I have no idea where I found this book, "Lymdrenn Tenvanni's Journal," but I literally came across it randomly in my travels. I read the book - I usually don't read books but I almost always read "journals," so this was usual practice for me. The story inside the book was fascinating, and I actually felt compelled to help the person that had written it. I knew what I had to do, but I didn't have a clue how to go about it. I have had that journal in my inventory ever since, partly because I can't get rid of it anyway, and partly because I actually wanted to have it with me at all times, just in case.

Literally five minutes ago (after more than 100 hours of gameplay) I randomly encountered the NPC that the journal is relevant. It wasn't even clear at first, I just started talking to him and his story sounded unusual. I asked him for a few more details, and then the quest clicked. The book was for him.

The amazing thing was that I honestly wasn't expecting it. I had no idea who he was, or where he was. I didn't really even have his name. All I knew was his story, a story which I randomly chanced upon the other side of as I was doing mundane chores. I hadn't googled the answer, I hadn't looked up the quest on UESP, and I hadn't even looked at the journal entry for the quest mark. I will tell you one thing, though, that was the most awesome quest I have ever done.

Not because the reward was expensive. Not because the story was epic or that the setting was amazing or anything like that. It was the most boring quest you could get: bring book to NPC. What made it incredible was the way it happened. I read this very compelling story in a book, kept it close to me for a long time, and chanced upon its conclusion. It was a pretty awesome feeling, and I want to thank Bethesda for that, and this game.

However, I would like to point out one little thing now that I've said that. This quest never would have been possible if I had just followed the magic pizza slice. This quest would have been boring beyond belief if a magic arrow just popped up and told me where to find this "long lost" person. How dull would that have been? So anyway, I would like to encourage Bethesda to take this into consideration when creating their compass, markers, maps, and journal entries.

Some quests make sense having map markers. If an NPC says "hey, go to my house, here, and get this thing" then yes, obviously they would just show you on a map. But for these quests about finding people, or things, that have been lost for years or centuries... Bethesda, I beseech you, it ruins the magic when the compass just says OH HERE IT IS KTHX FOR PLAY GAME.

The little things make Skyrim very much worth it.

Yeah i done that quest too....tbh i didnt find it AS interesting :confused:

You probably used the GPS and went into tunnel vision, focusing on one thing and one thing only, the Quest Marker.


I totally feel what your talking about OP, there's no actual exploration in the quests unfortunately. (Besides those rare ones that make you feel awesome for actually accomplishing it with your own brain.) I think it's a problem with the attention span of people nowadays. Everyone wants to be hand-held through everything, and it takes away from the game and what quests actually should be, adventures.

I was hoping for a quest system much like that of Morrowind, where NPC's would give you actual directions to your quest, and they would be added to your Journal.

Here is an example, keep in mind that this is a Miscellaneous Quest and these are the Journal Entries


Example:

-The trader Athanden Girith claims he has been attacked by two Ashlanders, who robbed him and left him for dead.

-Girith claims that the Ashlanders have stolen his shipment of guar hides, and he would like my help in getting them back. If I can retrieve the stolen hides, his friend Berwen in Tel Mora will reward me well.

-Girith has described the Ashlanders that attacked him: "They looked kind of like a normal dark elf, but wild. They wore animal skins and had tattoos. And they had odd hair." This may not narrow down my search as much as I had hoped.

-I have agreed to try and hunt down the missing guar hides for Athanden Girith. It will be best to check with the local Ashlanders first.

-I've spoken to Ashlanders about the missing guar hides. They tell me that the two I am searching for are named Emul-Ran and Ilabael. They are outcasts, belonging to no Ashlander tribe. They can apparently be found camped south of the Ahemmusa camp, along the shore.



Notice how much substance is in this Miscellaneous quest from Morrowind. The act of actually using your brain to find the ones who stole this guys hide is very much rewarding because you feel as if you've accomplished something. If I only have a short amount of time to play this because of work or something else, I would very much rather be able to do 1 or 2 of these quests that actually involve your thinking mechanism, than do 10 or 15 "Go to point A, retrieve Sword/Item, Go to Point B", all the while a quest marker showing you the exact location of A, Sword/Item, and B. Obviously this is all just my opinion, but I believe I share these thoughts with some of the folks that have those great memories from Morrowind cemented into their memory for the rest of time. The sense of discovery is what makes these games so rewarding.


