Maybe an option to turn off quest markers?

:toughninja:

Actually the Flynn Effect shows that we are getting smarter with each generation, it's not that people can't understand it, it's that they just don't want to deal with it, because it is quite tedious work.

Personally I don't care, but it sure as hell needs to be more better than morrowind, and Oblivion, but at least in Oblivion the quest markers overwrote the errors.

I find your list highly selective.

- Discovering places of interest is irrelevant to quest markers. Actually, when I searched in morrowind, I was focused on the finding where I needed to go that I ignored anything which was not that which I was looking for.

- Becoming lost is irrelevant to making do with what you brought with you, you always have to make do with what you brought with you.

- Encountering other quests along the way, is irrelevant to whether you have quest markers or not.

- You feel like the world is bigger than it actually is if you have obstacles in the way, it has nothing to do with quest markers.

- Keeping you wits about you is irrelevant to quest markers, quest markers doesn't tell you what you will encounter.

- No, finding the quest will get easier, I guess they will actually have to make the actual quests themselves challenging, instead of making finding them "challenging", finding the quests in morrowind wasn't really challenging, and when it was, it was because of the inability to discus vague direction, and weird map.

I hope they're out. Quest Markers ruins so much suprise and exploration for me, TES series would be better without 'em. (And no, I'm not some diehard Morrowind fan.)

In my opinion

OK, My experience with Quest & POI Markers, combined with Fast Travel:

• Talk to the quest giver.
  
• Skip the spoken details because I know there would be quest marker in the end.
  
• Look at the map and find the nearest visited place to the quest target, and click on it to teleport there.
  
• Follow the red and green "Compass Carrots" until I reach the quest target.
  
• Ignore the always similar challenges from the foes in the way, or deal quickly with them as I'm always ahead of them because of efficient leveling.
  
• Quickly deal with the quest target.
  
• Open the map and jump back to the quest giver.
  
• Rinse and repeat.
  
• By the way I would know all the interesting places a mile around me because of POI markers on the compass, so no surprises here.
  
• Complete detachment from the environment and no immersion in Oblivion.

OK, My Morrowind experience:

• Talk to the quest giver.
  
• Keep a mental image of the direction detail given by the quest giver.
  
• Finish the conversation and open the map and refer to notes to see the available routes toward the probable target place.
  
• Define a mental course of action that would help me reach the quest target place.
  
• Start the journey and get help from in-game traveling services whenever possible and cost effective.
  
• When in the route, look at the quest notes, and look keenly around to catch probable landmarks that was mentioned in the notes.
  
• Look warily around for a probable deadly and dangerous foe to avoid or deal with.
  
• Look intensely around to take pleasure in the unique vista of Morrowind, and probable hand placed loot in a corner.
  
• Get immersed in the game, because I'm following my quest notes, looking around the scene, for guidance, dagger and loot, and there would be no compass carrot to detach me from the environment.
  
• Stumble upon an interesting looking dungeon and decide to try it before my previous target.
  
• ...
  
• Find interesting and unique loot in odd places in the newly found dungeon.
  
• Exit the dungeon and start again to follow the direction of the quest giver.
  
• Reach a mine that I would decide was the place that the quest giver meant for me to enter.
  
• Enter the place and follow the tunnels around the cavern complex of the abandoned mine, until I reach the actual quest target.
  
• Deal with the quest detail, and either retreat my steps, or cast a spell to jump out of the place.
  
• Consider the place of the quest giver, and define a mental route to reach the place, and start the journey.
  
• Encounter another interesting event or place, and so on...
  
• In the end, do not loose my immersion in the great game scenes, and always look keenly around for landmarks, loot and danger.
  
• Morrowind was one of the best and more immersive RPG experiences of my life.

- Discovering places of interest is relevant to quest markers - on my way to Balmora I got lost and ended up in um..
Yeah you don't need to know where I ended up.... Lets just say that I ended up closer to Urshilaku camp than to Balmora and leave it at that...
- By extension being lost means that you are a distance from a supplier, that you could run out of say, repair hammers, and not be able to repair your gear, or run into a situation that you didn't imagine (e.g. go and clear out that bandit cave for me. Player becomes lost and wanders into a daedra shrine in the vague hope that the people there will give him some directions, only to find out that they well, won't.)
- You feel like the world is bigger than it actually is if actually have to find your way along roads and with landmarks, rather than the "Second quest marker to the left and straight on til morning" approach that Oblivion encouraged.
- Truth. Quest markers ... Yeah undeniably true.
- A quest is "A journey towards a goal". The journey towards the location is part of the quest. Not killing some random monsters spawned in the dungeon (or, as the more efficient way to complete the quest, running past them, reaching your objective, killing or collecting that, eradicate necessary obstacle preventing you from returning to quest giver and returning to said person, avoiding enemies as you return.) Would you care to explain how the quest to find the Cavern of the Incarnate only begins once you have found the Cavern of the Incarnate?

The directions I found in Morrowind were pretty accurate and useful if you actually followed them. There were three exceptions: Dwemer Puzzle Cube, plus two quests where completely inaccurate directions were given, and if you followed them you were screwed. Those are the only three quests given as examples that had weird directions and probably did need a quest marker. No other quests are given as examples. If anything, Dwemer Puzzle Cube was a victim of a bad dungeon design - the object was placed by the boss but I know that I needed a walkthrough to find that room. After that, no walk through required.

If you find his argument selective, would you care to add something to the Quest Markers side?

I don't like auto quest markers. Becаuse you just go straight to line and don't look around don't feel yourself like you are explorer. Don't aver remember path, only because you stare to compass marker.
But i want set markers by my self. Like M&M8. Mark places where I was. Or where interesting NPC or quest givers live. When it all automatic, you have so many markers that you don't need at all.

My experience pretty much. Agree fully :foodndrink:

That's not http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FakeDifficulty.

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Only thing that bugs me about the whole "compass" discussion is that people just keep saying "Compass" for everything, even though there are four issues:

1) The Compass - tells you what direction you're facing. Only the craziest people say they don't want this.

2) Points Of Interest - tells you when there's dungeons/etc nearby.

3) Quest Markers - tells you which way to go

4) Enemy Markers - tells you where the enemies are


...personally, I don't think there's going to be enemy markers (at least I hope not). They made sense in Fallout 3 because your character had a "Perception" stat which represented how well HE could see stuff - having an in-game representation of that is fine. Also, most enemies in that game had ranged attacks - some additional warning that they were nearby was appropriate.

Points of Interest.... I like them. They aid exploring, by giving you hints of ways to go.... otherwise, there's alot of locations that many players would never have found, given how bumpy/etc the terrain is. And wasted content is..... a waste. Also, Fallout 3 showed that even with PoI markers, there can still be unmarked locations to find - there were plenty of sewers, shelters, and buildings that weren't given PoI markers. So, plenty of places to find with hints, but still places that you can search out - best of both worlds. (it was kind of annoying finding some of those extras, since the only way to tell a sewer grate you can enter from one you can't was by constantly looking at the Local Map with door symbols. Really broke the flow of gameplay.... which, honestly, is a good arguement for not having unmarked locations.)

Quest Markers..... the didn't bother me in Oblivion. They certainly didn't "stop me from exploring" (one of the more popular complaints after "hand holding")..... I do think they'd be better if they just led to the entrance of a dungeon, and not to the actual target within it. It would make more sense - you've been told where the dungeon is on your map, the arrow just meta-represents the fact that your character can refer to the map & compass and know he needs to go that way. Also, with more mountainous terrain, there may be more quests like Morrowind, where you can't just walk straight to it, you need to go around ridges, through valleys, etc.... rather than the Cyrodil "we're in a big bowl" ability to walk straight to almost any quest marker.

Yes, the POI markers were there, but there were no quest markers as far as I could tell.

But will clairvoyance really feel that realistic? I mean, how does it even work? Is it like, "I need to find x", so it shows you the way to x?

Todd stated "It shows you the path to your current location" So I would guess whatever quest you have active, it works for that one. And its a completely optional spell thats there to help if you need it, so I like the idea.

Yes, I agree.
Neat concept.
Neat implementation.

Like the visuals too.

I suppose magic solves everything.

I think enemy markers will be optional since in the gamplay trailer, they appear while you are fighting the pack of wolves and a dragon, but they do not appear when fighting a group of draugr.

I hope that we dont start off with a bunch of spells automatically, at the start of the game. I dont want my War Vet to be able to use any magic at all.

And they only appear when you get close enough to them.

.... I know, but I think you will be able to turn them off since they did not show up even though the PC was close to the group of Draugr.

I want more classical round compass. Not line. Because it more convenient to assessment of cardinal points. And without markers, of course.

And when I was on my way to balmora, I didn't get lost and didn't find anything of interest, while in Oblivion, I went exploring regardless of quest markers, I didn't need to be forced to explorer by getting lost, I explorer because I like to.



All of which can happen with quest markers, quest markers don't show you where there is shops, and nobody got lost enough that they couldn't back track to a supplier, especially in morrowind, which only shows exactly where you have been, letting you know exactly where you came from. I don't even understand some of that, being lost means you are a distance from a supplier? being anywhere else lost or not, means you are a distance from a supplier! Quest markers doesn't tell you where go in case of emergency, I could wander into whatever establishment looking for supplies and discover danger instead, nothing about quest markers will change this.



I don't, if I walk into a small town, I don't magically go "woah!" if I have to follow directions, how big a town feels to depends on how much time it takes me to reach a certain distance, hence why obstacles haves a bigger impact.



