/agree

:facepalm:
It's not optional.
Also, sometimes quests are designed around them.

Is that so hard to understand?

This. It should be up to the quest designer to find a happy balance, but mostly, if a note or something describes where you need to go, don't have one. If it's a moving object, or nothing tells you in details where it is, have one.

Using directions from Morrowind worked fine for me. I don't see why the character should automatically know were a single item is in a dungeon on the other side of the province is. A clairvoyance spell is ok in my book though.

this.

i'd rather read, and think about where i'm going. and get lost on the way probably. however, some people need a helping hand, and some people just want it.

Quest markers remove all sense of exploration and all statisfaction of finding something.
It reduces the game to a session of follow the arrow.

Now, with NPC's with schedules that move around I can see it would be handy to have a way to find those, but I really would prefer detailed directions to a static thing like an object or a cave than a magic GPS.

A toggle will only work if, unlike Oblivion, there actually exist directions in the world and quests arent just lazily written with the use of markers in mind.

I don't think there will be one. there wasn't one in the demo and they also had a spell to direct you to your current objective so i don't think it will be there.

Yes it is.

You people who want so much options make me so frustrated. :sadvaultboy:

So far I seen 3 thinstoggleable HUD, finishing moves and a hardcoe mode

Yep thats the entire game right there how dare those who want to personalize their games

Wheres the I don't care either way option?

This is not was options are meant for. How many games have you played? How many times of those games have you clicked the "Options" button?

Don't consider myself a hardcoe RPGer, and me not wanting a quest marker has nothing to do with skill....... has to do more about exploration and not getting tunnel vision.

I'd prefer not having quest markers for undescovered locations..... now if they just marked the map, meaning no red point in the compass, just on the map then I'd be happy too.

umm.. let me see

Crysis: Change the color of your entire HUD and even change type of crosshair

Minecraft lets you remove the HUD in a click of a button as well as see your FPS

Every MMORPG I have played gives you COMPLETE control of huds from scale, to opacity to hiding each individual part.

Battlefield 2-2142 gave you an option to customize your HUD to opacity and each section from Crossahir to mini map and squad list current weapon.

I can go on but whats the use.. your dead set for some reason actually thinking a HUD or even removing an automatic animation changes the entire game in every aspect that you have an option to turn on or off. Yet you go on about using mods? thats what I find strange about you being against options being built in game

The ony reason they needed the Quest marker in Oblivion is because they used voice acting. In Morrowind they could just give you a wall of textual directions to follow and hey presto. No QM required. No voice actor would want to sit there saying "Turn left at the bog tree"For every single quest. But I think they could get around this by Quest givers saying "Let me write the directions down in that journal of your".

Since they have shown a Dragon Shout(or was it a spell? I don't remember.) that gives you a trail to follow to go through dungeons, I would hope that could work for quest objectives as well and if you don't want to use it you don't have to.

Yes. I'm a hardcoe RPG player and don't see why it should be removed, when you're never actually forced to use it. If you're really that fed up with the fact that Bethesda is trying to make their game slightly more accessible so they can be more successful and make better games, then just don't ever use the Quest Marker. Just read the quests details and figure out where to go on your own like Morrowind and every TES game before it.

There's more than one thread floating around about HUD, Compass or what ever. Should it be on / off / optional...bla, bla, bla...They're all coming down to the same thing...options.

Why anybody would be against the idea of player choice is absurd.

How complex can it be to program an option to toggle something on or off. It's either a 1 or a 0. A 1 and it triggers the effect/display. A 0 and it cancels it. It's not like it's adding a lot of content. The more options the game gives the player, to customize the game to his / her playstyle, the larger audience the game will reach. The larger sales. The larger profits.

The thing is even if you have that quest as active, you don't have to finish it, you don't always have to follow the marker.

Follow it, find something else in the meanwhile, get sidetracked, do that other thing, return back to the quest.
THAT is exploration.


No, if they could've just shown you on the map they would've done that in Morrowind too.

Just like in Daggerfall...

Not shown you in the map, written own directions in your journal, such as, "Head to Chorrol, exit at west gate blahblahblah"

I like that spell already. It looks pretty.

Also, this.

In my opinion, they need some sort of assistance system. Like the OP, I read all the text and listen to the scripts, but at the end of the day it gets tedious having to review those things repeatedly -especially if you save and come back- and I like having a marker reminding me where to go.
Having said that, I don't think that markers need to give us the exact, clairvoyant (excuse the pun) location of our objectives. Dungeon locations or exterior entrances certainly, but not which doors to go through, and the exact location of an NPC. I'd like some sort of target area that we are directed to ala Assasin's Creed.
Not having markers is the primary reason that I could never get into Morrowind after loving Oblivion so much. I just don't have the time when I sit down to play to read and reread all of my conversations to keep track of what I'm supposed to be doing.

I liked the missions in OB that guided you to say, the town/dungeon/general area where the objective was, and made you figure out the rest

Ideally, I'd prefer directions rather than quest markers. However, given that there's only so much dialogue in the game (given voice-acting), I prefer quest markers over directions. Why? Because I'd rather that the dialogue be used on story, lore, rumours, and so on. One hour of voice-acted directions to dungeons could instead be one hour of voice-acted dialogue about Skyrim's civil war, its history, its culture, or whatever. I'll take the latter, thank you very much.

As for the purported downsides of quest markers: I never experienced this "tunnel vision" in Oblivion. The hand-holding came more from the patronising quest pop-ups - "Ok, Earana has asked me to find a book. What, the game is telling me to tell the Mages Guild head about this? Can't I work out whether I want to do that for myself?"

The only thing I'd prefer not to have are quest markers that track (i) item location, and (ii) travelling NPCs. For travelling NPCs, just give me a marker for a particularly salient fixed location, such as their house. If they aren't there, let me ask around to find out where they might be instead.

Had a good discussion about quest markers in another thread.

The issue with telling people that theyre easily ignorable is the fact that you get little to zero direction dialogue to go along with the marker half the time....so if you dont have the marker youre basically out of luck...

I personally prefer not having markers at all and id rather them add in the direction dialogue to all quests so that we actually CAN ignore them or turn them off

id much prefer say, an example from morrowind, go southeast until you hit this foyada, head south following the side of the mountain, turn west once you see this tall stone column, this secret cave will be on your right in the side of a small hill, if you hit fort blahbity blah then youve gone too far....youre constantly checking everywhere and taking it slow looking for all the landmarks/directions youve been given and you stumble upon random caves/people looking for help that are in the odd places youre looking) and make markers optional.

Something like that appeals more to me than talk to guy, zero directions, quest marker pops. And because of the zero directions you have no choice but to rely on markers.


A good compromise i think would be to have quest markers appear for areas that are widely known to the public....and for the quests that take you out into the wilderness into barely travelled territory you should have to rely on dialogue and direction to get there.

Agreed that one could not ignore the quest markers if one wanted to find a particular quest location.

But there is also a further issue where the "just ignore it" point was made. Some people have suggested that quest markers are bad because they discourage exploration - you get too fixated on the quest marker, and you don't deviate from that quest path to do some random exploring. In response, one can simply ignore the quest marker - that is, ignore the marker on the compass. You may find this more or less easy to do. It seems like some people couldn't resist following the quest marker, despite not wanting to. I never had a problem ignoring the quest marker, however. :shrug: