Troperville
Editing Help
Tools
Toys
|
"Yet more meaningless endeavours?"
Need more gameplay hours? Simple: Send the player on a Fetch Quest.
A Fetch Quest is a subquest unimportant to the overreaching plot, which must nonetheless be completed in order to trigger a vital Event Flag. Find a key, save a kid lost in the cave, defeat the monster attacking the town, rescue the trapped workers, otherwise resolve an Adventure Town's problem. These tend to occur early in the game, before the party gets sidetracked into more important matters.
Gotta Catch Them All plots are often just a series of Fetch Quests. If it's not necessary to complete the game, it's a Sidequest.
Games will often use a Broken Bridge to browbeat you into solving a Fetch Quest even if you should intuitively have more important things to do. A Giant Space Flea From Nowhere will often be waiting for you at the end of such a quest.
Also known as a FedEx quest, since they often consist of little more than receiving an object from an NPC and taking it to a particular person or place or going to a particular place and bringing back an object. The people, places, and objects themselves are largely inconsequential — you're just their mail carrier.
Sometimes, however, a Fetch Quest - if done well - will provide essential exposition of the plot's backstory which would otherwise be awkward or obvious (or tedious) if delivered another way, say by a monologue delivered by an NPC.
Notice, if you will, that these are not restricted to games. Novels and episodic shows rely on these as subplots quite frequently.
Extend this ad infinitum, and you get a Chain Of Deals. Twenty Bear Asses is the variant where you have to collect a given number of objects dropped by enemies, and is much more popular with developers than players.
Examples
Film
- Bizarrely, this seems to be the plot of The Matrix Reloaded. Visit this guy, go to this guy to get this guy, get this guy to that thing...
- The same could be said of The Wizard Of Oz, when you think about it.
Literature
Video Games
- The overarching plot of Planescape: Torment is essentially a series of three fetch quests, in which you seek out the three people (in the loosest sense of the word) who can help you uncover your true nature and become mortal again. Many of the side quests also qualify. This is actually lampshaded thoroughly in the game itself, especially in your journal entries while endeavoring to become a mage.
- In Pokémon Gold, Silver, and Crystal (as well as the upcoming Heart Gold and Soul Silver), you have to go to the pharmacy in Cianwood City to get some medicine for Jasmine's Ampharos, because Jasmine won't battle you until Amphy's better.
- Slightly averted, in that you needed to go to Cianwood City anyway to fight Chuck (and encounter Suicune in Crystal and the remakes).
- These were actually a category of quests in Atelier Iris 3: Grand Phantasm.
- 60% of Animal Crossing is nothing but long, drawn out, randomly generated fetch quest where someone borrowed something, and lent it to someone and then someone stole it from them, etc. Which leads you through almost everyone into the village to get someone's [random Nintendo product] back in exchange for the original guy to give you some throwaway carpet or piece of furniture that you probably didn't want to begin with.
- Thankfully toned down in the sequels, which now only has you go from person A, to person B, then back to person A with the item in tow.
- Many players of the first game of the Baldur's Gate series complain that the game world is packed with lazy, lazy people who won't even walk down the street to the shop to buy themselves a book. It's also full of people who claim to be strong heroes who had something stolen but don't have the guts to get it back themselves. In fact, this player remembers the first chapter was nothing but fetch quests.
- 80% of side quests are of the fetch variety in the first game.
- The second game is generally much better about this, and even when it really is "fetch me this guy's knife" it's a) part of something much larger, b) giving you a choice about whose knife to fetch or c) giving you a very, very good reason to kill the woman, Lanthorn be damned. On the other hand, when your characters use the "Limited Wish" spell to ask for an adventure unlike any they'd experienced before, it's a particularly convoluted, tedious, and silly Fetch Quest.
- In the expansion pack to the second game, your characters are above such petty concerns. Instead, you can send a group of low-level adventurers out on a fetch quest for you.
