A side quest is an optional mission, objective, or chain of objectives in a video game that exists outside the main story. It may be a quick errand or a substantial storyline, and its rewards can include lore, character development, equipment, abilities, or access to new areas.
A side quest is an optional mission, objective, or chain of objectives in a video game that exists outside the main story or critical progression. It might ask you to investigate a disappearance, recover an item, defeat a named enemy, help a companion, explore a location, or complete an activity unrelated to the next main-quest step.
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“Optional” does not necessarily mean unimportant. A side quest can reveal major lore, change a relationship, unlock equipment or abilities, open an area, affect an ending, or become one of the game’s most memorable stories. What makes it a side quest is its position outside the central path—not the size or quality of its content.
What is the difference between a main quest and a side quest?
A main quest advances the game’s principal narrative or required progression. Completing main quests normally unlocks the next major story beat, region, chapter, or final confrontation.
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A side quest supports an optional objective or storyline. You can usually postpone it, ignore it, or complete it in a different order without preventing the main story from continuing.
| Feature | Main quest | Side quest |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Moves the central story or required progression forward | Adds optional stories, activities, challenges, or discoveries |
| Availability | Usually required and clearly marked | Often discovered through NPCs, locations, exploration, rumors, or quest boards |
| Player choice | Often determines when the next major story event occurs | Can usually be delayed, skipped, or pursued alongside the main story |
| Rewards | Frequently includes mandatory progression rewards | May provide experience, currency, equipment, abilities, reputation, lore, or relationships |
| Scope | Usually tied to the game’s principal narrative | Can range from a short errand to a multi-part storyline |
The distinction is not universal. Some games label a quest as optional even though it unlocks a powerful ability or has major consequences. Others blend side quests into faction, companion, or regional storylines so closely that the boundary becomes a design choice rather than a strict technical rule.
Common types of side quests
Games use different names for their optional content, and one quest can fit more than one category. These are useful descriptions rather than universal classifications.
Fetch and recovery quests
You retrieve an item, locate a person, recover stolen property, or bring something back to a quest giver. A simple recovery task can become more interesting when it reveals why the object matters, changes the player’s understanding of a location, or offers a meaningful choice about what happens next.
Investigation quests
Investigation quests involve following clues, questioning characters, inspecting evidence, searching an environment, or solving a mystery. They often slow the pace of combat-heavy games and reward observation rather than raw statistics.
Combat quests
These ask you to defeat a named enemy, hunt a creature, clear a hostile location, survive an encounter, or complete a combat challenge. The strongest examples connect the target to the region or the quest giver instead of using combat as a disconnected excuse for another fight.
Escort and protection quests
The player guides or defends a character, caravan, vehicle, object, or group. Escort missions are often criticized when the protected character moves slowly or behaves unpredictably, but they can work when the escort changes the player’s tactics, develops the relationship, or creates an unfolding situation rather than simply extending travel time.
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Collection quests ask players to find records, objects, creatures, landmarks, resources, or other sets. They are most satisfying when the collection reveals information, changes the environment, completes a character’s goal, or encourages meaningful exploration. Repeating the same search without a discovery or payoff can make the activity feel like filler.
Companion and relationship quests
These develop a party member, companion, rival, or other supporting character. They may explain a character’s history, test a relationship, resolve a conflict, or unlock new dialogue and abilities. Companion quests are often optional in structure but important to players who want the fullest understanding of the cast.
Faction and regional questlines
A faction questline lets the player support a guild, town, political interest, military group, or other organization. Regional questlines can expose local customs, institutions, rivalries, and history that the main story has no time to explain.
Challenges and minigames
Some side content is built around an optional activity: a race, puzzle, tournament, crafting task, investigation system, card game, or other minigame. These quests extend the game’s mechanics and provide a change of pace from the main campaign.
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World-building
The main plot has limited room to explain every community, historical event, institution, and local conflict. Side quests let the player see how ordinary people experience the game world and how events affect places beyond the central cast.
A quest about a village dispute, an old battlefield, or a local custom can make a setting feel inhabited rather than designed only as a route between major story scenes.
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Character development
Supporting characters often receive their deepest writing in optional missions. A companion quest can show a character making a difficult decision, dealing with past actions, or responding to the player in a context that the main narrative does not provide.
Exploration
Optional objectives give players a reason to leave the most efficient route. They encourage players to follow a rumor, enter a suspicious building, climb toward a distant landmark, or investigate a location that would otherwise be scenery.
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Progression and rewards
Depending on the game, side quests can reward experience points, money, weapons, armor, crafting materials, abilities, reputation, companions, or access to new areas. Reward systems vary significantly by title, so a side quest should not be assumed to provide a particular type or value of reward.
Gameplay variety
Optional content can ask the player to use familiar systems differently. A combat-focused campaign might use a side quest for stealth, investigation, conversation, escorting, puzzle-solving, collection, or a minigame. This variety can make a long game feel less mechanically repetitive.
Player autonomy
Side quests let players decide what matters to their character. One player may pursue a companion’s personal story, another may explore every corner of a region, and another may focus on equipment or difficult combat challenges. This freedom is especially important in open-world and role-playing games.
What makes a side quest good?
Length alone does not determine quality. A short mission can be excellent if it delivers a distinctive discovery, mechanic, character moment, or consequence. A long quest can feel weak if it repeats the same objective without adding meaning.
A well-designed side quest usually connects several elements:
- A believable objective: The task makes sense for the quest giver, location, and situation.