Add this detailed dialogue to a game like Skyrim, where the environment is x10 more immersive (obviously Morrowind's an old game and couldn't benefit from modern graphics), and it would give people some great moments and memories to look back on, and that's how TES will be defined for them.

Although, you are able to disable the Quest Marker's, the quest dialogue and journal entries are to vague and don't give you enough information to be able to play without it. A good middle ground would be to add the extra dialogue to the quests so folks can finish them on their own, and turn on the Quest Marker to aide them through the quest if they don't have the time or patience.


Unfortunately, this is up to the game developer to take the time to add that extra dialogue to the quests, and it seems that cut corners is what the masses like in their games now so this will most likely be overlooked.



I apologize for the length, I just felt I needed to voice my opinion on one of my favorite franchises. Thanks Bethesda for creating these worlds for us to live in.

I found that book recently - it's inside a shipwreck a little northeast of Winterhold. I found it recently, swimming around all the glaciers looking for neat easter eggs.

Actually, part of my problem, just running around randomly, not setting out to do quests is that I tend to start completing quests "accidentally".

When I was up and around the northern end of the map, I came across a cave, and figured I might as well clear it out. When I got in there, I found some female ghosts as well as the usual draugr undead. Unusual, but whatever, maybe it's part of a higher-level spawn chart. Then I come across some necromancer's journals, and suddenly, I've completed the third stage of some quest chain I've never heard of, and I'm now supposed to "return" to some guy I've never met. Looking it up to see what I'd missed later, it turns out this is some thieves' guild mission, and I haven't even been to Riften yet.

*sigh*

Now I'm actually a little scared to go into dungeons I come across - what if I'm not supposed to go in there until I get the right quest for it, and I'm missing the plot that gives that dungeon some sort of meaning? Apparently, just exploring and going wherever I want is the "wrong way to play the game" in Bethesda's eyes, now.

Yesterday, I got the very first description where to go in Skyrim, during the Perytie quest. It was really just one dialogue option and one sentence, but it made the whole experience that much more believable and interesting.

Yea. Ugh. I just stole a statue from some random house because it looked cool, and now I have an associated quest. My plan was to dump the statue in a lake just to spite the guy, and now I can't get rid of it at all.

Screw that. Let me break the game if I really want to. I swear to God Bethesda needs to change their "permanent quest item superglue" to a simple confirmation box. You try to get rid of a quest item and the game says "Are you sure? this looks important. Might want to hang on to it."

Give me the option, please. Please.

I could easily see the radiant AI keeping track of it, so that when you actually do get the quest, the game would be able to track down where it is now.

Something else about that shipwreck - when I first came to Winterhold... well, actually, when I first came to Winterhold, a dragon attacked right as soon as I stepped off the cart, and by "attacked", I mean, it kept circling for 10 minutes looking for a place to land, and beating its head against the nearby mountains before bouncing off while "flying" like a toy on a string, swinging around after it knocked into the scenery, while I zapped it with lightning. Yeah, fearsome creatures.

Then the jarl appeared out of thin air to gape at the dragon, but forced a conversation with me to complain about how much he didn't want me there because I wanted to see the college. A guard gaped at me and my swirling Highlander-style powerup sequence and declared "*gasp* You're dovakhiin!" turned around, took a couple steps, turned back around, and said, "Hey, maybe I'm the dragonborn, and I just don't know it yet." Radiant Story system, everyone!

Anyway, after that, I asked the jarl for a random quest, and he sent me out after some ancient helmet of nordish authority. I went exploring by accident after that because I found a neat chain of snowberries and some iron ore and wound up halfway to Dawnstar before finding a shipwreck that I noticed actually had the little quest marker thing for that helmet in a treasure chest next to a sleeping argonian. Since he was asleep, I just lifted that, and kept walking.

