🚨 BREAKING: No More Meaningless Fetch Quests In The Witcher 4, But There’s A Catch 🚨
🔥 Fans of The Witcher series, rejoice! The Witcher 4 is getting rid of those meaningless fetch quests that often felt like filler in the past. But there’s a catch—one that might surprise you! 😱

While the developers are promising a more immersive and meaningful quest system, there’s a twist that could change how you approach the game entirely. Curious?

The Witcher 4 is one of the most anticipated triple-A games right now, despite the fact that it likely won’t be launched for another couple of years at least. That’s largely because 2015’s The Witcher 3 is considered by many to be one of the greatest games ever made, full of rich narrative detail, well-written characters and dialogue, and tangible consequences to players’ actions.

One thing that was a little more contentious was its side quest design. The Witcher 4 narrative director claims that CDPR had a “no fetch quest policy” for The Witcher 3 that will be carried over into the sequel. Now, this isn’t strictly true – there certainly are fetch quests in that game, it’s just that all of those fetch quests carry some sort of narrative weight. None of them make the player feel like their time has been wasted, or reward you solely with resources. They all contribute to the overall story or worldbuilding in some way. That’s what makes them valuable and engaging to players, but they are fetch quests nonetheless.

The Witcher 3 Might Not Have Fetch Quests, But It Still Has Filler

The implication of a “no fetch quest” policy is that CDPR respects its players too much to saddle them with pointless busywork. The key word here is ‘pointless’ – there certainly is busywork. Geralt will sometimes have to kill a certain number of a certain type of monster, or gather resources to craft specific items or trade them with NPCs. You could argue that this busywork isn’t quite pointless precisely because of CDPR’s policy of making quests narratively impactful. It’s all about your choices having visible consequences on the world, or the gameplay, or Geralt himself.

But not having ‘meaningless’ quests doesn’t mean there aren’t parts of The Witcher 3 that feel like absolute slogs. They may help to flesh out the world and story, sure, but the game has some pretty boring gameplay at times. There’s a huge number of contracts you can accept from notice boards throughout the world, each of which follows the same general flow.

You see or hear about the contract, potentially haggle for a higher pay, then investigate the threat through talking to locals or using your Witcher Senses. Eventually, your bestiary will update, allowing you to identify the monster’s weaknesses. You kill the monster and accept your pay. There are only so many times you can do this before it gets old. You could argue that these are more fun on higher difficulties, but the flow of each mission remains the same.

The treasure hunts are similarly rote. You find a clue, go to a location, maybe use your Witcher Senses, and collect loot. Some of these quests will reward you with witcher gear diagrams, but many will just give you random loot. There’s colour, sure, but it’s undeniably filler. Filler with a compelling story is still, at its core, filler. And if it isn’t fun to do, you’re in for a bad time.

A Smaller Game Would Mean Less Filler

The fetch quests themselves aren’t what makes The Witcher 3 unpleasant to play from time to time, and it’s not what will ruin The Witcher 4. As I mentioned before, the rote nature of these secondary, optional quests is what makes them a slog. Adapting the same quest structure to different narratives isn’t enough to make the quests less boring. Neither is spacing them out through different areas.

The real problem is the volume of filler content. There’s so much of it, enough that the quest structure gets boring at all, because the world is so big and it has to be filled – thus, ‘filler’ content. The bigger a game is, the more a studio feels it has to shove in there to make its price justifiable. More side content equals more hours spent in game, equals more players feeling like they’ve gotten their money’s worth.

I’m beating the same dead horse every gaming journalist has been whacking at for years, but what I’d really like is for The Witcher 4 to be smaller. A smaller game means less filler content, which in turn means less opportunities to bore players by making them do the same thing over and over again. The Witcher 3 would have taken players nearly 200 hours to fully complete. In a world where triple-As a fraction of that length are now taking off, I can only hope that The Witcher 4 takes heed and respects players’ time a little bit more.