- A connection to the world: The mission reveals something about the setting, its people, history, institutions, or conflicts.
- Interesting use of mechanics: The player does more than repeat a routine objective, or the repetition is given a new context and payoff.
- A fitting reward: The reward reinforces the quest’s theme or provides useful progression without feeling arbitrary.
- Respect for the player’s time: Travel, combat, searching, and dialogue contribute to the experience rather than merely inflating the playtime.
- A memorable result: The quest creates a discovery, relationship, consequence, story, or location that would be absent from the main path.
Good side quests also use optionality carefully. The player should understand that the quest is not required for the central story, while the game should still make its value clear through the writing, presentation, reward, or surrounding context.
Are side quests always optional?
They are optional in relation to the main narrative, but their practical importance varies. A side quest may be skippable while still offering a powerful ability, a major companion scene, a useful upgrade, a different ending, or important information about the world.
Some side quests are also missable. They may disappear after a story event, become unavailable when a region changes, require a particular relationship level, or depend on a choice made earlier. Whether that happens is specific to the game, its version, its downloadable content, and sometimes the player’s choices. Check a title-specific guide before assuming that an optional quest can safely wait.
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Examples across different kinds of games
Side quests are not limited to traditional fantasy role-playing games. Official game materials describe optional content in several forms and genres:
- Final Fantasy VII Rebirth: Side quests and minigames contribute to relationship development and provide lighter activities alongside the main adventure.
- Street Fighter 6: World Tour combines fighting-game progression with side quests and minigames.
- Sea of Thieves: Its open-world pirate structure includes a large number of optional goals and side quests.
These examples illustrate why “side quest” is broader than “optional fantasy errand.” It can describe narrative missions, social activities, challenges, investigations, and other goals that sit outside a game’s principal progression.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How to approach side quests as a player
1. Read the description before accepting or abandoning it
Look for clues about the quest’s region, required character, chain structure, suggested level, and objective. A vague entry may be the first step in a longer storyline rather than a one-off task.
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2. Check for dependencies and deadlines
Before advancing a major story chapter, check whether the game warns about a point of no return. If a quest involves a temporary location, a companion, a festival, a faction, or a changing region, it may be more time-sensitive than its label suggests.
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In an open-world game, completing quests by region can reduce backtracking and make exploration more coherent. This is a convenience strategy, not a universal best order: some quests are designed to be revisited after story events or may change based on player choices.
4. Keep track of unresolved leads
Use the in-game quest log, map markers, notes, or a checklist to record quest givers, locations, clues, and incomplete chains. This is particularly useful when a game has many activities with similar names.
5. Choose your preferred spoiler level
Players who value discovery can use only a map marker or a light hint. Completionists may prefer a full walkthrough that lists prerequisites, branching outcomes, and missable objectives. A video game strategy guide can be useful for side quests involving hidden locations, multi-step chains, maps, or completion tracking; guide availability, edition, platform coverage, patch compatibility, price, and stock can change, so verify that a guide matches the game you are playing.
6. Decide what kind of reward matters to you
A side quest may be worthwhile for its story, character development, exploration, equipment, experience, challenge, or simply the pleasure of solving it. There is no single correct completion strategy. If you are focused on the main plot, prioritize quests with useful upgrades or characters you care about; if you are exploring the world, follow the objectives that give a region more context.
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Should you complete every side quest?
No. Completing everything is appropriate for players who enjoy discovery, lore, collection, or maximum progression, but it can also create fatigue in a large open-world game. A sensible approach is to sample different types of side content and continue with the ones that provide a story, mechanic, place, or reward you value.
If a quest repeatedly sends you across the map for identical tasks and offers no new context or meaningful payoff, skipping it may improve your experience. Conversely, a short quest that appears mechanically simple may contain an important character moment or a memorable piece of world-building.
“Side quest” in everyday language
Outside gaming, people sometimes use side quest as a metaphor for a secondary real-life activity pursued alongside a primary goal. That usage borrows the game meaning: the activity is not the main objective, but it may still be rewarding or revealing. The established video-game meaning remains the more precise definition.
For game designers: a useful side-quest test
When evaluating an optional quest, ask:
- What does this quest reveal about the setting or a character?
- Why would this quest giver ask for this objective in this place?
- Does the player use a familiar mechanic in an interesting or revealing way?
- Does the reward fit the quest’s theme and progression needs?
- Does the quest respect the player’s time?
- What discovery, consequence, relationship, or memory would be missing without it?
This test also explains why side quests can feel either essential or disposable. The best ones are not merely extra hours attached to a campaign; they make the world, characters, systems, or player choices richer than the main path alone could manage.
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Are side quests important?
Not necessarily. A side quest is optional in relation to the main story, but it may still unlock important abilities, reveal major lore, affect relationships or endings, or become unavailable after a story event.
What are examples of side quests?
No. A side quest can be a short errand, investigation, combat challenge, companion story, faction questline, collection task, escort mission, or minigame-based activity. The defining feature is that it sits outside the game’s main progression.
What is the best way to complete side quests?
It depends on the game. Read the quest description, check for prerequisites and points of no return, group nearby objectives, and use a title-specific walkthrough if you want to avoid missing content or spoilers.
The Bottom Line
Side quests are optional game objectives outside the main narrative. Their value is not measured by length, but by what they add: world-building, character development, exploration, progression, gameplay variety, or meaningful choice. Because quest dependencies and missable content vary by game, check title-specific details before committing to a completion order.
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