I am currently playing Oblivion and one of the things that stand out while doing quests is the way the player is informed that the quest has been updated. I don’t understand why Bethesda chose to stop the game so often with that (HUGE!) window everytime a new fact is revealed. I feel like the game is playing itself and I’m just watching, since I don’t have the chance to decide myself whether or not an object/book/information/rumor is valuable for a quest. Everything pops up and it’s there, available, in big font summarized for you, there’s no need to think, to speculate, to gather clues and to come to your own conclusions like in the adventure games.

I enjoyed more the fading message “Your journal has been updated” in Morrowind. It doesn’t stop the game and it doesn’t draw the conclusions for you unless and until you decide to open the journal for clues. I think it’s more natural and while it still files the info for you in your journal, it lets you try to solve the puzzles yourself before deciding to look for help. I do understand that some people play this game mainly for the action and don’t like/have time to read books and deduct clues out of reading, so I’m fine with the journal doing the work for you, but I’m only asking this handholding to be optional. It’s still there in the journal, just a click away so the other people who like to be more challenged to have a shot at it.

What do you think would be a good quest update method to suit your playstyle?

What would be awesome is like a voice over as you continue playing. It'd just be awesome to hear Lucien Lachance(or a similar bad ass voice) to sum up for me through some magic... thingy, so it doesn't take you pout of the element. On a side note- is there anyone better than lachance to do a TES voice over?

Short message as long as I can go into my quest log and see where I left off and be able to continue knowing exactly where I left off.

I much prefer the short and unobtrusive short message like in Morrowind. I also would like the name of quests to not directly spoil what they entail. Such as the "Separated at birth" quest in Oblivion.

Yeah, the Oblivion quest update window was really not necessary. It usually was just a repeat of everything I just heard. I don't remember the window ever having "spoilers" as you put in the poll option though. The quest update is there to remind people of what to do next if they have forgotten after not playing or something like that, but then in Oblivion it was just redundant. Morrowind did a good job with it, by including all topics of conversations and quoting exact words of people, but only with the Bloodmoon quest list and stuff. Vanilla Morrowind with no expansion-journal was AWFUL.


That would be even worse.

You have a point and I agree that the Morrowind journal was better for immersion.
I understand though why the Oblivion quests have that window spamming: it’s because of the whole quest design which is annoingly linear! Let me give you an example: the quest with the stolen painting in Chorrol. The quest is divided in parts and you can’t advance unless you did the previous. I think this kind of rail driven quest is what’s breaking immersion. In my opinion the quest design should be more flexible, if I manage to figure out what happened faster than the quest is meant, I want to be able to finish it in more possible ways.

It would be cool if the important quest releated text in a book your reading would be highlighted or drawn into focus.

I chose the first choice...I would rather have a short time to read the thing and semi-digest it.

Morrowind quest update was good, Oblivion was in excess ("If it ain't broken, fix it until it is" ). I like 100x times more to write the notes myself. I did it in pen and paper in Morrowind and I'd like it to be an option in Skyrim to write your own notes in the journal.

Ha, I remember rpg's that I have played that I wrote stuff down, for example Daggerfall. I thought Oblivion went overboard with their quest updates, especially updating a quest once I opened a book, before I even read it???? I need something in between Morrowind and Oblivion, or maybe Skyrim can think of something better that we have not seen.

POP UP WINDOW GAME PAUSES

uhh..popups are bad...mk.

But especially the way there were implemented in Oblivion. Never should a book be summarized in a quest before the player has a chance to read it. Never. Never. Ever. Ever. Never.

And yet that happened constantly in Oblivion.

The journal is supposed to be there if you need it. If you're able to figure things out without it, don't force it on the player. Ridiculous. Like so much else in Oblivion.

I feel like they got away from that crap with Fallout 3 for the better.

Short message, although I wouldn't mind the FO3/FONV style either. Except for one thing: Sometimes I "get quests" that I have no intention of attempting for a long time. By that time, my character and me have completely forgotten about what was said. I.e. in FONV I may get a quest "go speak to Mr.X who lives near place y", but the short version in the log only say "go speak to Mr.X". I have no way to figure out where that is without compass/map markers indicating it. So I want the full chat history shown somewhere as well. Plus I want to be able to sort it on a per quest basis, chronologically, and per NPC.