- The player's character is sent on a FedEx quest so many times that he finally snaps and vents his frustration in an Angry Rant on the hapless NPC that (attempted to) assign the quest.
- Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin has an NPC who rewards you with items and abilities just for doing nearly random fetch quests for him, such as gathering one of each of five item-drop playing cards from various enemies, entering in a button sequence, or buying a potion and the first castle map. Not to mention there are a total of 37 of these, and they make up just one of the many categories of things you can get 100% in in this game.
- Order of Ecclesia also features plenty of fetch quests with a difference: Whereas in PoR they were optional to some degree, in OoE they're practically mandatory if you want to survive the rest of the game as said quests are the only way to get the equipment, health items and other stuff you'll be needing by the end of the adventure.
- Cave Story has a few of these. In one early level, a robot asks you to bring three items so it can make a bomb. In the following level, an old woman makes you track down her five lost puppies one by one.
- Chibi Robo is made of these quests (with a subverted storyline in the middle).
- The Chrono Trigger DS re-release has a new optional dungeon which is nothing but fetch quests. One particularly egregious example, towards the end of the dungeon, is a fetch quest that requires you to traverse one dungeon (getting into three battles you can't avoid), then leave the dungeon, then go back through the dungeon, then leave the dungeon, then go back through the dungeon, then leave the dungeon, then go back through the dungeon...It reaches the breaking point when, for this one fetch quest, you become Genre Savvy and realize that the first item you grab is not going to be the item that was requested, but looking for the right item is impossible until you're told that the one you have is the wrong item. And then, because once isn't enough, the game does the exact same thing immediately afterwards.
- All the mountain climbing is sure to be good exercise, right?
- This troper would say the optional dungeon counts as That One Level.
- At least there are a couple pretty intense boss battles. It's just a little weird that it's broken up by having to go down and then back up a mountain to get one of the bosses some lunch. Twice.
- City Of Heroes has many of these, often as a part of a story arc or task force. City Of Villains not nearly as many, but they're still there. Sometimes called "Bathroom break" missions when in a group because one person can usually take care of it.
- The game often attempts to spice these missions up by having a group of enemy forces spawn to ambush the player. Since skilled characters with the right powers can move something like a hundred and eighty miles per hour in this game, the most common actual result is the ambush to spawn, be left in the dust without the player even noticing them, and ultimately make life very "interesting" for some much lower level character who blunders into them.
- Ubiquitious in the Learning Company's Edutainment Game series The Clue Finders. One game, The Clue Finders Search and Solve Adventures, even Lampshaded it:
Joni: I think we're gonna need to find some keys to open these boxes.
LapTrap: Oh, of course! Why can't it be easy for once?
Owen: Hey, it's no fun if it's too easy, dude.
Joni: Yeah, the tougher, the better.
LapTrap: Oh, great! Here we go again.
- Overtime Mode in Dead Rising is almost all Fetch Quest. Like the rest of the game, it's also a Timed Mission. What makes it bad is that while the first half of the Fetch Quest is gathering key items, the second half requires you to collect ten queens, which are inventory items, and therefore the special forces will take them away if they get you before you get them back to Isabella.
- The Devil May Cry games often calls on these; in fact, many a Boss Battle kicks off when you retrieve the quest object, Nightmare in the first game being notoriously bad about this.
- There are quite a few of these in the Final Fantasy series.
- The original Final Fantasy . To move on with the game once you get the ship (at approximately level 4-5), you need to change one tile of the map from a small land bridge to water. To do this, you need a dwarven engineer to blow it up. He needs TNT. TNT is behind a magically locked door in the very first castle in the game. The door requires the mystic KEY, which is held by the Prince of Elfland. The Prince is cursed to sleep forever, until he's given the HERB. Matoya, a witch, has the HERB, but a dark elf stole her CRYSTAL. Astos has the CRYSTAL, but won't reveal himself as Astos until you get him the CROWN, which is at the bottom of the Marsh Cave, which you should be level 9-11 to attempt. Get used to grinding for a few hours.
