I'm not really talking about Skyrim,FO3, FNV or Oblivion. I do agree that the sidequests were rather uninspiring, and that's why I refer back to Morrowind which was released 12 years ago.
Pray tell: what is a fetch quest anyway? I saw you reference it several time but it's so ill-defined it's hard to counter. All quests if you think about it are either kill quests or fetch quests.
Morrowind kept it at a manageable and most sidequests actually serve the purpose to explore the setting.
For example, Curios Vario, Legion Champion sends you to kill Cammona tong thugs at the Council Club. It's essentially a kill quest but that is very solid writing. It's a way of showing vs. telling even though it's completely unrelated to the main story. It established the kind of world you were dealing with early on
without the long paragraphs extolling lore which WRPG are now famous for.
Furthermore,they did not have this quality of I haz 2 get betta g3ar that you speak of because rewards were often very disproportionate to risks. Furthermore, there were no markers for you to follow, GPS style. If anything, questing was one of the worse way to get loot. With few exceptions, it was much better usually to seek out and clear Daedric shrines or kill Templars by yourself rather then go on as you call "fetch quest".
What do you mean it has nothing to do with quest designs? Narrative is an inherent part of quest design. It's what makes the quest interesting in the first place.
Have you never noticed how robotic the characters act when you're talking to them in FO3 or Skyrim (albeit there's a big deal of that --- Cough cough commander shepard)? It is completely unnatural and most of all, boring. So no it's not even the voice acting and lypsinc. My guess is that it's really the awkward static body language.
In order to do the quest, you have to care a minimum about the characters involved.
The reason you hold your POV is this: WRPGs' default way of telling stories is essentially loredump and that's a terrible way of telling a story.
"The X faction is fighting the Y faction. Y Faction is evil because I'm telling you so and you better believe it because roleplaying you know!"
If it's done like in Skyrim, FO3, WoW, Diablo, etc ,of course it's going to be tedious. It's just that you are underestimating the effect of art and espescially writing and acting in games.
It's not even this. It's the fact that a choice (esp. in dialogue) really puts the spotlight on actions. As soon as the director uses C&C, it takes away all subtility from a scene.
The thing is with C&C you can usually take an education guess as to what's going to happen with the second option, having first picked #1
no one successfully pulled it off in games or in fiction. Or at least never on par with more established ways of telling a story.
It is much better to have unified narrative and work on that.
There is room for C&C of sorts but more in the "how" rather then the "why". the gameplay and in the sequencing of events rather then the narrative itself.
If video games wants to grow as a medium, it will have to give more weight to aspects other then glorified CYOA. espescially. musical score (which sadly is very weak in Western games) and acting/animation. There's a reason why CYOA books suck. Can you imagine for example Robert Heinlein writing Starship troopers or Strangers in a strange land as a CYOA book? How about Blade Runner?
Good. Let's say (to be generous) the first quarter of the game is generic and is the same to all players and then comes your first choice. Now imagine how many story arcs you want to have. Let's take a movie with great AAA quality cutscenes, FFXIII, which has 6 hours of cutscenes. The first 1.5 is generic, so now that leaves us with 4.5 hours. Now divide the remaining playing time by the # of story arcs you want. Get the picture?
And as you add in variables (player's height, player's weight, etc) it gets exponentially worse.
Alpha Protocol highlights this problem very well. The novelty is already gone so by the time you go through your second playthrough, you get an impression of deja vu(which is a polite euphemism for boredom). Character development for most characters was extremely poor during the first playthrough.
CYOA works to an extent in games, because for most parts, they are visceral experience but it becomes old fast. There is a balance of course, but in times, smart writers will recognize this and will find way to tell clever stories and not so overt about it by abusing C&C.
A lot of character and plot development is best made by not saying anything and simply letting the player come to his own conclusions.
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