I was looking for a turret inStar Wars Outlaws. Kay Vess’ spaceship, the Trailblazer, needed a little extra help in battles, so when my robot companion ND-5 said that he had a lead on one, I leapt at the opportunity. This seemed like a small, unimportant quest at first.
Outlaws sometimes has you stop by a merchant to buy a quest item and I assumed that was what was happening here: a quick fetch quest to upgrade some equipment that would be helpful later on. But in keeping with a positive trend that’s been playing out in triple-A games for the past half-decade or so, it ended up being so much more.
These Are Not The Side Quests You’re Looking For
Open-world games and RPGs are increasingly interested in doling out quests organically, letting a mission slowly reveal itself to be important, rather than pointing a neon arrow at it because the developers are terrified you’ll accidentally miss out.
I first noticed this inRed Dead Redemption 2. At regular intervals, you could return to camp and talk to all your pals. One of them might mention that they wanted to go fishing and without even realizing it, you were heading off for one of the most impactful quests in the game.
Cyberpunk 2077did the same thing with V’s phone. You might get a text that seemed innocuous only to reply to it and get swept up in a cinematic quest on par with anything from the main campaign. Games are increasingly hiding their best content by making it seem inconsequential, sitting there in your inbox alongside an ad for a beater car out in Dogtown.
When I headed to the merchant booths in Mos Eisley to look for the turret, I got a lead that my best bet for securing the part would be to track down some Jawas — the mysterious cloaked scrap traders from the original Star Wars. So I rode my speeder bike out into the desert, and found the Jawas standing by their Sandcrawler, a huge sand ship that looks like someone drew a Cybertruck from memory and improved on the design in the process.
I actually couldn’t see the Sandcrawler when I got there because it was nighttime. I just assumed the Jawas were standing next to a mountain and it surprised the hell out of me when I went back the next day.
Finding The Tooth
After talking to the Jawas with some crucial translation help from the disembodied head of a protocol droid, I found out that they would only sell me a turret in exchange for a tooth. What kind of tooth? A sarlacc tooth — of sarlacc pit fame — from its second mouth. I didn’t know what that meant, and didn’t really want to find out, but I needed the turret, so I took off into the dune sea. After driving for a bit, I found a dead sarlacc. There were other scavengers around, who I carefully avoided, and soon I was staring into the great beast’s cavernous maw. There was an exhilarating moment there on the precipice when I realized that I was, contrary to all my hardwired Star Wars instincts, supposed to jump into this sarlacc.
But jump in I did, and I slid down into the belly of the beast. It was basically just a goopy cavern and I quickly made my way to the tooth. Once I had it though, I exited the sarlacc, only to have the tooth stolen by a thief working for the Hutts. I took off after the thief, racing across the desert, as more Hutts descended on me. That was small potatoes though, as a Krayt dragon soon breached the surface of the sand nearby. It was a glorious, cinematic moment and, once the tooth was safely recovered, I couldn’t stop thinking about how I’d almost skipped this quest. It wasn’t necessary to advance the plot. It was just an optional side quest that ended up being a lot cooler than the pitch of ‘get a turret’ made it seem.
Baldur’s Gate 3was the epitome of this kind of design and, given how massively popular and critically acclaimed it was, I’m hopeful it could set a template going forward. When I played Baldur’s Gate 3, I noticed zero difference between the main quests, the companion quests, and the side quests. They all felt like they had been treated with equal care and, more than that, they seemed to lead into each other and play off each other. It was hard to tell where one ended and the other began.
And as a result, I ended up doing way more than I would have otherwise. Rather than this design signalling that something significant wasn’t important, it made me feel like everything was important. It made me want to do everything. Sure, one might be inconsequential. But one might be a valuable tooth in a sarlacc’s second mouth.
