i find this funny because in my thread on voice acting i voice similar opinions to yours on directions/markers

one of the replies was



rofl

yeah i cant understand how someone could think that reading and interpreting directions is hard in any sense of the word.

I don't think running around and getting into every dungeon just so you could see it is the searched dungeon or not should take most of the time to complete the quest...

And another thing, why do everybody always presume a quest marker would mean you have to follow it, disregarding everything else.
Even if you only look at the marker, other areas still show up on the compass, so you can always go there explore those as well, sidetracking yourself if you want to.
And why would it also mean that it shows the perfect way? It only shows the destination, not the entire way. There's rarely a clear, straight path to the destination, there's always something in the way, be it a natural boundary, like a lake or a mountain, or a group of enemies you have to fight trough.
If you think the quest arrow limits your gameplay and it's just some sort of carrot you HAVE to follow, it is because you made it into it.

And on the whole getting lost thing... I never actually got lost in Morrowind either. That's because, it's not the quest arrow's fault, but the GPS map's fault that you always know where you are.
The stacks of free intervention scrolls also helped...

The only times i really would like a quest marker (or even round, shaded AREA indicator telling me where i should go) is for when times the quest giver tells you:
"Go find Mike and tell him..."

Then trying to find mike all over each city you get similar reactions from EVERYONE but ONE person:
"Mike, he's a really nice fellow; i heard he even saved a mudcrab!"

I don't think any of that is an argument against quest markers. There are two arguments there, but they are against two different things. The first is an argument against being given very specific locations for where to go; the second is an argument against poor quest design.

On the first point: the reason why the directions don't take you to that tomb is because they are too unspecific. More specific directions would rule out those other tombs. Suppose instead the directions were "family tomb west side of the river just south of Balmora. It is the second tomb you'll come across after you pass the kwama egg mine on that side of the river." No need to explore the first tomb you come across then, since you know that's not the quest related one. Does this make directions bad because you might miss out on what's in the first tomb? Of course not! I deny that there is any clear connection between how you are told where to go for quests (directions vs. quest markers) and how this encourages or discourages exploration.

On the second point: we can put aside how that quest actually went (you know to go that tomb because that is the last name in a book of recent deaths in the Imperial City). The issue here is the quest arrow conveying information to you that your character could not plausibly have gotten. There's a kind of disconnect between the information given to you, the player, versus the information that your character could plausibly have. But again, this is not really an argument against quest markers. It's rather an argument against bad quest design. The same problems could arise with directions. For instance, an NPC could give you very unspecific directions, but the game updates your journal with very precise directions.



Directions would be voice-acted, presumably. So they take up a lot more room. You might think that the space taken up by dialogue is better spent on story and lore and stuff like that.



It is possible that people want quest arrows for reasons other than hand-holding. I've provided such reasons. Furthermore, all this talk about quest markers pointing you "directly to where you are supposed to go", and as having "no exploration, no reading, no critical thinking" is just hollow rhetoric. Directions also point you directly where you are supposed to go (that's what makes them directions!); furthermore, quest markers do not necessarily discourage exploration (as I've argued above); quest markers require different, not less, critical thinking to directions, since you still need to consider whether you'll take the road, cut through the wilderness, take a detour via a town, and so on; and the fact that you need to read directions is hardly a praiseworthy feature of directions.



I think that's misrepresenting Scow's point. The point was about efficiency and economy of dialogue. It wasn't about the amount of words, per se. It was about the amount of content relative to the amount of words. Take two bits of text, where one is twice as long as the other, yet both have the same content. Why would I prefer the longer one? Just because it has more words? That seems a bit silly. If anything, it seems like the second is preferable, because it gets to the point quicker.

(Note: some people like to trivialise this, by saying that people who like to "get to the point" are "mindless action-gamers" or something like that. Now that's a strawman if I've ever seen one. One could be the sort of Elder Scrolls fan who likes to read all the books and read/listen to all the dialogue, yet nevertheless like economy and efficiency in writing. The point is not about wanting the game to put you on rails to your quest goals, but rather just a little point about writing style.)