- Final Fantasy I is much more palatable when you realize the whole thing is the second half of a fetch quest. You've already fetched the orbs (or crystal shards, depending on the version) before the game begins. Now, you have to return the Cosmic Keystone to the respective altar. Only in the last 10% of the game is it revealed that the fetch quest was all designed to allow you to reach the Big Bad.
- Final Fantasy X would abuse this with the Monster Arena (although all you needed to do was kill a monster with a certain weapon. (Nine times for bragging rights.)
- Final Fantasy XII actually subverts it ("Thing is, I'm gonna need some special tools to open the door ... Heh, I'm just messin' with ya. I've got everything I need ready to go!").
- Final Fantasy Tactics Advance features so many Fetch Quests that plot-relevant missions are the exception, rather than the rule. To be fair, most of them are completely optional — if you want to be slaughtered when you actually attempt to do a plot quest. The plot bosses seem to be balanced for a party that simply rushes the main storyline in terms of level and mastered abilities. As a result, doing any side mission or random battle is grinding as far as the game's concerned.
- Fire Emblem: Blazing Sword has one of these around the late middle of the game: you have to find the Fire Emblem so that Prince Zephiel's coming-of-age ceremony can be held and the Bernese nobles will tell you where to find Durandal. It's really not much more than an attempt to get the Fire Emblem into the game, since it has to be in every game, as well as show us Zephiel before he becomes a warmongering maniac who wants to wipe out humankind in FE 6, since 7 is a prequel.
- Both games in the Golden Sun series.
- Knights Of The Old Republic imaginatively conceals this by making the Four Objects you must collect Four Planets you must visit. So, if you're in a generous mood, you don't even notice that you've been FedExing.
- Lufia 2 is filled with these.
- For that matter, the original Lufia is essentially one big string of (often minor and insignificant) fetch quests loosely connected in a way that helps the heroes pursue their main goal of preventing the rebirth of the evil Super Beings defeated nearly 100 years ago. Only occasionally does a given quest directly involve the main adventure, and usually then it's only in hindsight; there are seriously about three directly plot-relevant quests in the entire journey, and the total length of the game springs from the fact that those relevant quests just happen to require the heroes to go on enough plot-irrelevant fetch quests to bring the game up to passable RPG length. To top it off, the bulk of those fetch quests are so random and ordinary (dungeon crawling and monster-fighting aside) that they seem almost mundane within the in-game universe. Basically, if the heroes didn't occasionally regroup and discuss their main goal, the player could easily forget that they're trying to save the world from a group of Big Bads as opposed to just looking for random good deeds to do. Despite this, it's actually quite an enjoyable and cult-classic RPG.
- Example: trying to track down a scientist. When you arrive in town, the ever-so-helpful NPCs state that you just missed him and that he went to some cave. You go there, get to the end and find out that he went to another dungeon, you go THERE, get to the end and find out he went to some tower. You go THERE, GET to the end and find out the bastard went back to town. Cue screams of Why couldn't I just have waited for him!?
- Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars, Paper Mario, and Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door all use them in abundance.
- Near the beginning of Skies Of Arcadia, Vyse and Aika briefly leave their home for an inconsequential Fetch Quest. This results in them being conveniently absent when their peaceful hamlet is burned to the ground and their friends are kidnapped. Later in the game, the characters completely drop the main plot briefly to go on a treasure hunt. After all, it's not like the fate of the world is hanging in the balance or anything.
- Are we talking about the Daccat's Island thing? They, uh, they kind of had extraneous reasons to try and get some money built up...
- The Legend Of Zelda Majoras Mask became infamous for Fetch Quests, though most of them were confined to the large and frustrating Kafei/Anju sidequest that, thanks to the game's Groundhog Day Loop element, had to be repeated at least twice (for those who knew exactly where to be) and as many as four times (for those who didn't), to collect every item available from it.
