Team OXM love RPGs more than our own mothers (who we hope aren’t reading this issue) but their main quests can be riddled with tedious cliché. Save one princess/planet/galaxy and you’ve saved them all. Any digital adventurer worth their salt knows that the treats lie off the beaten path, in side quest land. In honour of The Witcher 3, a true master of the dramatic aside, we opted to get ourselves blind drunk, warp a few minds, dump some bodies and murder our fans, all in the name of bringing you the weirdest side quests on Xbox...
The desolate wastes of Fallout 3 aren’t known for their nature tours, but explore long enough and you’ll find a lush forest. Drink from the basin of purification and prepare to meet ‘The Great One’. The game does a great job of hyping you up to meet a God, and then introduces you to a talking tree – who’ll ask you to kill him. Whatever you decide, there’s a clear moral here: stay away from nature, and stick to video games. Nature only leads to trouble/talking trees.
There’s nothing more romantic than harvesting body parts for a mad scientist so he can resurrect his dead girlfriend. Indeed, it would take a real cad to step in the way of Cupid’s arrow. Enter Fable 2: Cad Simulator. The resurrected Lady Grey will fall in love with the first person she sees. Sure, you could let true love win out and leave the scientist to his beloved, or you can let her fall in love with you and poach yourself a handy undead girlfriend. Hang on, true love at first sight? Realism in games is dead.
Thought Fallout 3 would tone down the weirdness for the DLC? Exposure to Point Lookout’s powerful punga seeds leaves you with visions of passive-aggressive bobble-heads, a red saw in the sky and a giant needle sewing the ground. Followed by violin trees, exploding Nuka-Cola bottles and, uh, what? Relax, Wastelander, there’s no need to panic. This is all a harmless hallucination. In reality you’re actually just undergoing unsolicited brain surgery. Phew!
Playing Diablo III on Nightmare, or an even higher difficulty (we think we’ll pass, thanks), gives you the chance to trigger this rare, zombie-stuffed level. Gaming’s most generic foes are spiced up a bit when you notice that they’re all named after the Diablo III development team, with the descriptions of the monsters showing you their job titles. Trust us, after a few hours of enduring Nightmare difficulty, you’ll relish putting the boot in to the dude who built the 3D model of said boot.
There are no obvious sidequests in Lordran, because that would involve helping out the player, and this is Dark Souls we’re talking about. But who wouldn’t want to save Solaire of Astora? His love of sunlight, jolly optimism and this brilliant joke: ‘I am a warrior of the Sun! Spot my summon signature easily by its brilliant aura. If you miss it, you must be blind! Hah hah hah!’ Zing! You really have to go the extra mile to save Solaire. But if there was ever an NPC worth saving, it’d be him.
Heroes don’t have to be perfect, right? Exactly. So there’s no problem with us completing ‘Solving Problems’ where you help murderers get rid of some irritatingly incriminating dead bodies. It makes a nice change from being the good guy, even if we’re not sure throwing corpses in the water supply is the best idea we’ve ever had. Worth playing just to hear the pathetic excuses of the murderers that we happily helped out. Uh, don’t tell anyone in Denerim we did this quest, okay?
Budding thespians should speak to aspiring playwright Incisive Chorus. He’s furious that the sponsor of his newest play has altered the script to make it a satire of the Empire, and gives you the lead role. Do you respect art and follow his original script? Or risk provoking the Empire with the new one? It’s a bit like playing James Franco in The Interview, except funny. The scene’s even better when you deliberately fluff all your lines, forcing your co-star to badly improvise.
What is a ‘Witcher’ anyway? Based on most of this game’s sidequests, it’s a total sleazeball. After a heavy night, Geralt wakes up by the lake, missing most of his gear and with a tattoo of a naked lady on his neck. You stumble through the village, trying to figure out what you did last night. According to the NPCs, at one point you apparently tried to ride a woman to the local port like a horse – and the tattoo isn’t coming off easily. Laugh all you want; we don’t regret our BLINX 4EVER back tats.
