For game designers, I understand the desire to fill your game world with as much content as you can possibly cram on the disk (or the digital download). After all, you never want your players to feel like you’ve sold them half a game. This can lead to a lot of development time planning quests, writing dialogue, writing scripts for enemies to appear at the right times and places, and possibly even preparing branching paths and establishing consequences for player choice. Even if you have a triple-A video game company’s worth of manpower, I also understand the desire to invest in R&R for systems that can automate this lengthy process.

Bethesda’s solution for ensuring their games last even longer than their expansive quest list would suggest is their Radiant quest system. Whenever you play with certain factions in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim or Fallout 4, you may notice that some NPCs grant you repeatable missions that you can enjoy over and over to your heart’s content. These quests will involve you traveling to a location and killing everything hostile there, finding some item and returning it, escorting an NPC to a location and returning, killing a random friendly NPC in a town without being caught by guards, etc. etc.

For completing these quests, you’ll get a moderate amount of gold or caps as well as (in Fallout 4’s case) a small amount of experience. Some notable Radiant quests include the Jarl’s bounties on dragons and bandits, the Night Mother’s assassination missions for the Dark Brotherhood, gathering Shalidor’s writings for the College of Winterhold, escorting Brotherhood squires to locations around the Commonwealth, and the ever-present “another settlement needs your help” Minutemen quests.

Normally, asking for a game to have less content doesn’t sound sensible. Never having to set down Skyrim or Fallout 4 sounds great on paper.

But man, I hate the Radiant quest system.

As this Redditor points out, Bethesda doesn’t ever want to let you off the roller-coaster. I realize that for any game developer, wanting your players to play as often as possible can only be good for sales numbers. Although I’d like to see a solid study between total player playtime and total Skyrim: Special Edition sales, it’s apparent that replayability is vital. I get it. Bethesda wants us to play their games for as long as humanly possible. We’ve already discussed my extensive hours in Bethesda games; I think their focus on replayability is the only reason Bethesda’s execs allowed the modding scene to become as large as it has with attempting to completely control and monetize it.

As clunky as the Creation Club is, imagine if it were the only modding option we had. But I digress.

My first complaint about the Radiant system: it’s not readily apparent which quests have significance to progression and unique rewards and which don’t. I was shocked to discover that the Randolph Safehouse Radiant missions for the Railroad in Fallout 4 actually do have an “ending” of sorts, as well as a rarer armor mod reward for finishing them all. The quests, however, even take place in Far Harbor; why would a secretive Boston-based synth-rescuing cell of operatives even need to be in Maine in the first place? And don’t tell me it’s because they know about Acadia, because isn’t the sole survivor (if siding with the Railroad) the first agent to discover the sanctuary and report on it? I’m digressing again.

But only partially, because my second complaint about the Radiant system is the fact that these quests can send you to almost any location in Skyrim and the Commonwealth. The first time I met with Scribe Haylen in a new playthrough after installing the Far Harbor DLC, she sent me to retrieve technology from the Vim! Pop factory. I was level five, I believe; I hadn’t even met Nick Valentine, the detective upon which the whole intro to the DLC is based, and I wasn’t going to visit Far Harbor for quite a while. According to the Fallout wiki, this is a bug. I have a hard time believing they didn’t do it on purpose. Even if it was an oversight, the fact that Radiant quests can send you to far-flung parts of the map long before you’ll have the equipment and weapons to explore the area much less complete the mission can make these missions sit in your journal or pip-boy unfinished for a long time.

In fact, the locations sometimes make absolutely no sense, as if certain Radiant quests were designed to appear confusing. What will likely be your first Minuteman settlement mission asks you to travel to Tenpines Bluff and help them. They complain that the raiders at the Corvega factory are stealing food from them on a regular basis. You mean to tell me that the raiders at the much closer Outpost Zimonja (whose boss has a Fat Man and power armor) aren’t a more immediate threat, considering the raiders at Corvega would have to walk through or clear around the very-ghoul-infested Lexington just to get to you? And you haven’t been troubled by the raiders at USAF Satellite Station Olivia at all? I somehow doubt Corvega is your most immediate problem.

