The purpose of this poll is to (hopefully) tell the Beth Devs the way the players feel about the infamous "Journal". In my experience, I favored the Morrowind journal, (I am guessing because it actually felt like you were reading a book) over the Oblivion one. Even though the journal is not that important to game play, I did find it important for the immersion aspect. Out of all of these options, I would greatly prefer "Both" over the rest.


What do you guys want?

That wouldn't work on consoles, because typing would take about half an hour to put in 5 words.

I would just use the normal, automatic journal and if I need to take notes on my own. Although I doubt I would need to, since Oblivion's style of journal did not really need any additional information. Morrowind you needed to keep track on your own a little bit, but they seem to be going away from all that.

I would love to be able to write my own Journal. I could be RPing an evil Necomancer with a grudge against Khajiti and the journal entry would be "I met a kind Khajit today who lost his mushrooms" when instead it should be "Today I was pestered by one of those foul cat creatures".

agreed on a console you have to scroll to each letter. it sounds like a great idea until you actually have to do it and type all of the letters so i would only use the automatic one. i probably wouldn't even do the note taking one ethier because the keyboard on a 360 is so inconvienient.

There's keyboards available.

Personally, I'd like to have both. In addition, I'd also like to be able to tack notes onto my map.

That'd be amazing... Writing your own journal. You could do anything with it.

They should allow you to have purchasable books with finite pages to write in so you can have journals, notepages, books, etc. that you've written.

This is a bit off topic, but I always thought it would be cool if the details/notes in your journal and your map were directly influenced by your Intelligence. The smarter you are, the more detailed your map is and your journal will get you closer to your objective.

wasn't there a manual notes feature in morrowind? or was that only with one of the official expansions?............................................. or am i just crazy?

Daggerfall's journal at least had the presence of mind to remove old and useless data once the associated quests and whatnot were completed, so Morrowind's "Jesus Christ where the hell out of these 72 pages did I put that info about the main quest" rendition of the thing can go get stuffed.

Arcanum did this in a similar way. The more/less intelligent you were, the less/more coherent your journal entry would be. It was especially fun if playing an average intelligence character, getting drunk, taking quests, and noticing the quality of the information written in your journal.




It was a mod. Morrowind Enhanced: Journal



At least Tribunal brought the Quest-tab in the journal. Still, some not quest-related notes would not be classified.


As for the topic at hand, I always prefer to have the game update the journal for me. Having a manual journal would be way too much hassle. But I always love to take personal notes, such as recipes, so if we could write entries in our journal it would be great!

And please Beth, no more "I should do this" "I should do that" "I'll have to do this before that happens". Less hand-holding in the journal please. Let us think by ourselves.

I would like both since I play on PC and on 360 but being able to write down notes on consoles would be VERY unpractical.

Yeah, but who actually uses them? And would anyone really use one just to type in some information?

Pen and paper still work pretty well.

Troika>Black Isle and Obsidian...or maybe just Obsidian, but I loved Arcanum and Vampire.

This.

Not if you have a keyboard with a USB plug in thingy.

You can use one like that on The Sims 3 console version for writing biographies for sims.

Why would you need a manual journal? Isn't that what scribbling things down in a notepad is for?

Oblivion's journal was a gigantic, skyscraqer-sized improvement over Morrowind's, and I see little need for it to be radically changed. Being able to annotate your map could be kind of neat though.

I believe they did try and get books that you could actually write in in Oblivion, but it never worked

just keep a biro and pad next to your console.

I took many long hand notes when doing the oblivion main quest... the code in the 4th mythic dawn book the in game journal could not expand.

both

I want a PDA for Skyrim.

I like the idea of an Oblivion style journal that supports player commentary.

As has been said, all of the consoles have USB ports and as such could use USB keyboards.

people certainly don't seem to mind using them to type "your [censored] hacker i [censored] you [censored] mom you [censored] [censored] play me 1v1 in halo i [censored] you mother [censored]".

i voted for both. i also want the game's journal entries to be REALLY [censored] GOOD because the journal entries in Morrowind and Oblivion were boring as hell. i haven't seen good journal entries in a game since Baldur's Gate and it's horribly depressing.