Hmm... I have a story I want to tell in my game, but I can't think of how to actually translate it to gameplay. It would be really easy to just make it a long cutscene, but that would be antithetical to the design of the game. If it were a linear game I could get away with it, but it's an optional side quest in an open world game.

The only thing I can think of is having the player control walking and one interaction in between the scenes. That's not really much "gameplay" though.

I don't feel like I have enough time to change the quest drastically. My options right now are basically either to just cut it completely, or to implement it how I just explained and have it maybe be subpar. It might be a quantity VS quality thing, not that I don't think it wouldn't be quality but it would be really lacking in gameplay and be solely story based, and only really for one character.

You can dig yourself out of this.
What's the story and why is it optional?
How did you originally intend to tell it, just through dialogue?
What kind of gameplay would this exposition interrupt?

@chainsaw_appreciator so the main story is all about killing gods and finding magical flowers.

The side quests are all, for the most part, self contained stories that show off different struggles of the people living through a plague. They're all optional because they don't directly add anything to the main quest.

This one in particular is about a party member's friend who died because her dad hoarded food and she starved. She and one of her guild members wants to kill the dad to get revenge. The guild is a thief guild, so they are assassin types.

The quest, as it was written, is for the guild members to break into his house in the middle of the night and assassinate him. One of them gets caught and sent to jail, and you can break him out if you want.

The issue I'm running into is that pretty much all you do as a player is click the door to unlock it and then click the guy to assassinate him. It feels like it would be better as a cinematic cutscenes, building up the assassination and ask that, but the game doesn't really have those outside of the main story. Even then, the main story is mostly dialogue heavy cutscenes, not cinematic stuff like this. It would feel pretty out of place because of that. I don't think I could go the scene justice with it fitting the rest of the game's design.

That's why I'm considering cutting it. It feels too hollow if it's gameplay, and relatively complex if it's a cutscene.

Something I could do is put it in the background, like the guild does it without you and one ends up in jail, then you can free him. In that way, you still get the story of the characters involved. If you want to free the guy in jail it won't be a side quest or anything, just a choice you can decide to make (which affects the karma system, which determines other stuff in the game). Not everything HAS to be a quest I suppose, and it happening in the background would be a lot more aligned with the game since there are already a few quests that can change depending on what other quests have been done and other background factors.

So going off this context alone I'd either downgrade it to background exposition like you're thinking

OR

You can redesign the assassination quest from the ground up to make it more fun. Think of something along the lines of the dark brotherhood quests in oblivion. Killing someone in their sleep is boring. Infiltrating a dinner party to poison him (as a quick and cheap example of other things you could do) is more fun.

@chainsaw_appreciator yeah that's the other place where I'm stuck, because that would require rewriting the quest, potentially adding more NPCs, and even maybe some game mechanics. There's no bounty or jail system for instance, so getting caught would mean just getting into a fight you can't win or just an instant game over. I have something similar somewhere else but it's in a very self-contained dungeon where nobody will even know if the people there get completely slaughtered.

I do kind of like the poison idea though. I have gems you can attach to weapons, so maybe the goal would be to get the poison gem to give to the thief who is going to assassinate him, and he'll give you a top tier poison knife in return if you save him from jail. It will be a slight diversion, but technically less work than the quest was originally going to be.

The reason I'm worried about time btw, is because I've been working on the game for 8 years and I NEED all of the quests done by the end of the year. I really gotta wrap stuff up so I've been cutting and changing some things to meet that deadline. I was pretty sad about it but I know this stuff happens all the time in game dev, otherwise games would never come out.