What is your argument exactly with the quest marker?

In the fort blueblood quest, you *could* ignore the quest marker completely and go north of Leyawiin searching for the ruin.

But when you do that, the quest marker is south of you. You know by extension that the location you have to find is south of you. You *know* you are going the wrong way. For me personally, there's absolutely no way that I can fool myself into thinking that I am still doing the quest when I know that I am on completely the wrong path to success.

I believe that what you are saying is that if I don't think the quest arrow limits my game play, then I will search for fort Blueblood in the vicinity of Bruma, knowing full well that it is on the other side of the map, but thinking that the fact that I am deliberately playing the game poorly to make it more difficult somehow makes the game more worthwhile.

The problem with quest markers is that they don't show you the perfect way, and instead show you the As the Crow Flies route. The lack of dialog in the game means that there is no way to work out the perfect route other than experimenting. Remember the Assassin in the Jeralls quest for the Dark Brotherhood? I found the most effective way to complete that quest was to jump on Shadowmere, ride up the hill and over it, then dominate the camp's inhabitants and ride away again. Because of the quest markers (as well as the landscape's accessibility and also the compass markers) in Oblivion I did not actually use a lot of the intended routes to places because they were often windy and gave me no indication of where I needed to go. Whereas the quest marker/compass marker gave me the exact location, so I just hit set myself up in the right direction and hit autorun. A few tangential comments in this post.

When people say "I got lost in Morrowind", I believe that most of the time they mean that they thought they were going the right way but it turned out that they were wrong.
.

I'll take one if they got it, or they directly pointed out where to go.

Example, in my DnD campaigns, the characters know things that the player won't, like how to get to the market, or a secret entrance they found on a map. I don't make the players make stupid, common sense mistakes and other things with out letting them know, like if they were going to pickup a pendant from a dark priest, if they character knew it would be a bad idea, of light up a touch in a hallway already lit.

Likewise, if the npc says "he's in the smith shop over there" then I should know where the smith shop is because it was just pointed out.

But if a treasure I need is hidden in a near by cave, I might only know where that cave is, and how to get back but not the location of said treasure.

Did you not find that choosing a different quest as active helped with that?



You might think that is a virtue of quest markers: you have to find the way yourself. You see the quest marker and you say to yourself "Ok, so I have to head roughly NNW"; then you look at the map to see what roads might take you roughly in that direction, etc. Of course, you could run dead straight at the marker. But that's your choice; I don't think the marker is to blame for that.

I don't like the marker. I enjoy finding the quest location/objective myself. I just hope they give good directions in Skyrim so I can turn quest markers off or just disable the quest.

Gives us the OPTION to turn off quest markers. Those that like them may have them enabled. Those that hate them may have them disabled. And everybody wins.

In spite of all the countless hours I spent wandering around aimlessly in Morrowind, I have to take that over Oblivion's guided tour. I just think satellite GPS and the ability to fast travel from anywhere for free cheapen the experience of exploring, finding, and discovering that I so loved about Morrowind.

Yes, the directions were vague. Yes, it often felt like a massive waste of time. Yes, you walked past the thing fifteen times while looking for it just to the left of where it was. But you discovered countless secrets in the world along the way. You came to familiarize yourself with the places you were exploring, and how they were interconnected. And most of all, you actually had to think.

yep, that would be what everyone agrees with but some think turning it off makes the game an entirly different then Beth wanted it and its WAY!!! to complicated to change a 1 to a 0 in the ini file

No, I didn't, because after choosing different quest as active the game I encountered the problem that the available information in game gave me little to no information as to where I actually had to go during the quest, because without the quest marker in a lot of quests there was no information being presented to the player. (I also had the annoyance factor of a quest marker pop up on the screen saying "Do you want to make this your active quest" every time I fluked progress). Most fun quests I ever did were the Dark Brotherhood ones (where to "perfectly" complete them the information was available in dialog and the quest marker didn't necessarily help) and the quest-targetless ones in Pale Pass.

