You know, I actually like those red/green triangles. They're better than opening up the journal every time, looking for said quest, especially if you don't have the expansion, then your journal is an incomprehensible mess. Then you have to figure out where the directions actually start, then follow the given directions only to realise that the road moves in a different direction...
And let's not even talk about the wandering NPCs, in Morrowind it was easy, nobody moved anywhere, but in Oblivion you could look around everywhere for said person, only to realise he's home, sleeping and locked the door.
On the other hand, yeah sometimes it showed things it shouldn't be showing, like when we're supposed to be searching for, looking for stuff. Fallout 3 did it better where the pointer mostly showed the way to the dungeon, but not what's inside of it.

Yes... with this avatar, I can get away with anything!

In Oblivion/Fallout 3 I followed the mark, and liked it.
In Morrowind I followed the guidance, and liked it.

If I have a choice in Skyrim I will turn it off.

"Go this way" "No that way" "Over there!" "Try here" "Oops wrong quest" "Not here silly" "There can be only ONE..." "This isnt it"

Rather than address specific posts - just some comments on some of the recurring themes of the thread:

Making the quest markers toggleable doesn't counter the fundamental problem with them - it's not that they make the game easier, or that it's "cheating" to use them - it's that Oblivion was set up in such a way that, more than once, the quest markers (and the equally loathsome "journal") took the place of gathering information in-game. That - the thing to do next or the place to go next being communicated to you by the map markers and/or the journal instead of as information gathered in-game - is what should not make a reappearance in Skyrim. The map markers (and journal) themselves are peripheral to that.

/shrug

Been playing CRPGs of various sorts since 1980. And I found the markers in Oblivion and FO3 to be quite useful - of course, part of that is because the quests (and many mod quests) were designed around the fact you'd have the markers, and therefore had a decent number of things that'd be fantastically annoying to find without them. (Particularly in FO3, where those mazes of subway zones & inner-city ruins zones made tracking down stuff a right pain.)


If the quest system (NPC dialogue, journal, NPCs "marking" things on your map, etc) were improved, then losing the markers wouldn't be too big a deal.

This is exactly why in Oblivion I always had a quest that had no waypoints like "A Venerable Vintage" as my active quest. Those markers were just annoying. A pin on your map is fine, but having it on screen all the time? No thank you.

The triangle thingy removed ANY challenge factor regrading the quests, in MW we had to think and had to plan our way to that certain place. We also had riddles as to where a location may be.
Indeed it helps sometimes and it can be great to have an option to turn it off, but then, what is that point of having the NPCs tell us the location of that certain place if it's already marked in the map...?

Yeah I agree. Having a compass and a map should be enough!

. . . I like being given directions in game. But then again, my sense of direction IRL is horrible. :sadvaultboy:

I thought that they did a cool job of it in morrowind. The NPC would say something like: follow the trail east of Balmora and find the cave entrace where the trail turns to the north. Or something similar. It gives fairly accurate yet vague instructions. I liked this because its realistic. Assuming that during the time of Oblivion, tamriel did not have GPS satellites triangulating set locations.

The green triangle is far worse. I understand the red triangle when you are told "I need you to head to this fort. I'll mark it on your map." Of course you would know where it is. But when you are told "In order to find out where you need to go, talk to one of the beggars wandering the city, they will help you." Why would you automatically know where said beggar is no matter how long you wait, or how far away he goes. It's the same way when they say, "I need you to go to ruin X and find a sword for me. I'm not sure what it looks like, or where it is in the ruin." And you get a magic green arrow directing you there.

I think its all too complicated to call rediculous or "for babies".

Having a quest to "find evidence" (ie "unfriendly compitition") and having said evidence marked with a red arrow is a stupid, stupid idea. It turned what COULD have been a cool investigative quest into a "move to point A, then point B, talk to person C and pick up object D" with a battle towards the end. Where is the fun in that? Get rid of THOSE markers, surely no one can disagree with that.

