Side-Quest Side Effects

Welcome. We’re here today to compare the way side-quests work in two popular role-playing games: Mass Effect and Persona 3. (A warning: there may be mild, mild spoilers for both games.)

This is a screenshot of Mass Effect’s “Assignments” menu, which amounts to a list of side-quests. As the game progresses, the list gets longer: it seems like every character you talk to has something new for you to do. ”My mom’s boils became sentient, I heard there was a healing salve on Borblizzia. Can you fetch it for me.” “I’m a scientist interested in Prothean toenail clippings. Please find out whether or not Protheans had toes.” And so forth.

So what’s the problem? More side quests mean more content, right? And everyone likes content. The problem, as with so many things in (the original) Mass Effect, is in the interface. In the screenshot above, you can see that the assignment list provides a hint about the side-quest’s importance to the narrative, but no information about how the side quest plays.

In particular, you’re can’t tell how difficult a side-quest is, or how long it will take. This is important information, considering that any given side quest in Mass Effect might sprout a sub-side-quest, which could in turn require a sub-sub-side-quest. And once you’ve shuttled from one end of the galaxy and back to fetch a thing for a guy, you might find that your reward is completely trivial: a few credits, a grand of XP, an item or skill that turns out to be irrelevant to the way you’d been playing the game.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I like side-quests. I’m a completionist: if a game has a list of things, I want to either acquire or eliminate those things—whichever puts a checkmark on the list. But with Mass Effect, it got to the point where I didn’t want to do any side-quests, since it was so difficult to determine whether or not a side-quest would be worth the effort. I knew that those checkmarks would go unchecked, unless I was willing to bounce the Mako around a featureless 3D fractal for hours on end tracking down some Geth guarding magic hair or something. The lack of foreknowledge made the decision whether or not to do a side-quest seem arbitrary.

The interface for side-quests in Persona 3 FES, on the other hand, gets it right.

The interface in Persona 3 immediately presents you with all the information you need about a side-quest: the relative difficulty (indicated with a star rating), the reward for completing the side-quest, and an in-game time restriction (you must complete the side quest by a particular date in the game).

This information in this interface actually makes it an interesting choice whether or not to do a side-quest. You can ask yourself questions like the following: Given how I’ve been playing the game so far, can I fit the quest into my schedule? I really could use that reward, so would it be worth dealing with the difficulty level? More information, in this case, leads to more challenge (and, therefore, more fun).

An interface like this can make a completionist feel fulfilled even if a number of side-quests are left undone. An interface like this encourages replay, because you can formulate a strategy for the next playthrough: how might I arrange my strategy in order to make it possible to complete side-quests I missed the first time through?

It’s differences like this between Mass Effect and Persona 3 that explain why I’ll probably never play Mass Effect again (even though I enjoyed it), but I put over 150 hours into my first playthrough of Persona 3, and will probably do the same when I play it again on PSP this summer.

For all its streamlining and general improvements of the RPG formula, Mass Effect 2 has the same obscure interface for side-quests as the original. Interestingly, Persona 4 took a step back from Persona 3 FES, removing the date restrictions, difficulty ratings, and reward appraisals for side quests. (This is just one of many regressions in Persona 4. But that’s a topic for another blog post.)

—Adam