10 Modern Video Game Tropes Everyone Is Rejecting

10. The Shift To Tiny Side Quests

Side quests have been a common occurrence within video games for decades. Extra pieces of content that gave us more to do outside of progressing the main story, these can be found everyone in contemporary games.

However, developers have never been sure on the best ways to handle them. For years, a side quest consisted of completing tedious fetch quests or other meaningless pieces of busywork. They were lazy means of padding out a game’s length without adding anything of substance.

And then The Witcher 3 and Assassin’s Creed Origins came along and changed everything by transforming side quests into their own character-driven stories that tied into the overarching plot.

In both these games, side quests provided something new and interesting to experience. Hunting out these quests were now worth our time. But, for some unknown reason, developers have taken two steps backwards by making side quests even smaller than ever.

Whether it’s Mysteries in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla or Cyberpunk’s singular objective Gigs, extra content has been diluted to bite-sized chunks of largely forgettable interactions that don’t add much, if anything, to the overall experience.

A return to The Witcher-style of quests would be ideal.