I don't think that is a virtue of quest markers. What roads are there on the map? In the middle of the wilderness there are no roads marked on the world map, and the local map is hidden by a fog of war. Not to mention that the road which takes me roughly in that direction from Bruma (East) actually goes northish for quite a distance, circles back on itself and comes into the location from the west side. It's simpler, easier and quicker not to take a road which has a very high probability of being the wrong road and just pop right up over the hill.
I'm even going to completely ignore the fact that I already know the destination, and so any detour I make along the way to that destination is entirely deliberate and thereby pointless. Why would you search in the wilderness for an alternate route to take when you already know what the shortest distance that you can travel is? The compass/quest marker is to blame for that.

Right, I forgot about the lack of alternative methods.

But now I'm not entirely sure what bothered you about that Leyawiin quest. Either your character is given directions or not. If not, then your character doesn't really know where the fort is. So you might as well choose a different active quest, and just generally search around Leyawiin until you stumble across the fort. On the other hand, if your character is given directions, you might think the quest marker is just standing in for those directions (and so she then marked the fort on her map, and so she might as well have a compass pointing her in the right direction).

This is not to deny that there are other differences between quest markers and directions. But I'm not really seeing it in the case you mentioned.



I guess what I meant to say was that the quest marker isn't telling you to travel to the quest location in a straight line. The quest markers tells you what direction the quest location is. It's up to you what path to take. You can be more or less indirect, as you please.

Sure, the more indirect path might be "deliberate", but I'd hardly consider that "pointless" or otherwise bad. You might deliberately take a detour via a town to replenish supplies, repair items, talk to someone or other. Or you might wander throughout the wilderness because it's a part of the map you haven't really seen yet. There are lots of good reasons for not heading straight for the arrow. There seems to be some sort of implicit suggestion floating around in these discussions that a major reason for not getting straight to your quest goal is getting somewhat lost in the world, and having to struggle a little to find out where you are and where you need to be. I do not want to say that these people are wrong to enjoy the feeling of getting lost in the world. But what I do want to say is that there are other reasons for not heading straight to your quest goal (the ones I mentioned). While a quest arrow might prevent you from getting lost, it doesn't undermine those other reasons for not heading straight to your quest goal.

I personally never felt the compulsion to let the quest arrow railroad me in the game, so I'm somewhat bemused by the seemingly large number of people who felt that the quest arrow gave them "tunnel vision". It just seems to me that it's entirely up to you, the player, to control the path you take to your destination.

Your argument is somewhat invalidated by the fact that you can simply fast travel to the nearest major town, all of which are revealed on the map from the outset and do not need to be discovered, and then just walk straight to the objective, be it a cave or fort or whatever, because the entire world is nothing but hills, which can be easily traversed with minimal detouring. Then fast travel back to the questgiver when you're done.

And that's assuming you haven't discovered the quest location already, in which case you can instantly travel straight to the fort, do the quest, and teleport straight back.

I get what you're saying, but going out of the way to pretend you can't do everything incredibly easily is just masochistic.

I don't see how this invalidates the argument I was making. To a large extent fast travel is orthogonal to directions vs. quest markers.

What you seem to be pointing out is how easy it was in Oblivion to get to your quest location, and pointing out the contribution fast travel made to that. I do not dispute that. All I was saying is that the quest arrow does not force you to take the quickest or most direct route to the quest location. Let there be fast travel. You do not have to use it to get to where the quest arrow is pointing.

I agree that taking detours and exploring the world are a large part of making the game enjoyable. But I deny that not being distracted by the quest arrow is "pretending" or "going out of my way" or "masochistic". I don't even feel the temptation to just head straight for the quest location. Finding my own path to the quest location is just a routine part of the game, for me. So I say that letting yourself get distracted by the quest arrow is being masochistic .

