So I got to thinking. Bethesda has too much of a casual audience now to just revert 100% back to Morrowind style mechanics. Don't take offense to the term "casual." I'm not tossing it around in a derogatory way, but it's true. TES is now contending with other casual mainstream games like BF and COD, and a large majority of Skyrim's crowd are casual gamers. hardcoe fans are upset with some of the "casualization" changes to the series.

One of the biggest complaints is the lack of immersion when it comes to exploring. Quest markers and the map of Skyrim come up a lot.

• Quest markers just tell you where to go with no real exploration needed.
  
• The map of Skyrim is basically the game world zoomed out, so there are no more terrain surprises. You can't ascend hills to see a beautiful view you weren't expecting or something, etc.
  
• Little items that you have to find within dungeons/forts/ruins/etc have arrows that lead you directly too them, reducing the need to even creatively hide anything.

Perhaps those three things are what kill the feeling of exploration for most hardcoe fans of the series who have been with it for a long time (myself included).

So, what can we do to allow casual play-styles to persist whilst allowing a sense of exploration to return to the TES franchise for some of the older fans of the series? Read all of these suggestions before you comment, because they work in tandem with each other.

• Add a toggle for quest markers. You can toggle them on or off. Include two separate toggles - one for the marker that leads you to the location and one for markers that lead you to people or things within the location (such as finding items and what not).
  
• Since it is an option to have those markers on or off, creatively hide things like you did in Morrowind (took me forever to find that damn scroll under the wardrobe that Ajira needed in the Mages Guild in Balmora). If you get frustrated after looking for a long time, flip the markers on. Most hardcoe players that are absolutely against that will just keep it off (myself included).
  
• Revert the map style in the next game back to an Oblivion-style map. It's literally just a piece of parchment, not a zoomed out view of the entire province. This will lead to more surprises as you walk through the lands of the next TES game. Mountains/hills/valleys/rivers/forests will all surprise you as you walk through the world.
  
  • Heck, perhaps even have different maps that you can buy from merchants. They would be drawn with proportions slightly different (but not too different) and might even be a little biased (if you buy one from an Argonian in Black Marsh, it might have Black Marsh as being a bigger province than the Imperial version of the same map). Someone suggested that cartography and map-making could be a skill, but I'm not going to think about how to implement such a thing for the purposes of this thread.
• The big one: NPC quest directions, voicing, notes, etc. A lot of you probably asked when you read point #1, "How would you find anything because the way quests are given to you in Oblivion/Skyrim almost require quest markers." Good question. It's a simple solution, that comes in multiple steps.
  
  • Don't change anything about the voice acting. Simply have the NPC slip a paragraph long description of how to get to the quest location. Stop right there - I've heard the arguments against this, "Why can't the NPC just mark your map?" The NPC can mark your map, which is why, for hardcoe players, I'm taking it one step further (see next point).
    
  • Add a toggle to remove your character marker from the main map. From a realistic perspective, NPCs can mark your map which is more efficient than giving you notes. But in real life, they would mark the map AND give you defining terrain features around the area because they wouldn't have access to a zoomed out version of the world where they can just look at where the dungeon is. In this way, the player would have to figure out where he is in the gameworld and then use that information combined with a compass to figure out where to go. When combined with the fact that the game map wouldn't just blatantly show you every terrain feature, it would make the written notes from the NPCs all the more valuable. People give directions like this in real life all the time (well, before GPS anyways, but the TES world hasn't invented the GPS yet). They'd often say to go here, maybe mark it on a road map if you have it, but they'd say things like, "You should pass a Burger King and a Dominoes on the right side, there will be a Best Buy shortly after that" and that's what kept you reassured.

I think these implementations are easy and a win-win for casuals and hardcoes alike. Casuals can just play with markers on at all times and never worry about getting lost. People who want some more exploration thrown in can remove their character's marker from the map, read notes from NPCs, and get lost because the game world map doesn't show you what terrain features might be in the way of you and your quest objective. I think being able to play without your character being displayed on the map would actually be a more realistic way of playing than any of the TES games have provided thus far.

Thoughts?