How do you pace yourself going through main story missions/quests?

[StaceyPowers]

In games that have endings (i.e. you aren’t playing an open world game which you can play forever after completing the main questline), how do you pace yourself with the main story missions or quests?

I tend to avoid main story missions for long periods of time because I’m afraid that I’ll accidentally rush through a game. I guess the obvious solution is to look up the list of missions/quests to see how many there are, but I am always afraid of accidentally seeing spoilers in the mission names if I do this.

What about you? Do you look up the list and then pace yourself accordingly? Or do you guess and try to go through the missions at the pace you figure the game intends (sometimes you can guess based on context clues in the game)? Or do you avoid the main story until you feel pretty sure you have done most everything else and won’t miss anything?

The other relevant issue here is levels. It can be pretty annoying to charge into a mission when you are way below the intended level on mistake—but it can be equally bad to wait too long only to find that a mission’s enemies have leveled up to being ridiculously hard to beat despite your own high level.

@skyfire @LadyDay @The Blackangel @kingpotato @Alyxx @killamch89 @Crazycrab @DylanC @Shagger

[Crazycrab]

If it's leveled quests (Horizon Zero Dawn, Witcher 3) I tend to start with the lowest leveled quests and work my way up.  If there is multiple questlines with different factions (Skyrim, Oblivion) I will focus on one faction at a time breaking into the main quest every once in a while.

[SaucyPastaTho]

When I'm going for platinum I usually give myself a time limit to complete the game and then grab collectibles and sweep up left over trophies. But when I'm playing casually, I'll usually take my time between levels main quests and side quests collectibles etc.

[kingpotato]

While playing the witcher 3 I did somehow end up completing the main quest too early and I left behind a lot of side quests, so by the end game most of the map still had many question marks and they all felt pointless to explore. But yeah I also try to do as many side quests as I can before moving on with the main quest.