore. Nobody required us to talk to this person or investigate what happened. We could have collected the main quest marker and continued heroically toward destiny. Instead, we chose to care.
Games are obviously still designed experiences. The quest exists because writers and developers put it there for us to find, but player agency changes how that experience feels. Finding something optional can create a tiny sense of ownership over the memory: I found this. I decided to help. I stayed to see what happened.
That becomes particularly powerful when the reward isn’t a legendary weapon or enormous pile of money. Sometimes the reward is simply knowing how the story ends.
Good side quests don’t necessarily announce themselves as important
This may be one of their greatest tricks. A main quest arrives carrying expectations because we know this is Important Story Business. Side quests can hide what they are.
The request sounds ordinary: find someone, investigate something, deliver an object, deal with a monster. Then the situation changes. Perhaps the person asking for help hasn’t told us everything. Maybe the monster isn’t the actual problem. A straightforward decision becomes morally uncomfortable, and the reward suddenly matters less than deciding what we think should happen.
CD Projekt Red became particularly associated with this approach in The Witcher 3, where optional quests and monster hunts could contain their own narrative arcs rather than functioning purely as combat assignments. The mundane premise becomes camouflage, and because we weren’t expecting a major story, the emotional turn can land harder.
We came here to kill something for 200 gold. Why are we having feelings? This was not in the contract.
Of course, some side quests are absolute chores
We should not romanticise the entire institution. Somebody absolutely does want ten wolf pelts. The wolves absolutely do not all have pelts. You will absolutely kill seventeen of them.
A quest being optional does not magically make it interesting. Bad side quests can make a world feel less alive because their artificiality becomes obvious. If every village contains a different person asking us to collect ten local objects, we’re no longer meeting inhabitants with problems. We’re servicing quest dispensers.
Developers themselves distinguish between meaningful optional stories and filler. The point isn't that a character can never ask us to retrieve something. It's that fetching the thing cannot be the entire reason for the quest to exist.
“Go there and bring this back” can be the mechanical structure underneath an excellent quest. Something interesting needs to happen because we went.
Rewards matter, but not always in the obvious way
Side quests traditionally offer very practical incentives. XP is good. Money is good. Swords with numbers larger than the numbers on our current sword are generally considered excellent.
But memorable side quests often leave us with something that doesn’t fit neatly into the inventory. We understand a companion differently, discover something about the world, change a location or simply acquire a story we’re still thinking about several years later. Someone may survive because we stopped to help. Someone may not.
That doesn’t mean mechanical rewards are irrelevant. RPGs still need to respect the player’s time, and receiving six coins and a turnip after an hour-long quest is one way to discover previously unknown emotional responses. But the best reward for a story can simply be having experienced it.
That’s a rather extraordinary thing for optional content to accomplish.
The main story gives the adventure direction. Side quests give it texture.
Main quests and side quests don’t really need to compete. One gives the journey structure, while the other can make the journey feel inhabited.
The main story tells us why we’re crossing the continent. Side quests give us reasons to remember the places we crossed along the way. They introduce people who will never appear in the final cinematic, let writers explore ideas too small, strange or personal for the central plot, and give players opportunities to care about things the game never required them to care about.
Occasionally, they create the moment we remember most. Which is why the kingdom may indeed be burning, the ancient evil may very well have returned, and reality remains scheduled to collapse by Thursday.
But somebody’s cat is missing.
The Dark Lord can wait ten minutes.