- A lot of the Zelda games have at least one of these, but Majora's Mask is the only one that actually gives Link a day planner to keep track of them all.
- The grand champion of fetch quests in the Zelda series is probably the one in Link's Awakening - completing this massive Chain Of Deals is required to complete the game, as well. Most players don't even realize that they've started this quest until they're halfway through it...
First: Pick up a Yoshi Doll playing the Trendy Game (a crane game.)
Second: Trade the Yoshi Doll to a child for a Ribbon.
Third: Trade the Ribbon to a vain Chain-Chomp for Dog Food.
Fourth: Trade the Dog Food to a canned-food loving alligator for Bananas.
Fifth: Trade the Bananas to monkeys - they'll not only build a bridge for you, but also leave a stick behind.
Sixth: Give the stick to someone who will then poke a beehive which results in you getting a Honeycomb.
Seventh: Trade the Honeycomb to a chef for a Pineapple.
Eighth: Trade the Pineapple to a hungry man for a Hibscus.
Ninth: Give the Hibscus to a woman who will then ask you to deliver a Letter for her.
Tenth: Deliver the Letter to Mr. Write to get a Broom.
Twelth: Give the Fishhook to a fisherman who will then give you his next catch: a Necklace. (It was a bra in the Japanese version.)
Fourteenth: Use the Scale on the Mermaid's Statue and it will open up a cave which holds a Magnifying Glass.
Fifteenth: Use the Magnifying Glass on the small-print book in the library to find out how to get through the last dungeon.
- The Legend Of Zelda Ocarina Of Time had the Biggoron Sword quest which, though quite frustrating in itself, was mercifully shorter and simpler than Majora's Kafei/Anju quest.
- Zelda II had a number of these which Link was forced to perform in order to be taught the skills he needed to complete his quest.
- Oracle Of Ages and Oracle Of Seasons each have a Fetch Quest to get the first sword upgrade, which in addition to dealing more damage to enemies also allows you to smash pots with your sword and fire Sword Beams when your hearts are full.
- The freeware MMORPG Kingdom Of Loathing frequently uses these, but also makes fun of them in the process. At the start of the Level 2 quest, the Council of Loathing tells you "We need a mosquito larva. Don't ask why, because we won't tell you." At one stage in the Level 11 quest, your character, upon being told he must paint a red door black to prove his worthiness for no particular reason, says "Are you sure you're not just taking the opportunity to have me do some menial jobs while I'm here?" Also from the level 11 quest, you are tasked at one point to retrieve fifteen pages from a book. After finding the first two pages, you find the third through fifteenth pages all at once, and the game remarks "Okay, I guess it's not going to take as long as you thought."
- The last one is a sendup of a pair of particularly annoying fetch quests in World Of Warcraft. In each one, every single enemy in the zone has a minute chance of dropping one of about 12 pages from a book. Add this to the fact that you can get multiples of the same page, and you have a recipe for aggravation.
- You can auction those extra pages for much more than you can get with a sale to a vendor. That makes it a little bit less aggravating.
- Subverted in Guild Wars: Nightfall; while the entire series is filled with fetch quests, one NPC is more than happy to go and collect the item they need by themselves (also dodging a potential Escort Mission in the process) while leaving you with the relatively "easy" task of guarding the ruins that is supposed to be their charge. Needless to say, once the NPC is out of sight, you get to earn your quest reward.
- The Metroid Prime games are often criticized for the fetch quests they use (Chozo Artifacts, Sky Temple Keys, etc.) to increase play time before the final boss.
- Although it was only particularly annoying in Prime 2, where you couldn't get most of these Plot Coupons until the very moment right before the final battle.
- Prime 3 took a different option and had Samus collect energy cells. The trick in this game is that getting the cells is almost mandatory to finish certain tasks, so you'll only have to backtrack once or twice instead of nine or twelve times.