Issue with Leyawiin quest is that the quest marker clearly shows where the fort is, but in your journal you see "I should search around Leyawiin for the fort" and those are the only directions given. My issue with the Leyawiin quest is that last point - because of the riddle you are given they really have an opportunity to do a quest reminiscent of one of the quests in the Morrowind main quest, and so it provides the potentially most exploration driven quest without quest markers. For me, "close to Leyawiin" would be up to half the distance from Bravil and Leyawiin, and I would search in a circle that large. That's a fairly large chunk of game world that you have to search. In planning the search for that quest I personally would have looked at the map and my preference would be to search in the clockwise direction. So I would have gone north up the river (checking for a fort guarding against approaches to Imperial City + Eleswyr Border), then circle back down south along the river with the Argonian homeland's border. The key word there is "would have". I would have done all of that if a map marker hadn't been added to my map already, and so in checking the map to do some planning I find that in fact, the fort is there and now I have a quest target again, like it or not, with absolutely no effort put into solving the riddle on my part.



Addressing the second part of your post, I guess I'm a very narrow minded thinker. See, when I am doing a quest, that is my primary objective. So a replenishment run to a town, if necessary, has already been done and in setting off from civilisation into the wilderness I am now firmly engaged on doing whatever quest I may be doing. Likewise, the deliberately indirect path is pointless if you have no reason to leave the route. This applies to the majority of the people in the pro-quest targets group. Often they explain that the presence of a quest target means that they can get on and complete a quest during a limited play session and therefore spend 30 minutes playing the game and get somewhere in that time, rather than spending the time wandering frustratingly around the wilderness thinking that they had gone completely the wrong way, like they would have done in Morrowind.

As to the exploration thing, I am lost myself. I'll come back to this in an hour or two, or a day or two.

My biggest problem was their would be the worlds north south east and west. Which ending me pausing the game every 5 mins to check the big map to see what dirrection I was going. They have very good directions but no real way to tell where you where going. I think alot of people are wanting quest markers because they only have like 2 hours to play and did not want to waste them.

To people wanting quest markers. Go play another game. This is an RPG. It means Role Playing game. The markers kills role play. You know why. Cause it removes your abilty to choose what to do. Morrowind had many many quest that not only had one option but 3 - 5 different ways to could do something.

I can not tell you how many time I stumbled across a quest that had a good evil and netraul option. Which made me stop and think. How do I want to do this. Remember this is your story not the devs story.

The quest markers to me is like the Devs saying. "What wrong stupid? Can you not read? Do you not know how to read a map? Do not like having freedom to do thing your way? Well it ok. We will take away all the thinking and roleplay."
There already talk about Elder Scroll 6. This one. The final boss is waiting out side of jail for you to come and kill him with your iron weapon. Cause he takes 10000% more damage when hit with a weapon made out of iron.

I don't need big bold arrows telling me where everything is, but a little direction and help finding random places is always nice.

Quest Markers are the bane of the TES series.

No, really. Just give me a damn option.

I didnt find it difficult to stay in one heading after looking at the map one initial time.

"wanting quest markers because they only have like 2 hours to play and did not want to waste them. "

Thats is definitely true as its been many many peoples excuse for loving markers.....oh as well as....not having to read so many words. Moving to the casual.

Or how about what was said in the Oblivion interview: They don't intend certain things to be a puzzle. If something had a quest marker, they didn't think finding it was a big part of the quest.

I strongly oppose ridiculous "casual" generalizations. Regardless, the poll obviously wasn't constructed seriously so I won't vote on that. The thread itself is more interesting. I think you should definitely be able to disable the quest markers. The fact they have pointed out that NPCs give directions and can point you down a road in the proper direction sounds great.

since everything was pointed out by quest markers in oblivion that would mean that everything was not a big part of the quest. so long as they have detailed written/spoken directions and i can disable the baby pointer im happy. im a big boy.