They should be optional in the settings. Fifth try, Bethesda, how hard can it be to actually include gameplay settings in the...settings menu?

Perhaps just general markers in your quest log, like in oblivion. For instance "i must find a dunmer mage in skingrad to teach me the unique restoration spell"

Actually, only poor writers use emotional shaders like that.
Possibly the best book ever written in the English language is Lord of the Flies by William Golding.
The reason its so well written has nothing to do with the actual story, it is because the writing is very stylised and minimalist, there is literally not one superfluous word in there. No 'The sky was blue, it was a beautiful day.' Or any descriptives like that.
No 'He felt angry'. Or any emotional shaders like that whatsoever.
Each and every sentence is purely functional for the progress of the story.
Its a work of genius and rightly got a nobel prize for literature.

It is a haunting, evocative, thought-provoking work that stays with the reader long after the last page is read.
And it does so because all the 'fat' is trimmed.

Youre thinking of Dan Brown, who uses atrocious sentences like: 'The famous man stood in front of the window.'

Assuming based on context is a large part of what makes stories great. We are the storytelling ape, pan narrans (A description I find a lot more fitting than the haughty Victorian's 'homo sapiens sapiens'), and storytelling is part of our very being.
Other apes groom, we gossip.
Storytelling, painting a picture in someone elses mind, has a distinct advantage because you can only groom one person at a time, but you can captivate an entire audience with a story.
Our minds are built in such a way that we understand stories, that when a good storyteller like Tolkien captivates us we are there in Moria, with them.
We dont need oodles of superflous descriptives, stories work so much better if that is left to the reader.
And an accomplished author knows this.

I vote no markers. Why even have a compass when you have a magic arrow telling you exactly where to go.

It seems like there are two discussions going on - voice acting versus text prompts, and the magical GPS.

Frankly, I hope the magical GPS can be turned off. In fact, I would like to get the HUD down to just the key stats - health, magic, and fatigue. Everything else should be hide-able. Part of the fun of going into the wilderness to look for something is the looking. You never know what you will miss if you stay on the magic brick road. However, I don't believe it should be removed, because some people just want to get there, do their business, and come back - and that's fine. Just allow people like me to turn it off.

As for voice acting, I prefer the Morrowind style. Spoken greetings and key text, but text dialog otherwise. However, I think this ship has sailed. Bethesda seems to have gone whole hog into spoken dialog only. It makes doing quest mods hard, since you either use silent MP3's (and look amateur), or spend a lot of time doing your own voice acting.

It needs to be optional, because some of the mods are nearly impossible even with quest markers. So its helpful for modded quests that are good qsts, but have bugs.

Far as I know, quest mods in OB have to define the quest markers. I've had quest mods that used markers, and others that deliberately didn't use them. (Or ones that disable Fast Travel, etc...)

This is something that needs looking into. I'm sure one of the almighty gods at Bethesda can figure something out. :disguise:


I don't get why we actually can't just use a system similar to some of Morrowind's quests, but more extended.

for certain quests, I would get the area marked off on my map. Of course, this only worked with certain areas, and would need a bit of tweaking, but the general idea is the same. when it's marked on the map, what's the point in a compass? Just a quick check and you know to go north east.

I'm pretty sure it makes everyone happy. I'm also pretty sure that most dislike the "exactness" of the quest marker. This would also remove that issue.

Please. The second you started making personal attacks on me, rather than my argument, your rebuttal lost all traction. Your opinion not being in agreement with mine is not the same as me being delusional, so stow it.

I'm not saying that all voice acting is bad. But from the existing data that we are given, voice acting in the elder scrolls is not as effective as the textual dialog. Maybe they will give us more accurate directions in the sequel to Oblivion, but on the other hand they might not.

My argument is specifically about character, so don't side track the issue with irrelevant comments about graphics etc. Actually it's an interesting point that you just made, about animated facial expression.
In an animated film, the audience is able to react to the emotions of inhuman objects when put in a human situation. By this I mean someone can animate a mouse to walk on two legs, smile, dance, laugh, cry, love, live and die. As you move the animated character along the spectrum towards that resembling a real human, we grow more emotive towards them, and we'll sympathize more with their character. Eventually you get to a point, however, when the audience notices not the resemblances to a human for that character, but all the flaws that make it inhuman, and that point we are repulsed and disgusted by this inhuman creature. (flaws in this context being such things as exactly the same animation for facial expression across multiple characters, the way hair doesn't move in a gale when all the trees are sidewards and so on)

So yes, in the short term more accurately voice acted characters will increase the immersion of the game, but in the long run the immersion will be taken away because certain aspects of the game don't add up. For example, how your best friend doesn't talk to you in a friendly fashion, or how the guard who hates you for being a murderer will angrily greet you, cheerfully direct you to the landmarks around town, and angrily send you on your way. No you can't hear idle conversation between NPCs without text, and I don't have any objection to that. It's part of the suspension of disbelief that relationships between them are constant. Just like it's part of the suspension of disbelief that your insignificant character can be top of the heap in the game-world. However the discrepancies between vocal expression and the NPC attitude towards the player are those aspects of the game that cause players who are actually immersed in the game to reject the inter-character interactions, and then it's just a waste of disc space. Maybe Bethesda will perfect it in Skyrim, who knows? To do THAT, they need to close the world down and restrict the players interaction with NPCs, or have separate dialog for every single NPC depending on their attitude towards the player, and that's improbable.

Actually, I have no problem with voice acting in games. I have a problem with the limitations that the voice acting places on the ways the characters are expressed in the games, in the sense that full voice acting in Oblivion was, in the words of Lead Designer Ken Rolston "less flexible, less apt for user projection of his own tone, more constrained for branching, and more trouble for production and "disk real estate" than Morrowind's partially recorded dialogue".

Having quoted Rolston, I'll include the rest of the quote. Rolston was referring to the plan for fully voiced dialog. He made the suggestion that voice acting "can be a powerful expressive tool", which I disagree with. It is certainly equally as expressive as text, but in all likelihood less so. On that topic, I'd like to apologise for my bad example and direct you towards Lord of the Flies as another poster said.



Rolston also said that "it can contribute significantly to the charm and ambience of the game." - I have no problem with that. But for all those people who read faster than they listen, and there's a lot of them, it becomes quite a useless tool in actual conversation non-playable character to character.
"I prefer Morrowind's partially recorded dialogue, for many reasons. But I'm told that fully-voiced dialogue is what the kids want." - I don't need to restate my views on this. It's the first principal of business that a lot of people don't know what they want, you design a product which is unique and then sell it by persuading them that they DO want it. Yes in the big world markets a product which loses customers is acceptable, because the "American" philosophy of business management seems to be "Lose a few customers, you'll always find more", and its such an effective philosophy, until one day you've pissed off so many old customers that they've told all of your potential new ones what a crappy business you have, and suddenly your new product has no economic viability. In addition to which, with an ESRB rating of 18+, the game isn't FOR kids, it's for advlts, and sorry, a fully developed sophisticated character isn't viable in a verbal dialog format, without a disproportionate amount of verbal dialog by that character, which would just result in the majority of people skipping the 'boring bits' or reading through faster than the verbal dialog.

Whichever way you decide to look at it, in the open-world anything is possible premise that the elder scrolls series has as an RPG, fully voiced dialog is not as effective as partially voiced. As other posters have mentioned, it also cuts down on modding options. It is undeniable that the pros outweigh of the cons of partial voice-recording, like in Morrowind. The fully-voiced dialog was one of few aspects of Oblivion which was criticised. The lack of adequate directions in Oblivion and thus reliance on the quest marker was also criticised. The directions were given verbally, (or rather they weren't given at all), the fully voiced dialog caused "trouble for disk real estate", in the words of the developers. It logically follows that fully voiced dialog is inferior. Then you consider the number of 2D characters in the world because they can't say enough to develop themselves, and the fact that verbal dialog is inferior to textual dialog is inferior.

Seeing as you did take such pleasure in insulting my mental state, I'd like to point out that I by no means expect that Skyrim will not be fully voiced. But it's an inadequate medium.

I've said all there is to say, and more, and I think the time of this thread has come now.

I think they should be optional or at least less noticable. It didn't bother me much in OB, but I prefer the FO3 style with an almost invisible marker.

