exactly! in Skyrim helping a little kid get revenge on a person who abused him gets you drafted into the murder guild, in Fallout:NV you follow a trail of a missing scientist and discover sentient plant life!

i remember so many little quests from those games because they turned out to be much bigger than i could ever imagine. But it takes courage to hide a chunk of your game behind a quest somebody could miss or even fail, courage that bethesda fucking misplaced somewhere and i doubt they’re even bothering to look for it

it honestly feels refreshing to be able to miss content in games, playing Baldur’s Gate 3, and then watching a gameplay of someone else playing it is thrilling, because look at all the things i never knew you could do, look at all the quests, npcs, items, i never saw. There’s a whole full fledged companion character that if you’re playing as the good guy, which is most player’s first choice, you yeet off the cliff the first time you see her and that’s it, she’s gone! Recently I asked my friend who’s been playing that game since launch “are there any other mimics in the game? I only discovered one spot with them” and he replied with “there are mimics in this game?”

argh and in Starfield all that mystery and wonder of discovery is stripped down for “convenience” of walking through a location and picking up 10 quests in a row titled “Help Bob, Help Sam, Help Biggus Dickus”. Why would I bother playing that quest if you didn’t bother to spend a whole 5 seconds to give it a unique name? Honestly it wouldn’t even be an issue if there was enough meaningful quests to play through, but there’s one quest that has any work put into it per faction so i guess i’ll go do that