A bit more complicated though would be travelling across the map to cave. Obviously you don't want to be told "Go to Mysterious Cave" and be left to your own devices, but following an arrow isn't so great either. So, like someone mentioned before, having vauge, morrowind style directions would be awsome.
"From cheydenhall, follow the Red Road until it turns off into a dirt path, make your way to the top of the mountain infront of you, ?????, PROFIT"
On the otherhand, quest markers towards NPCs are actually kind of needed. One NPC in particular could be in a bar in cheydenhall, half way along the road to the Imperial City, in the market district etc etc. It would kind of svck to be given the quest of "Find the amulet then SCOUR THE FOUR CORNERS OF TAMERIAL FOR A GENERIC LOOKING DARK ELF". This COULD be combatted by forcing packages on them and then giving directions to where the package happens maybe...

Well, some of us like the "red triangles" because we don't want to spend our valuable game time wandering aimlessly on misguided direction from some NPC on where a quest is supposed to start. Or even worse, *having* to revert to a 500 page game guide to find where the heck we're supposed to be going.

Some of us only have a certain number of hours in a day to play games so we'd rather spend our time actually playing rather than wandering around like a whacktard.

That said, there should be an option to turn it off (which Oblivion actually had just by selecting a different quest, preferably one that didn't have a red triangle associated with it).

There is a HUD, the compass is permanent and the Health, Magic, fatigue fade when they are full, but as soon as you get hit etc the hud will be back.

Let us remember that Morrowind was a hand built world and had many landmarks and such to navigate off of whereas Oblivion was an auto generated world and didn't have as many landmarks and such to navigate off of. Skyrim is going back to the hand built world which would hopefully mean not having the markers. Granted, in Morrowind finding certain places was very difficult and I got annoyed, but it certainly did encourage more exploration.

http://ps3.ign.com/dor/objects/93394/elder-scrolls-v/images/elder-scrolls-v-skyrim-20110211094607486.html

I don't really see anything there. I'm just going to assume everything was moved to the map page, because that's all we can tell from what we've been given.

There is a HUD, though, and that's a good thing, because the game not telling you how much health or magicka you have left would get rather annoying. The health, magicka and stamina bars are just only shown when you need them, for example, when you're in combat. And it's been confirmed that there is a compass, but compass arrows like in Oblivion may or may not be in, the compass may just serve as a means to help the player determine which directions north, south, east and west are in... you know, what compasses are actually used for in real life. Nothing has been said about quest arrows so we can't be certain if they're in or not.



I really don't think you need a fully hand-crafted world for people to understand what "Follow the road to the north until you reach a fork in the road and take the right fork, watch for a cave entrance to your left." means, an automatically generated world would really only prevent that from working if it was randomly generated with every new game you start, which Oblivion's world obviously was not.

People, not necessarily everyone, obviously, but a certain portion of players complained about having a hard time finding quest objectives in Morrowind, therefore, the quest compass was introduced to make things easier, I don't think there's any need to doubt that this was Bethesda's reason for doing it. We can certainly debate whether this was a good idea or whether Bethesda should keep the approach in Skyrim or not, but the reasons it was done seem clear to me.



Most of the prerelease screenshots for Oblivion didn't show the HUD either, Bethesda probably just had it disabled when the screenshots were taken. And how the HUD works was explained in the podcast.

Which suggests that the best overall solution is for a "Quest Markers Y/N" checkbox among the Difficulty preferences. :shrug:

I believe this answers your questions:

?
Pulling the camera as far away as possible gives you a great respect for the size of the game world. From the map view players can manage quest icons, plan their travel route, or access fast travel.
?

Source: http://www.gameinformer.com/games/the_elder_scrolls_v_skyrim/b/xbox360/archive/2011/01/28/skyrim-menu-system-overhaul.aspx#

That's for the map. We're talking about on the compass.

There's going to be Quest markers, which were the OP main issue.

Haven't read any of the new articles. Did one of them talk about the quest markers? (I know that one older thing mentioned there would be a compass, but no-one had mentioned quest markers at that point...)

blehk. no hud better be toggleable. other wise I'll have to wait for the mod that puts the hud back in.

I think it's fair to assume there will be quest markers, given this GI quote:
?
Pulling the camera as far away as possible gives you a great respect for the size of the game world. From the map view players can manage quest icons, plan their travel route, or access fast travel.
?

Source: http://www.gameinfor...-overhaul.aspx#