The main story quest is a lie.
You think you bought a massive $70 fantasy epic to save the realm, rescue a long-lost heir, or avert the looming apocalypse. Wrong. You bought a budget-busting open-world game just to ignore the burning villages and go fishing for 40 straight hours.
What Witcher 3’s Gwent and Final Fantasy XV’s fishing game showed is that many gamers couldn’t bother saving the world if there’s a bar fight, a gambling table, or a fishing rod nearby. More and more devs are dropping these intricate mini-games, so let’s revisit some of the side quest activities that completely stole the show.
1. High-Stakes Card Game
The kingdom may be crumbling, the main villain may be building a doomsday device, but your Geralt is sitting in a dusty tavern arguing over card synergies.
We saw this glorious descent into madness in games like The Witcher 3 (Gwent), Red Dead Redemption 2 (Poker & Liar’s Dice), Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (Queen’s Blood), and Far Cry 3 (Texas Hold ‘Em). Half the people playing TW3 forgot Ciri even existed because Geralt was too busy harassing local blacksmiths for rare foil cards to build an unstoppable deck.
Developers don’t give us dumbed-down arcade mini-games, either. They build real-world odds, position play, and bankroll management directly into the code. In much the same way serious card players rely on a poker equity calculator toinstantly analyze hand strength and probability for poker variants like Texas Hold’em or Omaha, you end up building entire meta guides and tracking complex hand probabilities just to beat a random NPC tavern keeper.
The world can go to hell; we’ve got a pot to win.
2. Extreme Fishing & Wilderness Tracking
What started years ago as a basic hold-X-to-catch-some-fish mechanic has mutated into hyper-intense, fully realized sport simulators dropped into the middle of epic fantasy settings.
In Final Fantasy XV, Noctis’s fishing hobby wasn’t a minor pastime, but an intense discipline complete with custom reels, dynamic water physics, specific lure selections, and dozens of unique species. You’d have a world-ending threat waiting outside, but the prince was locked in a mortal struggle with a legendary trout.
Red Dead Redemption 2 elevated this wild distraction to an art form. The game turns you into an obsessive tracker, rewarding you for analyzing wind direction, applying scent maskers, picking the exact rifle caliber for a clean pelt, and stalking rare beasts through dense snowstorms. Spending three real-life days living like a solitary mountain man on the trail of a Legendary Bear is the real reason we booted up the game.
3. Corporate Empire Simulators
Just when you think you’re strictly playing a gritty action-RPG, the game hands you the keys to a corporate enterprise and demands you become a business mogul.
The Like a Dragon (Yakuza) series remains the undisputed king of this absurd pivot. It is an absolute masterpiece of tonal whiplash to put Kazuma Kiryu’s heavy crime drama on complete hold for thirty glorious hours just to manage real estate portfolios, run a high-end cabaret club, or turn a struggling local cracker company into a multi-million-dollar titan.
GTA Online pulled a similar power move by letting you trade street brawls for managing underground supply chains and running nightclubs. The exact second a side quest lets you hire staff, streamline operations, and watch virtual revenue tickers go up, the main quest ceases to exist. No heroes here, just executives with swords.
The Future of Questing
We’ve come to the point where Gwent literally spun off into its own standalone title, and games like Crimson Desert are building entire systems around mundane activities like horse taming and arm wrestling. As we look ahead to The Witcher 4 and GTA VI, no doubt that the main quests of tomorrow will try their absolute best to be dramatic, but we’ll all still be in the local tavern or a nearby lake, completely ignoring the apocalypse.
Perhaps the main storylines are not exactly a lie, but merely a suggestion.