Later, after returning the helmet for whatever quest happy stuff I was supposed to get, I became thane of Winterhold, which means jack all, apparently, since I don't even get a faction icon or anything in a menu anymore, and noticed that the jarl was offering another job, so I asked about it. He wanted me to recover... the exact same helmet. But this time it was from a DIFFERENT shipwreck, so apparently, ancient nord kings always carried spares. I guess you have twice as much authority when you stack two horned helmets on top of each other or something.

So, I wound up jumping off the cliffs of the College of Winterhold some time later when exploring The Midden right after killing a dragon that had literally been sitting on the fountain in the middle of the college waiting for me to wake up from my nap in the college, instead of taking my introductory lesson at the College (which was the entire reason I had come to Winterhold so early in my game), and wound up at that other shipwreck where I found the second helmet by mistake, along with that quest book.

I honestly feel less like an epic hero and more like "Billy" from family circus with the craziest spaghetti of dotted lines going in every which way, accidentally saving the day before I even realize why I have a magic sword of ancient power in my backpack.

Welcome to the Morrowind style quests in Skyrim.

I hate quest target markers with a passion, because they result in lazy quest developers, who heavily depend on readily available target marker, on screen.

Morrowind had its fault, and some people had problem with finding the next quest targets in their quests, but I really loved that aspect of the game.

By the way, you can read http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1215202-bookworm-quests if interested.

Yes this. Only a few quests in skyrim have stuff like these; and i quite enjoyed doing them.Unfortunately most quests are "blahblah i need a book, and i happen to know its in that cave but me being an old and useless [censored] i cannot go so please fetch it for me thanks here is your reward of boring gold."

although to be fair it would be pretty hard to make every quest "investigative"...would it?

i had the same experience but i wasnt expecting it i often times like wandering the area seen a few wreckages near the ice but i never expected it when i found it although i ran across brand shei much earlier (was in riften alot at the time thieves guild quests)

I agree with you 100%. This is my exact opinion.

I love games with puzzles because I have to think. I love realistic games cause I can write my own adventure. I wish there could be a modern game that was both of these!

I think at the very least, developers should allow players the option of turning on/off quest markers. For me, I need quest markers simply because I don't have much time to spend playing the game during the week. Therefore, I need a little help getting to quest locations that way I would not spend my whole time playing just trying to find out where I have to go to kill some bandit leader lol.

I always turn off questmarkers anyways...walking to your next objective in a straight line kills it for me.

I play without compass and usually quest markers, but sadly the journal is too vague a lot of the time to really help in a lot of cases. I try to compensate with Clarevoyance and it works out most of the time, but it would be nice if there was some more investigating/exploring at some points.

As far as the quest log/journal is concerned, it's one of those things where I feel they could have done a lot better. They could have kept the short objective as a main focus of the journal, but there should be a bit more text to accompany it. Then combine that with being able to see older entries of said quest, so you could see all the old entries and end up with a huge extensive journal. I liked that about Morrowind and Oblivion and it's too bad it's not in Skyrim.

Why I turn off the arrow when I get to the dungeon entrance.

You do have the option. But the information given is usually too vague to find what you are looking for, unless you've been there before or had the location marked on your map for whatever reason.

If voice-acting is too expensive for NPCs to give you more details, then further conversations should be logged in your journal for you to read at your leisure. Then there could be two options - 1. Turn on quest markers and 2. Turn on detailed conversation in journal. If you loved exploring even if it took you hours to find what you needed, you could turn off both 1 and 2. If you liked Morrowind-style questing where you have to follow directions like "turn right at the red pile of stones and look for the dragon-shaped rock", you could turn on 2 and turn off 1. If you like it the way it is, i.e. you don't like reading and are happy just blindly following a magic pizza slice, you could just have 1. If you like Morrowind-style questing but have gotten a bit lost or are having trouble figuring things out, you could turn on both.

Anyway I just think this would make absolutely everybody happy and not be any work at all. Except for writing some dialogue which must be the least expensive part of the whole game-producing business.

The quest log doesn't deserve to be called a journal anymore IMO; it's now maybe one or two steps above the "objective log" you'd find in an FPS campaign, which is a shame, really. The MW journal was great, if a bit unorganized (but the Tribunal expansion pack did much to fix that). Did it really have to get scrapped completely? :confused: Oh well...

Back on topic: yeah, finding these little gems is great. It's too bad there aren't many of them.