In an industry saturated with fetch quests, experience bars, and relentless checklists, a single provocative idea cuts through the noise: a quest should be something almost nobody finishes, and everybody remembers. This is the guiding principle behind Emilien’s new column, From Scratch, a series that dares to ask whether modern game design has traded mystery for efficiency, and memory for completion. It is a challenge not just to how developers build quests, but to how players have been conditioned to consume them.
The statement itself is a quiet radicalism. For two decades, the dominant trajectory of role-playing games and massively multiplayer online worlds has been toward accessibility, clarity, and linear throughput. Quest markers pin exact locations to the minimap. Objective text tells the player exactly what to kill, collect, or activate. Reward structures announce themselves before the first step is taken. The result is a frictionless experience that rarely leaves a scar. Emilien’s framing reframes the entire purpose of a quest: not as a task to be completed and checked off, but as an experience to be carried long after the player has moved on.
From Scratch arrives at a moment when the conversation around game design is ripe for reconsideration. The live-service model has pushed developers toward endless content loops. Open-world games compete on sheer square footage. Achievement systems encourage 100-percent completion rates as a mark of mastery. Against this backdrop, the notion that a quest should remain unfinished for most players feels almost heretical. And yet, the most indelible moments in gaming history—the discovery of a hidden dragon in an old Elder Scrolls cave, the failure to save a companion in Mass Effect 2, the unsolvable mystery of Shadow of the Colossus—are rarely tied to completion. They are tied to memory.
The column’s name, From Scratch, signals something important. This is not a nostalgic retreat to the opaque design of the 1980s, nor is it a rejection of modern tools. It is an invitation to build meaning from the ground up, starting with a fundamental redefinition of what a quest is supposed to do. If a quest is designed to be unforgettable, then the metrics by which it is judged must change. Player retention, daily active users, and completion percentages become secondary. Emotional retention becomes the primary currency.
How Modern Quest Design Erased Mystery in Favor of Certainty
To understand what From Scratch is reacting against, it helps to trace the evolution of quest design over the past thirty years. In the early 1990s, games like The Secret of Monkey Island and Ultima VII presented quests with minimal handholding. Players were given a goal and a world to explore. Failure was common, and ambiguity was deliberate. A player might wander for hours without making progress, but that wandering itself became the story. The quest was not the objective; the quest was the experience of trying to pursue it.
The shift began in earnest with World of Warcraft in 2004. Blizzard’s genius was in systematizing the quest experience at scale. Every quest was color-coded by level. Exclamation marks appeared above NPCs with work to offer. The quest log tracked every objective with precision. For the first time, a massive online audience could move through a coherent narrative without getting lost. The trade-off was predictable: mystery was the first casualty. Players no longer discovered quests; they consumed them from a menu. The feeling of stumbling upon something strange and unexplained became the exception rather than the norm.
This design philosophy spread outward into almost every genre. Skyrim in 2011 perfected the radiant quest system, which generated infinite variations on the same core loop. The Witcher 3 elevated writing quality but still relied on quest markers and level scaling to keep players on track. By the late 2010s, the open-world template had become so standardized that a player could predict the structure of a side quest within minutes of accepting it. Go to location. Fight enemies. Retrieve item. Return for reward. The loop was efficient, satisfying in the moment, and almost entirely forgettable after the session ended.
The data supports this observation. Studies of player behavior across major MMO platforms show that fewer than 15 percent of players complete the main storyline quests in any given expansion. Yet those same players spend hundreds of hours in the world. What they remember is not the quest chain they finished, but the moment they stumbled into a PvP battle that went wrong, or the time they helped a stranger complete a difficult encounter, or the view from a mountain peak they reached by accident. These moments are not designed. They emerge from the space between quests.
Emilien’s column argues that this space is where meaning lives. A quest that is too efficient leaves no room for the unexpected. A quest that is too clear leaves no room for interpretation. By designing quests that most players will not finish, From Scratch proposes a return to that middle ground where difficulty, ambiguity, and personal investment create memories that persist.
The Unfinished Quest as a Design Philosophy
The idea that a quest should remain unfinished for the majority of its audience is not an argument for bad design or obscurity for its own sake. It is a recognition that different players derive meaning from different kinds of experiences. For some, the satisfaction of a quest lies in its completion, in the dopamine hit of a reward screen and a level-up animation. For others, the meaning lies in the struggle itself, in the moments of uncertainty and discovery that occur along the way. A quest that is too easy to finish serves only the first group. A quest that is difficult enough that many will abandon it serves both.
Consider the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The game is famously ambiguous in its objectives. The main quest to defeat Calamity Ganon can be completed in under an hour by a skilled player, but the vast majority of players spend dozens of hours exploring, solving shrines, and uncovering secrets that have no direct bearing on the plot. The game does not punish players for ignoring the main quest. It rewards them for being distracted. This is a design philosophy that implicitly understands the value of unfinished business. The game is designed to be remembered, not just finished.
Another powerful example is found in Dark Souls. FromSoftware’s entire design ethos is built around the idea that the player will fail, frequently and memorably. The quests in Dark Souls are often opaque. NPCs can die permanently if the player makes the wrong choice. Entire storylines can be missed entirely. A player who finishes Dark Souls without using a guide has almost certainly missed half the content. Yet the game is revered precisely because of this design. The connections that players do discover feel earned. The quests that remain unfinished become part of the personal mythology each player carries. No two players have the same experience because no two players complete the same set of quests.
From Scratch builds on this tradition but applies it as a deliberate design framework rather than a happy accident. The column explores how quests can be structured to accommodate incompletion without feeling broken. The goal is not to frustrate the player, but to give them something worth carrying forward even if they never see the final cutscene. This is a fundamentally different approach to content pacing. Instead of designing a quest that every player must finish to progress the main story, From Scratch envisions quests as artifacts, objects of curiosity that may or may not resolve depending on the player’s investment.
Technically, this demands a shift in how quests are authored. Writers must build narratives with multiple exit points. Designers must ensure that a quest feels satisfying even when abandoned halfway through. Systems must be able to track partial progress without breaking future content. This is not a trivial engineering challenge. It requires rethinking the quest database, the UI presentation, and the reward economy. But the payoff is a world that feels alive rather than scripted, a world where the player’s choices carry weight precisely because some choices lead to dead ends.
What a Quest Should Be: Memory Over Metrics
To understand the practical implications of Emilien’s philosophy, it is helpful to ask a direct question that has long been missing from industry discourse.
What is the purpose of a quest in a game?
A quest serves two functions. The first is structural: it provides direction, pacing, and progression within the game’s systems. The second is experiential: it generates meaning, emotional engagement, and lasting memory. Modern game design has optimized heavily for the first function. Quests are pipelines that move players from one content node to the next, distributing rewards and maintaining engagement metrics. The second function is often treated as a byproduct, something that happens naturally if the writing is good enough. Emilien’s argument is that the second function should be the primary design goal. A quest that fails to generate a lasting memory has failed, regardless of how efficiently it delivered rewards.
This reframing has direct consequences for how quests are evaluated in the development process. Studios routinely measure quest completion rates as a success metric. If too many players abandon a quest, it is considered broken and is redesigned for higher completion. From Scratch suggests the opposite: a quest with a low completion rate may be the most successful quest in the game, provided that the players who attempted it remember it vividly. The metric shifts from completion percentage to recall percentage. Do players talk about the quest days or weeks later? Do they share stories about it on forums or social media? Do they return to the game world hoping to discover more quests like it?
The implications for live-service games are particularly significant. These games depend on constant content updates to retain their player base. The pressure to produce large quantities of quests often leads to formulaic design. A quest that takes risks, that might leave many players frustrated or lost, is a liability in a system designed to maximize daily engagement. Yet the most memorable moments in live-service games are almost always the ones that broke the rules. The hidden raid boss that required a cryptic sequence of actions to summon. The NPC who appeared only under specific weather conditions at a specific in-game hour. The quest that required real-world community collaboration to solve. These are not efficient quests. They are inefficient by design. And they are unforgettable.
Emilien’s column does not argue that every quest should follow this model. A game with nothing but cryptic, unfinished quests would be exhausting. Instead, From Scratch argues for a tiered approach. Some quests should be straightforward and completable, serving the structural function of progression. Others, perhaps a smaller set, should be designed with incompletion in mind. These are the quests that define the character of the game world, that give players something to wonder about long after they have moved on to other content.
The Role of Failure in Creating Lasting Game Narratives
The industry’s obsession with player agency has produced an odd paradox. Players have more control over their narrative outcomes than ever before, yet the stories themselves feel increasingly predetermined. Dialogue wheels offer the illusion of choice while funneling all paths toward the same few endings. Quests that can be failed are often reloaded immediately, as save systems have made failure a temporary inconvenience rather than a permanent consequence.