- World Of Warcraft. If you're not killing something, you're killing something and stealing its stuff.
- An especially silly example: One quest requires turtle meat from the nearby river and spices... which the Quest NPC sells to you.
- Different, but no less silly: Shuttling messages between two questgivers that are anywhere from shouting distance to ten feet apart.
- The same, and a complete pain in the ass: Killing something for body parts that it can't live without, and the amount of work you have to do is best summed up by: <# of mobs you have to kill> = <# required of the item that keeps the mob alive> X 100.
- The Mega Man Battle Network games love these. Battle Network 5 starts spamming them at the end. Just when you think you're ready to attack the evil headquarters, your buddy gets kidnapped, you have to do an errand to get a new office, then you have to hunt down and destroy five MacGuffins by going through five areas you've been to before, and fight five easy bosses you've beaten before. Considering the amount of postgame stuff, you have to wonder how much of this was really needed.
- Taken to great lengths in Star Fox Adventures. At one point you need to recover cogs to get a bridge to work. Most items in the game are held over Fox's head as he stares at it in awe (likely a reference, mocking or otherwise, to the 3-D Legend Of Zelda games), and the bridge cogs are no exception. Each bridge cog, as you collect them.
- Lampshaded in Runescape's quest one small favour
 . The quest text itself will taunt you about how mundane it feels for a mighty adventurer to carry around a rust bucket, a pot lid, sharpening tools worth pocket change, a few chickens, gnome tea, the medieval equivalent of aspirin (a taunt on how this part of the quest makes player sick of it, perhaps), a weathervane, the medieval equivalent to screw eight lightbulbs, and a mattress.
- Puzzle Quest has quite a few sidequests of this type, but subverts it a bit by giving you the choice of returning the item for the reward... or keeping it yourself.
- Both System Shock 2 and its Spiritual Successor, BioShock, feature many of these. Your very *first* objective in SS 2 is: 'Find the guy who has the key to this section of the ship, which contains this other guy who has the code you need to go down a level, where you can fix the elevator so you can go up a level...' Naturally it only gains more layers of complications as you progress.
- System Shock 2 actually gets less complicated as you progress. In fact, once you reach the sixth deck of the Von Braun, your objectives basically boil down to "Get in the escape shuttle, kill shit."
- BioShock provides the player the opportunity to learn more about events before their arrival in Rapture by collecting recordings they encounter as they progress through each Fetch Quest. The recordings themselves are not the required items for any of the game's F Qs.
- The World Ends With You has one where the characters have to find a stolen microphone. After they've finished the quest, Neku calls it "the detour from hell."
- If you want to see how bad this trope can possibly get, go sign up for the browser-based MMORPG Travians. The Fetch Quest is its bread-and-butter, and it's layered on top of Broken Bridges and Insurmountable Waist High Fences everywhere. Not to mention Red Herrings (if an NPC says he won't talk to you because you're a "swineherd," this does not mean you've finally found a reason to drop your pig off at the woman who keeps asking you if you want to leave your pig with her). Here's a sample:
- Most of the quests are triggered by you being a certain age (in days). So if you've done all the quests up to a certain point, you may not be able to do another quest for three or four days. There is no way of telling this in advance from the game itself.
- Also, maybe half the quests are revealed randomly by talking to NPC's. (Yes, yes, ''WorldOfWarcraft'' does this too, but then WoW manages to stick enough quests all over the place to make it worth your while; Travians has no Side Quests and only ever one quest at a time.) Most obstacles are either randomly cleared (which you don't know until you run over there) or randomly opened up by your presence (you've gained enough strength to move boulders now = believable; you suddenly possess the know-how to fix bridges but FYI can't fix the identical bridge on the other side of the map = Wall Banger). So if you want to do each quest as soon as you can, and don't resort to hints, the only course of action is to log in each day and run around the entire map talking to each and every NPC and approaching each obstacle on the slim hope that one of them might possibly start up a quest or open up a new area for you. That is, if it's not one of those days when you don't have any quests at all (and the Support Chat moderators counsel you to "be patient").
