The world is ending but here's a side quest - will RPGs ever solve their urgency problem?

Why is it that in a role-playing game where the stakes are usually 'the end of the world', the end of the world always has to wait for us to finish our sprawling to-do list first? There's no way you've never encountered this. I came across it most recently in Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which, after a thrilling end to Act One, effectively turned to me, the player, and said, hey why don't you focus on some companion quests now instead, eh? The world was still ending, the danger hadn't diminished or passed in any way, it's just the game needed a pace change and for me to see some of the other cool stuff in it.

Egregious though it was, The Veilguard is far from the only BioWare game to have done it - I think, throwing my mind back across a dozen of them, they probably all have. The Reapers are going to destroy the galaxy! But don't worry you've got time to go scan some planets if you want, first. BioWare games are far from the only RPGs to have done it either. In Baldur's Gate 3, you have a tadpole in your eye for crying out loud, one that you know will turn you into a mind flayer probably pretty soon, and yet still you have time for, well, anything you want to do. In The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt, you're racing to find your daughter-of-sorts Ciri who's being chased by a menace of legend, yet you've got plenty of time to become the bareknuckle boxing champion of the continent, or Gwent champion, if you so wish. This approach is so common in RPGs it's like dwarves with Scottish accents; a better question to ask would be whether there's an RPG that doesn't do it - one that hurries you up instead?

I'm thinking. It's tricky.

Pentiment? It doesn't quite fit the RPG template but it's one of the only games I can think of that has a sense of passing time, and of either-or choices associated with it - you won't be able to do everything so you will have to choose. It's a game in which time feels like time - time that's as inexorable and immovable as we know it be. Couldn't a system like that work in a more fully fledged RPG?

I wonder whether anyone else is bothered by it, or whether we've become so accustomed to it now we just don't see it. Perhaps it's even become part of what we know and expect an RPG to be. What is a role-playing game after all - how do we qualify a game as one? Do we think of them as games we play roles in, to use the purest meaning, or do we think of them in terms of mechanical trappings like side quests and character progression? For me, it's the latter, slightly ashamed as I am to admit it. But can you imagine an RPG without side quests - would it even be an RPG? It's a label that's come to mean certain things, and one of them, for better or worse, is being able to take our time and have the 'end of world' wait for us. Some games are reluctant to release us from their grips at all - just think of all the ways live service RPGs make continual demands on our time and attention.

I think you can trace all of this back to Dungeons & Dragons, like so much in RPGs, because it is, after all, the original one. That's a game that very much revolves around the players - that presents them with a world and tries to guide them around it, but famously usually ends up with players going wildly off course and dungeon masters trying to keep up with them. Are our video game RPGs a legacy of this behaviour - pandering to players?

Is there another way? When, I wonder, was the last time someone sat down and questioned the trappings of an RPG and thought about mixing them up? What if we weren't given an inexhaustible amount of time to see all areas of a game so we had to more mindfully plot our course through it - wouldn't that make for more interesting subsequent playthroughs? Wouldn't hurrying players - because of an impending 'end of world' event - help us better understand the urgency of it? Why is it we've settled for things the way they are?

Maybe this is their ultimate evolution - that's a possibility, as bedgrudging as I am to entertain it. After all, one of the allures of RPGs is their being places we can escape to and submerge ourselves in, soak ourselves in, like warm baths, in an effort to forget our worries elsewhere. Adding a new tension to that mix might spoil it. Similarly, I know there's an allure in wanting to scour a world and do everything in it, and knowing you will be able to - I can't imagine starting a game knowing I couldn't. It would feel very weird, but then, maybe that's because no one's tried.

What if? That's all I'm asking. What if we haven't completely nailed it? Just because we've done things this way for a long time doesn't mean it's the only way forward. There might be a game being made out there that's about to come crashing down from proverbial outer space to rewrite the rules and show us that time and urgency can be just as compelling as an endless to-do list. Maybe it already exists and I just don't know it yet (answers on a postcard in the comments if you do!). But I do know I'm ready for change. I want my time in games to matter again.