They have a few standouts, for sure. I remember a quest on Oblivion that locked you up in a house with a bunch of strangers and you had to kill them one by one without letting them figure it out. It was a pretty cool concept but the design itself was nothing to write home about (iirc you could be really obvious with your kills and they still wouldn't figure out it was you who did it).
XV does have a few well designed side quests, like the Dead Eye hunt, but they're a minority. Still, I guess I can't complain much when the locations with actual design put into them (like the Rock of Ravatough) and the dungeons are so well done, and most of those are optional content too. What they're lacking is precisely contextualization.
Completely agree. The fetch quests aren't particularly well designed, but the world is, in my opinion. And there is a lot of meaningful optional content, that I can't ignore when discussing side quests. They might not be the usual quest you pick up from an NPC, but it's still side content and there's rarely equivalents as well designed as the ones here in other games.
It really lacks contextualization, but every now and then it has the endearing banter to go with the blatant fetch quest that makes it a bit more fun. For example, last night I was doing this quest for a kid and his granddad in Lestallum to find a hunter they hired. It was a very standard "find me X thing in this blue dot", but both when I took the quest and then when I delivered it, the party had unique dialogue commenting on it, and they started teasing Ignis, saying he was probably just like that annoying kid when he was younger. Noct said he doesn't even remember how Ignis was before, and Prompto answers that he was probably like this since always.
It didn't have a standalone narrative where we found out more about that kid and his family or the kind of thing you'd expect from Witcher 3, but there is some exposition relating to the main characters and their relationship, which is pretty much the core of the game. Their friendship and the roadtrip. It wasn't a lot for this specific quest, and I wish there was more, but every time I play this game I'm amazed by the amount of unique voiced dialogue it has, and with such fantastic japanese voice actors, too! It must've been expensive as fuck.
Happens for most FF games too...
FFVII: "A meteor is coming to end the world... but hold on lets grind here real quick before we start. Maybe go to the Gold Saucer."
FFVIII: "Let's play some Triple Triad for a bit here. I know time is being kompressed but..."
FFXIV: "Empire/Primal/Religion going to enslave all of humanity...but I gotta go deliver this piece of bread to this woman down the street real quick because NO ONE IN THIS WORLD IS SELF SUFFICIENT."
Seeing people get weirded out by FFXV doing it is weird.
I actually think FFXV did a somewhat decent job with its long-term goals. Not to justify the quests themselves, some of them are weird and not the kind of thing you'd expect them to do, but as far as urgency goes? I think it's fine.
You won't take down the world's biggest empire overnight, or heal the star of its plague for that matter. As Chapter 0 shows us right at first, he'll be fighting for quite a while. Might as well sit back and enjoy the trip. A few weeks of doing random crap won't make that much of a difference when the very first scene in the game shows you that it's been 10 years and the situation is still not solved.