- Quest: Sell 20 bottles of Olive Oil.
- Reason this is infuriating: There aren't anything like 20 NPC's in the entire game. And of the maybe five you can talk to, two of them respond to your sales pitch with "Never!" or "I hate olive oil!" It might appear that you're supposed to return to the three who'll (occasionally) buy once a day to sell them new bottles; certainly one of their responses is "I have enough for now" or "I don't have enough money for another bottle right now." No; the solution is to badger them into submission via the age-old tricks of telemarketing. That is, when she says "I have enough" or he says "Um, no, not right now," you simply ask them again. Until they buy. And then ask them again. Until they buy more. Ergo, your role in this quest works out to:
You: Want to buy some Olive Oil?
He: Not right now.
You: Want to buy some Olive Oil?
He: I don't have the money.
You: Want to buy some Olive Oil?
He: Okay, fine, I guess I'll take a bottle just to get you off my back.
You: Want to buy some Olive Oil?
He: What? No! I just bought some! I have enough!
You: Want to buy some Olive Oil?
He: Go away!
You: Want to buy some Olive Oil?
He: Okay, fine, here, I'll take another bottle.
You: Want to buy some Olive Oil?
He: What do you want from me??!!
- Just completing this quest made me feel dirty.
- Some olive oil will get that dirt right out. Buy a bottle.
- Quest: Get the three parts of a password from three NPC's. Each NPC says "Not until you gather 5 of Resource X" (wheat, clay, ore, whatever - different for each NPC).
- Reason this is infuriating: You have two occupations in the game, and having an occupation means you gather X resource way better than any other resource (something like 20-to-1 ratio). Gathering any resource outside your occupation is a total waste of OP (occupation points), all the more since you can buy any of the resources at the Player Market or NPC Market as needed. But the NPC's for this quest don't want you to bring them Resource X, they don't want you to use Resource X, they just want you to pointless waste 5 OP to gather Resource X. Which never comes into play during the quest. At all.
- Quest: Talk to uppity girl in the southeast corner of the map. What Guide Dang It might tell you: You need to be wearing a Silver Cape to do so (she won't talk to you otherwise). So the quest is really: Find Silver Cape.
- Reason this is infuriating: Firstly, without Guide Dang It, the way to discover the underlying quest is to return to an out-of-the-way NPC whose quest you just completed and who you thought you'd never mess with again. Secondly, the quest goes like this: Start with out-of-the-way NPC in SSE corner of map. Return to main tavern at North edge of map. Grinning git there actually has the cape, but won't tell you until you've run to five or six other NPC's at all corners of the map and returned twice to the starting tavern (the first time to talk to the innkeeper, who sends you off on another wild goose chase; the second time to talk to the grinning git and get the cape).
- Xbox 360 RPG Infinite Undiscovery has more than its fair share of these as well.
- The "To D'ni" expansion set to Uru: Ages Beyond Myst is basically one of these. It leads to a bit of extra backstory and of course new areas to explore.
- The 1999 PC adventure game Outcast was essentially a gigantic series of nested fetch quests, and played like a flowchart. For example, Level One required the player to visit a character who would ask you to find another character who would request an object and then ask you to see a third character who asked you to find an object from a fourth character; at that point you had to find a series of keys which allowed you to retrieve an object which you had to take to a further character who would ask you to retrieve some stones; and then you had to visit some more characters who would ask you to visit another character who would send you to visit another character who required a certain object before he would give you a message to deliver for another character who would ask you to find some dynamite. At that point you were roughly three-quarters of the way through level one. There were five levels, which continued in the exact same vein.
- In the first Suikoden game, you encounter a Fetch Quest with several steps in one of the later towns, when you are convincing one of the 108 Stars of Destiny to join you. After talking to about six different people you finally get the soap the Star in question wanted...but then she says she discovered she had some all along.
