The most annoying questgivers in PC games

Moira Brown gets a bad rap. Fallout 3's most chipper NPC, the Minnesotan menace is an inventor who sends you out on fact-finding missions to investigate the many dangers of the Wasteland. That means she puts you in harm's way quite a lot, which many players hate her for. Others just hate her voice.

I think her positive outlook makes a refreshing change of pace from, you know, everything else going on in Fallout 3. Plus she gives you an armored Vault suit just for starting her questline, and the Wasteland Survival Guide she writes with your help goes on to be a useful item in both New Vegas and Fallout 4.

What I'm saying is, there are plenty of videogame questgivers much more annoying than Moira Brown. All of the ones below, for starters. And if you disagree, you're a big meanie.

Zero

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

Rockstar loves to make us sit through cutscenes where our protagonist agrees to help out some of the most annoying people alive. Zero isn't alone—in GTA: San Andreas, he's got wannabe MC/janitor OG Loc for competition—but he is the winner for absolute worst.

Zero's the owner of a remote-control car shop at war with a rival called Berkley. He's a shrill parody nerd who shrieks dialogue like, "Curse you, Berkley, curse you!" Zero's most annoying mission is Supply Lines, where you pilot a model biplane to shoot Berkley's delivery drivers. The flying controls in San Andreas are terrible enough on their own (the fact it makes you complete pilot school as an unskippable part of the plot is a hate crime), but in Supply Lines you also have to cope with a limited fuel gauge that drops like a stone if you dare to use the accelerator.

Zero's excited yelling during this mission is so bad even David Cross, who voiced Zero, called it "the most annoying voice you could ever imagine" and has never finished the mission himself.

Falcar

The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion

"Ignore the main questline, stick to the sidequests." This is good advice when you're playing Oblivion, if you mean "stick to the Thieves Guild, Dark Brotherhood, Daedric Shrines, Shivering Isles, and Fighters Guild," because if you take it to include the Mages Guild questline, it becomes bloody terrible advice.

The most frustrating faction in Oblivion, the Mages demand you travel to every guildhouse in Cyrodiil to earn a recommendation from each before you can join. Many of the Mages use these recommendations as a way to extort tedious favors from acolytes like yourself, such as clearing a dungeon of boring old zombies, or they involve you in silly pranks like stealing spellbooks. It's tough to pick who is the most obnoxious, but my vote goes to Falcar.

Falcar sends you to retrieve a missing ring. The ring's down a well, but turns out to be enchanted so it has an encumbrance of 150, which the previous acolyte couldn't lift. You find his body still submerged in the well. Someone drowned because of how much of a dick Falcar is.

You can drag the ring out of the well yourself, if you clear some space in your inventory and maybe drink some potions, but that turns out to be pointless. By the time you emerge from the well, Falcar's done a runner because he was secretly a necromancer this whole time. Shame his quest isn't about uncovering that, which might have been interesting, but is instead a literal fetch quest.

The Riddler

Batman: Arkham Knight

Before the Battinson movie reskinned The Riddler as Gotham's version of the Zodiac killer, the character was at a low point. The Arkham series saw him transform from preppy to shabby as Batman outsmarted him again and again, and by the time Arkham Knight rolled around he'd been reduced to an oily mechanic crafting racetracks to test the Batmobile, in between making Catwoman walk across his deathtraps.

That's bad enough, but you still have to collect his trophies scattered across the city and solve "amusingly taxing" riddles by taking photos as well, and if you don't 100% all the tedious challenges he throws at you you're not allowed to see the game's "real" ending. Thanks, Arkham Knight.

Rider the Miner

Rune 2

You're probably familiar with flyting, the medieval poetic boasting often compared to rap battles, thanks to its use in Assassin's Creed Valhalla. It was referenced a year earlier in Rune 2, but a lot less people played Rune 2.

Human Head's last game (and there's a story there), the Viking action-adventure features some truly terrible NPCs. Chief among them is Rider the Miner, who speaks entirely in rhyme with the kind of overemphasized white-ass delivery that makes you expect "My name is Rider and I'm here to say…" at any second. Instead, what you get are lines like, "When I take off my shirt you'll see all the girls flirt / Though my work is to whittle, it's my stomach that's chiseled." He's unemployed because the mine is closed, which I guess is why he's whittling? I don't know, man.

Anyway, survive all his dogshit rapping and finally you find out he's got a quest for you. Does it involve the skalds, or the bardic tradition he's part of? No, he wants you to mine some ore. Don't bother coming up with a rhyme for that, Rider.

Chadley

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth

There's a lot of filler in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, but what makes it worse is how much of that filler is routed through Chadley. This tedious little twerp who looks like he stepped out of the Village of the Damned appears on your wristscreen to narrate tower-climbing, lifesprings, photorelics, summons, combat challenges, and more. It feels like you can't take five steps without him squeaking "Cloud!" and making you drop everything for an update that could have been an email.

Then Mai appears, a gender-flipped version of Chadley who doubles the amount of dialogue you have to sit through. Instead of just having Chadley backseat driving every other sidequest, now there's a pair of squabbling siblings in the backseat who won't shut up. The third game should pull a Jar-Jar and dump Chadley straight down the memory hole, for all our sakes.

Preston Garvey

Fallout 4

The problem with Preston is that he's surrounded by some of Bethesda's best companions. Nick Valentine, Codsworth, Curie, John Hancock, cage-fighting Cait—compared to them, Preston's a personality-free zone. He's a Minuteman because he always wanted to be a Minuteman and his main function is to tell you when to clear out another settlement on behalf of the Minutemen.

Companions have an affinity score that can be raised and lowered based on your actions. Preston's affinity goes down when you do typical bad stuff, like picking pockets, stealing, taking drugs, and indulging in cannibalism, and goes up when you help settlements (of course) and modify weapons. I can feel myself getting bored even writing that out. He doesn't like cannibalism? Shocking. Give me Strong the Super Mutant any day.

Sebastian LaCroix

Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines

The vampire prince of Los Angeles, Sebastian LaCroix runs the city from an office so gaudy it's probably got a gold-plated toilet. He talks over you, bosses you around, and if you refuse to run errands for him, uses his vampire powers to dominate you into doing them anyway. (In a nice touch, you still get dialogue options but they all say the same thing.)

When he's not bossing you around, he's whining about how difficult it is being Sebastian LaCroix. "Each minor problem like a grain of sand," he moans, "each night I inherit the desert." He doesn't even have the good grace to enjoy being rich and powerful and immortal.

Unlike most of the other questgivers in this list, he's not annoying because he gives you meaningless missions or wastes your time or roadblocks the best ending, but because he's written that way. You're supposed to hate LaCroix for exactly the reasons you do.