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[THEaaron]

The Witcher will probably have a ton of fetch quest as well. All Western RPG's do.

Yes, but they are the OpenWorld fillers there. Monster dens, bandit camps, treasures,... Map is actually full with complete repetitive content. The actual sidequests are well crafted in W3, at least.

 

[tuxfool]

But that's as far as the logic goes. There's nothing believable about having a narrative urging Geralt onwards to hurry finding Ciri before the Wild Hunt does and then having the player proceed to travel all over the world removing question marks from his map, doing horse races and playing Gwent with god and every man. It's the very essence of cognitive dissonance. It doesn't make sense and is only made as such to accommodate AAA checklist design and to conform to player expectations. It isn't designed that way because it's logical or believable.

The difference is that they never instill an absolute sense or urgency. Yes, she needs to be found but it isn't a race, rather, a marathon. It should also be noted how the narrative structure changes after act 2 and it instills a much more urgent and direct path towards the end of the game.

 

[tuxfool]

In my experience "fetch quest" is almost always defined by people as "quests I don't like", because arguably, every single quest that isn't explicitly about fighting enemies or talking to people is a "fetch quest".

I've seen many people attempt to call the Bloody baron a fetch quest. Ultimately, in reductive terms it is, but then this ends up ignoring all the facets that elevate the W3 quests above many others.

 

[Seanspeed]

So uh, now that we got to play both games, what's the verdict here ?

Never said it was impossible, just difficult. :/

I'd say that TW3 has mostly lived up to the designer's claims though, definitely. Ironically, it feels like far more effort was put into side quests in this game than the main quests. And some of it isn't too much different than other games, but what I think CDPR does well is give quests a bit more meaning and context, even if just through a few extra lines of dialogue. Many quests still amount to "go here and kill thing" from a mechanical standpoint, but giving a little bit more effort into the backstory for the quests goes a long way in making a quest feel more significant.

 

[Ushay]

Not once did I feel like I was doing a fetch quest while playing W3 (I'm at Skellige at the moment). And the extras were all well varied enough to not feel repetitive at all, for example guarded treasure would have different creatures guarding them at different power levels.

Dragon Age on the other hand felt incredibly bogged down outside of its usual narrative, thanks to the massive number of collect X of these quests, even worse when you had to traverse massive areas like Hissing Wastes.

 

[Denton]

Never said it was impossible, just difficult. :/

I'd say that TW3 has mostly lived up to the designer's claims though, definitely. Ironically, it feels like far more effort was put into side quests in this game than the main quests. And some of it isn't too much different than other games, but what I think CDPR does well is give quests a bit more meaning and context, even if just through a few extra lines of dialogue. Many quests still amount to "go here and kill thing" from a mechanical standpoint, but giving a little bit more effort into the backstory for the quests goes a long way in making a quest feel more significant.

I never said you said it was impossible
But yeah, it is hard. But somehow CD Projekt and to certain degree Obsidian manage it. It would be nice if Bioware, Bethesda, Ubisoft and others rose to the occasion in their future games.

I do disagree about your implication that main quest received less effort than sidequests though.