- Parodied (like every other video game trope) in Progress Quest. Quests are made from two randomized components, Action and Item. One of the possible actions is Fetch Me an [Item].
- Shaun White Snowboarding had the player traipsing around the mountain for coins in order to unlock the next mountain. [[ Seriously]].
- Assassin's Creed is positively loaded with pointless and mindlessly repetitive fetch quests, a flaw this troper considers nigh unforgivable in an otherwise excellent game. The most blatant example is probably the "informant" quest where you have to gather up approx. 10-15 Masyaf flags scattered around the general area. This can be partially justified in that one of the informants seems to genuinely hate the main character's guts and would no doubt relish the opportunity to make Altair's life needlessly complicated by sending him on pointless fetch quests. But then there's the informant who claims to have "dropped" his massive bundle of Masyaf flags which somehow scattered them all over an entire city block, including a few that launched themselves onto the rooftops of several buildings.
- The 1997 Macintosh RPG Task Maker is nothing but a fetch-quest.
- Mana Khemia Alchemists Of Alrevis had two types of Side Quests: one where the party fights optional Bosses, and the other fall into Fetch Quests.
- In EVE online, your agent's division determines how many Fetch Quests you get. Note that the difference between Courier missions and Mining missions is the former is the typical A and transport (an) item(s) to B while the latter is go to location A, mine a specific mineral (usually along the lines of thousands of units of ore), and take it to B. Effectively, they are both Fetch Quests.
- In Backyard Skateboarding, you must find the key to Shark Belly Shores in the Boardwalk before beating the Tour Guide Challenge, which unlocks the next level.
- This actually happens many, many times in the game.
- The Dark Cloud games tend to do this in a unique fashion. Moving the plot forward relies in restoring specific key buildings in the Georamas, usually yielding some or another item which is needed to do away with a Broken Bridge. And then there's the condition to revive the Treant in Matataki Village, which combines a very strange Fetch Quest with a broken river: you have to collect enough river parts in the dungeon to reconnect the waterfall at one end of the valley to the Treant's spring to revive him.
- The Xenon Hub mission from Egosoft's X3:Terran Conflict. The development team in charge was definitely up against a looming deadline and the executive powers-that-be responsible for approving or vetoing the idea looked at the proposed mission and said, "Seeing as how no one has a better idea, let's put this in the game." The player has to provide: 400 units of microchips; 500 units computer components; 450,000 units of Ore; 150,000 units Teladianium; 500 units Nividium; 750,000 crystals; 400,000 units Silicon Wafers; 85,000 more microchips; and pay an NPC 15,000,000 credits.
- Even the developers have had to admit that the Hub mission is over the top — several of the game's patches have reduced the requirements. A little.
- Oblivion includes several, such as retrieving the Amulet of Kings after the monk loses it (mandatory) or collecting various ingredients for a witch to brew a Cure for Vampirism (optional). Fetch quests are more common in Morrowind, which is full of alchemists who can't be bothered to gather their own ingredients and wizards who would rather wait around for a PC to show up and ask for work than go to the bookstore themselves.
- Vampire: The Masquerade, such as collecting the TNT from the botched drug deal (mandatory) or collecting the voodoo doll for the flesh-eating Vampire (optional).
- Fable 1: Collecting mushrooms as payment for a cure for the sick boy (optional).
- Dragon Quest VIII is full of 'em. At one point, where you have to use a particular monster to power up a magic mirror so you can fight the not-so-Big Bad, if you pick that moment to talk to Jessica, she'll complain aloud that, if the rest of their quest has been any indication, the monster in question will have a toothache and your team will be forced to find the remedy (fortunately, that doesn't happen.)
- La-Mulana has two of these, each made aggravating by the lack of a convenient Grail Point.
Web Comics
Western Animation
|
|
