Fallout 3: The Warming (minor spoilers ahead)

Finding the dog companion really helped. We all want to BE Mad Max, right? Although in my world the dog doesn't die.

I'm still very early into the game, still doing Megaton missions for the most part and doing the odd side Wasteland job here and there. It took me a few hours to accept the fact that the mission structure in Fallout 3 is basically par for the course and I wanted this game to be more than that. Maybe that wasn't fair or realistic, but it's hard to ignore expectation.

I have grown to despise the Side Quest as Game Tool mechanic. And Fallout 3 does this like most every other RPG ever designed.

Are the quests fun? Oh yeah. The Family Quest in Fallout 3 was cool.

But it made no sense that I was doing it, and as these games become more and more involved and successful at sucking you into their world I start to look at them like I used to look at paper/pencil RPGs back in college.

We played Warhammer Role-play a ton in college (tuition $$ well spent..sorry mom and dad), and what made it so enjoyable was that Warhammer itself (back in the early 90s anyway) was a very "realistic" world -- just with Orcs and Chaos thrown in. But the world made sense -- more than D&D did for me anyway.

Regardless, I GM'ed a lot of our campaigns and I made it a point to give the players (or asked them to provide one) a reason why they were there. Just "being adventurers" wasn't enough. That was cheesy and stupid. There had to be something tangible -- why is Player A with these people doing these dangerous things? Why would a Halfling Scribe be in the forest far from a city that could use him?

This was another great boon to Warhammer as players had Careers and not Classes. You could have been a Tomb Robber rather than a "thief" or maybe you were an ex-soldier of the Empire rather than a generic "fighter" -- that sorta thing. This level of detail, to me, was important because it helped tell a better story which is what playing RPGs with my friends was all about. It was never, ever, about throwing a bunch of dice and looking up charts and arguing over saving throws. It was about storytelling that was fun and that also made sense.

I want CRPGs to do the same and thus far the fact that Fallout 3 doesn't do that annoys me but perhaps I shouldn't hold it to that standard.

When you leave Vault 101 you have one CLEAR mission -- find dad. You have known nothing but Vault 101 for 19-20 years and you leave for that sole reason. And that made sense.

What doesn't make sense is why in the world I would tackle these quests that have nothing at all to do with that one goal. Why am I trying to repair this bomb? Why am I a guinea pig for a crazy shop lady who is writing a survival guide? And why am I delivering letters for people I don't even know?

Where is my dad? Can you help me find him? No? Then bugger off.

I fully realize that I can ignore these side quests and just focus on the Dad Task at hand but I also know I would be missing out on a lot of what F3 offers and I don't want to do that. But I want RPG designers to get off this side quest kick unless they make sense.

It would be easy to do. "Hey, I need you to do me this favor -- and I can give you info on your pop's whereabouts." Maybe this person is lying? What choice do I have? I better play Mr FedEx.

Other quests wouldn't have to be directly tied to your dad's location but a creative mission designer could craft the quest so that it made sense as to why you were doing it other than "Hmm...hey why not? I have nothing better to do!"

RPGs, especially now with their ridiculous level of graphics, are all about immersion and the side quests sorta of break that wall for me. So it's not that Fallout 3 is bad or even disappointing, it's just not what I had hoped from a mission/design POV.

You know the game that recently bucked this trend?

The Witcher.

If you didn't play that on PC:

A) You Suck
B) You should absolutely get the upcoming 360/PS3 version.