10 Video Game Side Missions That Made You Feel Cheated

When you decide to do a side quest, you usually expect some kind of reward, or at the very least a compelling bit of storytelling that will compensate you for your time and effort.

However, we don’t live in a perfect world, and neither do characters in video games. Sometimes an optional mission might promise great rewards, but the only thing you end up getting is a pair of empty hands and a sense of humiliation as you realize you’ve wasted a lot of your free time getting fooled by a misleading questline.

The world of video games is full of side missions that make players feel cheated upon completing them. They trick you into getting invested in them, and when they’re done with you, they only reward you with anger and frustration.

Don’t fall for the following side quests: It’s better to leave them alone.

Finding collectibles is one of the more dull and annoying things you can subject yourself to in Assassin's Creed. It requires you to look for barely visible objects all over the map, and the payoff is usually very miniscule.

That is, unless you're collecting the King Richard flags in the original Assassin's Creed, in which case the payoff simply doesn't exist.

Yes, in the first game, you can (though you really shouldn't) collect one hundred small flags related to the King Richard crusades. If their number already doesn't sound terrible enough, the flags tend to blend in with their surroundings, and they're not marked on your map, so you really have no way of telling which ones you're still missing.

But hey, if the flags take so much time and effort to collect, surely there has to be some awesome reward for getting them, right?

Wrong. The only thing you get for collecting the flags is an achievement. That's it. You've spent hours of your time scouring the map just so that a small popup can show up on your screen.

Assassin's Creed IV at least had the courtesy to give you some shanties to sing with your crew. Here, the silence is deafening.