Opinion - How to fix RPG Side Quests

@The Escapist Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw explains how to fix RPG side quests.

And it occurred to me while we were discussing it that Dragon Age: Inquisition was millimetres away from a logical solution to the sidequest mundanity annoyance. It comes down to two features of that game: the large number of party members, of which we can only employ two at a time while the rest hang around home base braiding each other's hair or something, and all the War Room stuff that allows us to send imaginary soldiers on imaginary quests that return rewards after a specific amount of real time. The same kind of thing Assassin's Creed did from Brotherhood onwards to let you actually feel like you're commanding a big organisation and not just three jackoffs who live in an unusually large house.

So here was my thinking: why not let us send party members that we're not using to complete sidequests offscreen? Not imaginary quests that are solely for completing offscreen, but the actual quests that the player could have completed but were left for too long and the reward is no longer worth it. Not quests we've just been given, so we can fob off all the gameplay; just the ones that in World of Warcraft would be coloured green or grey on the quest log.

I voiced these thoughts and the point was raised that doing the shitty Farmer Dickcheese quests is part of the experience, it's how we get a sense of the path that our character takes as they grow from humble beginnings to greatness. But I would argue that this benefit is lost after our character has achieved a certain level of greatness, and still has old sidequests cluttering up the log that no longer offer any significant growth. The only thing you can do at that point is quietly delete them from the list (if the game even lets you do that), and that doesn't feel like the heroic thing to do. There's no closure. You have to live with the knowledge that the rats might eat all of Farmer Dickcheese's grain and leave him and his family hungry this winter. And that Mrs. Plopknickers will never again see her little boy who mysteriously vanished near the dark forest.