I don't understand what you mean, I find your answer vague, if this was in morrowind, you would have been killed.



Not when the quest giver knows exactly where you are supposed to go, quests can be to convince someone, or kill something, it can be a multitude of different things, quests can be about searching, and when they are they are not challenging, unless the quest giver doesn't know where what you are searching for is, at which he will not give directions, if he gives directions, he will know where it is, or a general area, and so might as well mark it on your map, unless he's completely [censored].



I found them a piece of cake, and time consuming when they were accurate, basically like a load screen, because following directions is about as tasking as shopping in a mall, and I found them frustratingly more time consuming when they were not, they weren't even challenging then, the time it took just increased, same solution, no strategy, no different approach, the same approach, just more time consuming because it's up to luck whether you interpret something correctly or the graphics accurately portray whatever landmark they used as a reference, the fact that you could not discuss them with the quest giver was aggravating to the point at which I would slaughter them if their lack of cooperation proved insufficient.

Like the quest for hostile mudcrabs, it tells you to leave ald ruhn on the west side and take the road towards Gnisis, but you haven't been to Gnisis, and Gnisis isn't a topic she can talk about, and there's no road sign showing you the way to gnisis. Then it talks about what you need to do when you get into the hills, but Morrowind is entirely made up of hills, so this is like say, "when you start to walk on dirt", so not only can't you take the road to Gnisis, because you don't know what road that is, and you can't ask the person who apparently knows about the way to Gnisis, but assuming you did take the road to Gnisis, your supposed to reach some hills before continuing with the rest of the directions, which tells you [censored] about when to continue, because your surrounded by elevations that can be classified as hills.

So what you have left is that the farm in trouble is due west, so you walk west, but you don't know for how long, you just walk west, and hope you'll walk over it, which is highly unlikely, because you can't walk in a straight direction because of the landscape.



Did you happen to notice, how my problem was that he had attributed things to the non-quest marker side, the only difference between having quest markers and not having quest markers is one less trivial task to do, that is all, there's nothing else to it, everything else is just personal projection and back bending rationalization of various qualities in order to make it appear as more, if these can be taken as actual real values I could come up with a million qualities and attribute them to quest markers, or anything else for that matter. This is not rocket science, there's no overall scientific theory of quest marking, or non-quest marking. Following directions isn't mentally stimulating, either it's easy or it's broken.

There's one place where quest markers are not supposed to be, and that is when the quest giver have no idea where you are supposed to go. However if he does know where I'm supposed to go, and I have a perfect good map with me, I can see no reason why I would not be able to discuss it with him over the map, no functional human being would actually walk into foreign territory without knowing exactly where to go on a map, because, surprise! you could get lost, which in a game is aggravating, and in the real world is rather dangerous, therefore, does he know where I'm supposed to go, he will mark it, if I don't know his landmarks, he will mark them too, if he doesn't know exactly where it is he can mark a general area, but so help me god he better mark some [censored] down or I will rip his spine out through his mouth.

I honestly believe Morrowind was made with use of the paper map in mind.

Because when you have the paper map, finding the farmer who is troubled by the mudcrabs is really no problem.
The hills the quest giver mentions for instance are clearly shown on the paper map.

I also remember a Redoran quest to find and kill a blighted shalk in some mine somewhere.
While the directions the quest giver provides you with are detailed and accurate, the geography of the west Gash is such that it is very easy to stray from the correct path or take the wrong fork in a road.
Yet when you use the paper map together with the directions and the in-game map, it is a breeze.

So this is not so much a case of poor directions as maybe a case of relying a little too much on the paper map that came with the game.
It is logical that this hinders people who borrow the game or get it second hand without it.

I would rather follow directions from landmark to landmark, each discovery of being on the right track a small reward, than I would like detailed directions + quest markers that eliminate all possibilty of going the wrong way while also removing a lot of the rewarding experience.

You know, I didn't put two and two together until reading this thread. Oblivion, to me, became less about exploration and gameplay and more about methodically chasing waypoints. In retrospect, I would have had a more satisfying, longer-lasting experience with that game had there been no quest markers.

It's simple really...

::Options::Gameplay::Navigation::
( ) disable quest markers
( ) disable points of interest
( ) disable enemy markers

The only other factor to make this work is to ensure quest-givers provide enough direction when describing a location. Even Radiant Story should be able to provide general direction and distance given a bit of extra programming.

This is a great, eye-opening thread.

Hmmm...
So will Bethesda have voice actors record, say, ten times more dialogue to account for Radiant Story?
I say that's unlikely, unless their new audio compression techniques have improved exponentially.
Which they haven't.

This.


The Elder Scrolls Series is gradually declining in being a true role playing game and instead becoming a fantasy-based action game. It's pretty sad because it was one of the last series around you could truly immerse yourself into.

Bah, forgot about voice acting...