It's something I dealt with in the last game. There are so many side missions that I want to do for the reward, for completion, for whatever reason, but getting through them feels like a chore. Everytime I finish a side quest path I'm like "glad that one is done with," then do a few more story missions then decide to knock out some more side stuff as quickly as possible like it's my job. Even traveling the world feels like a chore - I have to pick up every blue orb thing on my way to my objective.

And I know I could just not do the side stuff, but I WANT to, for whatever reason. I guess I get just enough feedback out of it that it makes it feel worthwhile.

Does anyone else feel this way? I don't really 100% many open world games, but I did with SR3, even though I didn't particularly like it. Maybe the side quests are just do-able enough that I feel like I need to complete them.

Nah, I liked having excuses to keep playing the game. Eventually finished everything them was sad there was nothing left.

@demoskinos said:

This. I was so glad when that DLC came out, even though it wasn't that good. Feels so good to fly and run around in that game.

You're a chore.

The side stuff does sort of seem way worse this time around. I mean, all the new mini-games are outright terrible. The platforming one is probably the best of the new stuff, but these sorts of action games have never been particularly well-suited for that type of precision. The target thing is clunky, and uninspired. The race thing, that seems flawed from the ground up. I'm not even really sure what they were going for there. The pre-existing side activities are so outlandishly easy once you get most of the super powers that they might as well not exist. I don't know, I enjoyed the game a lot. I thought they did some really great stuff with the characters and story telling. But it wasn't as fun to play. Which is weird because you'd think all those super powers would make it way more fun.

Sure. However, I'm not a big fan of the Saints Row games, so my opinion doesn't really matter much on the subject.

Yeah man, and that's from playing only two hours of main story. The rocket and spaceship sections were great, and so is jumping around the city collecting orbs, but every mission is just kill 50 cops, hack these terminals, eliminate this horde of aliens, kill this tedious miniboss, collect these 4 things etc. So tedious, and the humor is hilariously mistimed, but I'm sure there's enough good stuff left to keep going.

It totally does. Every side quest is, "Go do this series of minigames".

Nope, I loved every second. The powers were so fun to use that most of the side stuff was trivial anyway and more about fun messing around with yhe mechanics

Nah, I was pretty engaged from beginning to end. I'd probably still be playing it here and there if I wasn't restricted to the bipolar framerate of the console versions...

Some of the side stuff was definitely pretty weak, though - specifically the Super Hero Fight Club. But that's no different than every prior Saints Row game, where there's the few duds amidst the gold mine of stuff to get lost in.

No. Why do you want to do something you don't enjoy? They made that stuff as optional as possible. I really enjoyed it and there are the challenge things I decided not to spend to much time bothering with.

I thought that way about third but haven't had a problem with 4. The only problem I have is getting side tracked by orbs which I never had a shortage of. The side missions are fast so I didn't mind also its real easy and fast to get across map, unlike GTA. I could probably do 10 side mission in SR4 in the same time as one for GTA5.

The side missions totally. I was very surprised to hear a lot of people talk about them being better in this game than the last ones (didn't the Giantbomb guys do this?). There was no challenge or method or learning curve to them, they were cookie cutter, and some were just outright bad. The insurance fraud was pretty much the only fun one in the past games to me and this time they just made it totally meaningless as I literally cartwheel down freeways at 80 mph smashing into cars. Not fun.

And then the put all the unlocks behind them in pointless bundles to get upgrades from your Saints... it just all felt very lazy to me. I enjoyed the game but it felt rushed and slapdash in a lot of ways.

@korwin said:

Hey!

I think it might be a problem I have with open world games in general, but the missions are so uninteresting. Like