Third, Radiant quests have no effect on the game as a whole. They don’t. In fact, they make the game stagnate. There is little narrative developed by escorting Brotherhood squires for Kells, collecting technical documents for Quinlan, or “acquiring” food for Teagan. No increase in Brotherhood rank, no settlement or resource opportunities, no perks, nothing of note beyond caps (which are plentiful by the end of the game), possible companion affinity (when working with Paladin Danse), and a measly amount of experience.

You know what would be a really neat idea for those Brotherhood squire escort missions? If, when I had taken enough of the little tykes out to slay their first deathclaws, Sergeant Kells took me aside and asked the Sole Survivor to become the permanent mentor to a squire companion of my choosing (an invincible Atreus who could learn a valuable lesson about synths from becoming friends with a certain diminutive synth in the post-story). How about if, when I had procured enough technical documents for Proctor Quinlan, he allowed me a glimpse at the research he was performing and gave me schematics for constructing advanced plasma or tesla turrets for the Sole Survivor’s settlements? What if, when the Sole Survivor had “borrowed” food from enough settlements on behalf of Proctor Teagan, a small farmer-led riot would happen on the doorsteps of the Boston Airport, and the Sole Survivor would be ordered to “take care” of the crowd – through force or reasoning?

Most important of all, what if my standing in the Brotherhood could develop through the completion of these quests? Fallout: New Vegas’s reputation system would serve well here. I’m not expecting the game to let the Sole Survivor take Elder Maxon’s place; I rather prefer Bethesda’s decision that you can’t become the ruler of the Brotherhood through a coup. But I think it would be an experience-enhancing feature of the game if the Sole Survivor, after going through all of these Radiant quests for reputation, got the chance to make some game-affecting choices.

Extrapolating further, what if Radiant quest reputation could stack? There’s something New Vegas and even the 2D Fallouts didn’t really do. What if, because of his or her reputation as a leader in the Brotherhood and the Minutemen, the two factions formed an official alliance, and the Sole Survivor’s first task would be making one of the many settlements he’s founded become the manufacturing arm for Brotherhood power armor or weapons? Granted, this would require a spotless reputation record from the Brotherhood to trust you with those level of schematics and probably a required number of established Minuteman settlements to be able to “produce” the facilities. But from then on, the Sole Survivor would have the ability to create power armor and laser weapons (maybe even plasma) at unique crafting stations. Heck, you could “minimize the Brotherhood’s potential casualties” (as Quinlan would say) and give the Minutemen access to the same heavy arms and armor for the infiltration of the Institute at the end of the main story. Not only would this combination of faction strengths fill in the unanswered question of how the Brotherhood replaced all the T-45s with T-60s in between Fallout 3 and 4, it would put the player in a fun and unique position based on their time spent with each faction.

You could easily come up with similar combinations of the Railroad/Minutemen (becoming a heavily-fortified synth refuge) or Institute/Minutemen (a settlement staging point for coursers and synth expeditions). Obviously, Brotherhood/Railroad wouldn’t work, and Brotherhood/Institute is right out. But a Minutemen/Diamond City alliance could produce a lot of caps in trade (might have to happen after the main story when Mayor McDonough is deposed) and a Vault 81/anyone could provide a steady supply of stimpacks, antibiotics, and radiation-free food, just to set a few examples.

I use Fallout 4 as a better example of how the Radiant quest system failed because, in Skyrim, it felt like the system was in its infancy. Radiant quests could have had such a larger impact on Fallout 4.  I truly hope Bethesda finds a better system for creating “endless” content. If they must continue to use the Radiant quest system in the upcoming Fallout 76 and other future titles, I hope they develop it to the point where these types of quests serve a greater purpose and no longer feel repetitive.

All I’m saying is that the Radiant system could have had so much more meat on its bones. I admit, I know nothing of Fallout 4 modding, but I’m surprised very few mods have messed around with the effects of Radiant system quests… Well, except for mods that mark them as such or disable them entirely. Interesting that such a “vital” system to replayability makes Fallout 4 really… Oh, what are the right words?

Oh yeah. Unimmersive. Boring. And worst of all, a waste of time.