From Scratch re-embraces failure as a legitimate narrative outcome. A quest that the player cannot finish is not a failure of design. It is a statement that the world does not exist for the player alone. Some problems are too big. Some mysteries remain unsolved. Some characters die and stay dead. This was the standard in earlier game design because technical limitations prevented developers from accommodating every player outcome. But what was once a constraint became, in the hands of skilled designers, a storytelling advantage. The feeling of loss in a game where loss is permanent is qualitatively different from the feeling of loss in a game where a reload is always an option.
The difficulty is that modern audiences have been trained to expect resolution. The psychological pull of an unfinished quest is strong, and many players find it uncomfortable. Designers who adopt the From Scratch philosophy must be willing to tolerate a certain level of player frustration in service of deeper engagement. The key is to ensure that the frustration is meaningful rather than arbitrary. A quest that cannot be finished because the game’s systems are unclear is bad design. A quest that cannot be finished because the player made a choice that closed off one path while opening another is good design.
This distinction is crucial. From Scratch is not arguing for obscurantism. It is arguing for consequence. The quests that are remembered are the ones where the player’s actions mattered, even if those actions led to failure. The memory of a failed quest is often more vivid than the memory of a successful one because failure carries emotional weight. Success is expected. Failure is personal.
Practical Foundations: How Developers Can Build Quests That Endure
Translating this philosophy into concrete design guidelines requires addressing several practical questions. How does a developer create a quest that is both completable for some and memorable for all? How do reward systems handle partial completion? How does the narrative accommodate players who will never see the ending?
One approach is the branching failure state. In this model, a quest has multiple exit points, each with its own narrative payoff. A player who abandons the quest early receives a different piece of information than a player who completes it. The world reacts differently depending on how far the player progressed. This is not a new concept—Fallout: New Vegas implemented a version of it with its reputation system and faction quests—but it remains rare in mainstream design because it multiplies the writing and implementation workload.
Another approach is the ambient quest. These are quests that exist in the world independent of the player. They can be discovered, observed, and optionally interacted with, but they continue regardless of player involvement. A player who stumbles upon a caravan being ambushed can choose to help or walk away. If they walk away, the caravan is destroyed, and the world changes accordingly. The player never receives a quest log entry. There is no reward. The only thing the player carries away is the memory of having seen something and chosen not to act. This is a quest that cannot be failed because there is no failure state for an event the player was never required to join.
From Scratch explores both of these approaches and others. The column serves as a living document of experimental design thinking, informed by the realities of modern development pipelines but unafraid to challenge their assumptions. The goal is not to prescribe a single solution but to open a conversation that the industry has largely avoided. Quests have been treated as infrastructure for too long. They are the primary vehicle through which players interact with game worlds. They deserve a design philosophy that matches their importance.
The Future of Quest Design in an Era of Unfinished Memories
The industry is already showing signs of movement in this direction. Elden Ring in 2022 was a commercial and critical success that explicitly rejected the handholding conventions of modern quest design. Its quests are cryptic, easily missed, and often unresolved. Players loved it not in spite of this opacity but because of it. The game treated them as adults capable of discovery. Disco Elysium in 2019 offered quests that could be failed through dialogue choices, with failure often producing more interesting narrative outcomes than success. Outer Wilds in 2019 built an entire game around the idea that knowledge, not progression, is the true reward. Players finish the game not with a full inventory but with a full memory.
These are not outliers. They are signals. The market is responding to a fatigue with the quest-as-checklist model. Players are hungry for worlds that feel larger than their own playthrough, for mysteries that remain mysterious, for quests that leave room for the imagination. From Scratch is positioned to capture this moment and give it a coherent intellectual framework. Emilien’s column is not about nostalgia. It is about a design philosophy that has always existed on the margins of the industry and is now ready for the mainstream.
The challenge for developers is to resist the pressure to optimize everything. The tools that make quests easier to produce also make them easier to forget. A quest that is perfectly clear, perfectly paced, and perfectly rewarding is a quest that leaves no impression. The quests that endure are the ones that have a rough edge, an unsolved question, a moment of genuine surprise. By embracing the idea that a quest should be something almost nobody finishes and everybody remembers, From Scratch offers a path forward that is both artistically ambitious and commercially viable. The developers who take that path will build worlds that players carry with them long after the save file is cold.