Give the blessed flower to a character of your choice. Hmm, is this really one of the best sidequests to be found in Dragon’s Dogma? Perhaps not, but shouldn’t there be more games about handing out flowers to your fellow videogame companions? Maybe if there were a few less Call of Dutys taking up space on our hard drives and a few more Flower Arranging 3000s, then oh! What a wonderful world this could be! [He’s been at those punga seeds again – Ed.]
Despite our body-dumping routine in Origins, we’re still trusted to preside over trials in Inquisition’s courts. The trick is to judge crims, varying from the clearly guilty to the truly bizarre, without upsetting your companions with overly grim punishments. One man has been attacking Skyhold by firing goats at it. He seemed harmless enough, but we felt we had no choice but to sentence him to unbearable torture. Harsh, but reminding us of Goat Simulator cannot be allowed.
“Nina lonely, need partner for lovetimes” – we’ve seen worse descriptions in the lonely hearts ads. There’s something about a great side quest that brings out the inner romantic in us, especially when it involves shooting potential suitors in the face with a freeze ray. They say ‘true love conquers all’. We say it’s no match for a good laser-cannon to the heart. Find Nina her true love and she’ll keep him in her infirmary, strung up by his wrists. We think we’ll stick to bachelor life.
After a busy day of saving the galaxy/shooting your biggest fan in the foot, Shepard’s earned a drink at Afterlife, the anti-human bar. Is that a smart move? Amazingly no, as Shep loses consciousness and wakes up outside. You can now go and face the bartender or how about you maybe not swig a mysterious blue drink that you didn’t order in the first place? Still, someone needs to stop Forvan the bartender from poisoning his customers – it’s a pretty lousy business model.
Barely a quest, but kudos to the devs for showing how flawed the morality system is. A beggar asks you for money. For light side points, pay up and watch a brief cutscene of him getting mugged. For dark side points, give him nothing and watch him angrily mug someone else. So no one wins. It seems that in the Star Wars universe, no deed is truly ‘light’ or ‘dark’, more of a murky grey. Haunting.
In an Inception-like twist you journey into the mind of Pelagius the Mad to battle his demons and fix his lack of self-confidence. Boost his courage by shrinking his enemies and boost his sanity by maybe not stomping around his brain in the first place. Accept we’re never getting Psychonauts 2 (sob) and you’ll enjoy one of Skyrim’s strangest quests. Complete it and you’ll receive the wonderfully named Wabbajack, a staff that can cast one of 21 spealls, or nothing at all. Truly mad.
All little girls deserve to enjoy tea parties, even if that little girl is Tina, psychotic demolitions expert and world’s deadliest 13-year-old. Want to be the fool who tells her she can’t? Safer to protect her from waves of ‘guests’ as she pours tea, makes small talk and gets gory revenge for the murder of her parents. Never been to a tea party before? We’d advise against attending one of Tina’s – she has a habit of electrocuting her guests.
This optional quest has you climbing aboard The Serpent’s Wake, a haunted ship full of ghost pirates. Hang on, why isn’t that the main quest? All games are better with ghost pirates – zombie parrots! Scary treasure! Floating pirate ships! one measly sidequest in Oblivion isn’t enough – even Black Flag and Rogue didn’t have ghost pirates! (Note to self: send death threats to Ubisoft demanding Ghost Pirate DLC.)
A generic save-the-princess quest is given a Fable twist, when the three powerful mages who’ve enlisted your help turn out to be overenthusiastic gamers themselves. Shrunk down into their Hollows and Hobbes game (think Dungeons and Dragons) to meet a cardboard cast and fight real enemies, it’s a fun send up of fantasy tropes. “Prepare to meet a feathery doom!” cries one of your captors, summoning a demonic chicken. Maybe time to start leaving the house again, eh lads?
Summon Jesus in combat and he’ll descend from heaven, spraying enemies with a holy dose of heavy machine gun fire. To unlock him, you have to ‘find Jesus’ at the South Park church. A surprisingly pious sounding quest turns out to be a game of hide and seek, with a childish Jesus giggling behind the pews until you ‘find him’. Honestly, this is tame by Stick of Truth’s standards. You should see the bit where Mr Slave opens up his [Clear your desk and get out – Ed].
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