One of the tenants of good writing is "show, don't tell". That's exactly why using written dialog in a visual and auditory medium is a bad idea. When you write a story, you're trying to escape the limitations of the written word. You're trying to get the reader to experience the story, not read it. If you're trying to get someone to experience dialog in a video game, how could written dialog possibly be a better option than spoken dialog?

It makes sense to use the best tools for any given job. The Elder Scrolls (and RPGs in general) are not out to write texts with the most artistic merit, or for the enjoyment of people who want to read a well-written book. The Elder Scrolls is out to create an immersive, enjoyable video game world. Spoken dialog serves that purpose better than written dialog, because it doesn't have to break the flow of gameplay and it avoids the trappings of the written word.

Ultimately, you'd be trading one problem for others, with written dialog. For Bethesda to do a really good job with written dialog, they're going to have to hire highly skilled writers. That's going to cost money. How much would it cost to hire William Golding, or someone of his calliber? Now figure that the amount of dialog in Oblivion (as "sparse" as people like to claim; 50 hours of straight dialog is nothing to sneeze at) could easilly overshadow the size of a good book, you're looking to multiply that money by a sizable amount for more skilled writers, especially if you're expecting even more dialog. Time would also still be an issue -- if you change some AI packages, for instance, or change the race of a couple NPCs, that could necessitate a rewrite of dozens of lines of related dialog. That's not something a designer can do in a few minutes, if you're trying to maintain a high level of quality. And instead of modders having a problem with being able to deliver quality voice acting, they'd have trouble delivering quality writing. Written dialog, done properly, is hardly a magic bullet.


Morrowind had limited voice acting by necessity, not due to some text-is-still-bettar mantra. They didn't have the disk space or money. Oblivion had more funding and more disk space, and its completely-voice-acted approach was hardly as bad as some people make it out to be. The majority of quests had enough info that you didn't need the GPS quest marker, and most of those that did need it were due to NPC schedules. It was rough around the edges, sure (lack of voice diversity, being a big one), but that was still due to disk space and probably actor cost. Skyrim is improving this further... it has more disk space and better compression (it was Todd that said that the disk space needed for dialog is no longer a concern), and it sounds like they're putting more money into voice acting.

Also, outside of voice acting, Skyrim is employing more real-time visual cues to help deliver dialog, like the often mentioned example of the NPC walking the player to the edge of town and pointing out the way while describing the mission, as well as having improved the display of emotion. When the goal is to create a level of immersion like this, written dialog is a step backwards.

I'm not a fan of quest markers at all,i like to be encouraged to use my brain,explore,get lost and run into trouble or treasure.
All that is required is that it's an option,either at the beginning at the menu or in game.That way nobody can complain. ( similar to the option to have hardcoe or not in fallout NV )....shouldn't be that hard to do,especially since we know NPC's will give us directions. If you want directions and a big marker,thats up to you.But i also should have the option to turn it off. Maybe call it " Turn hand holding off"....something like that. :thumbsup:

Thats a very good point. I hadnt thought of it like that yet

I voted for 'Optional'. Personally I dislike the quest markers pointing you to the exact location of an npc or -even worse- a quest item hidden deep within the long lost caverns of Khaza'duum. But some people do not wish to search every nook and cranny or simply don't have the time; so for them it would work great to have them available.

My personal favorite would be the 'Here, let me mark it on your map'. That way you don't need full-voiced dialogue for descriptions on how to get to a specific quest location. With this, a marker could simply highlight the general location on your worldmap but will not point you directly to the objective (and will not guide you to it when the object is in a cave/ruin/fort/dungeon/crypt/etc.

So an optional setting combined with the 'Here, let me mark it on your map' would serve me best. Simple, effective and catering to both sides of the same coin.

That's right and I would say that the option would be somewhere deep within ini, or somewhere else that is not quite handy to toggle at a simple whim, so that I can control myself.

And I would disable it completely with a mod when it is available, hoping the quests where designed with the fact that it is optional and might be disabled, in mind.

As for the quest design, I think the quest givers should send you toward the direction and give you the initial momentum to help you start your journey toward the target, and the designers should place enough land marks, left notes, related events*, clutter remains of the previous people related to the quests, and the like, to guide you through the journey toward the target, and this should apply to the journey over the surface of the landscape and also in the final dungeon, house or other place that contains the quest target, what ever it is, an NPC, a monster of an item.

And if the quest target is a moving entity, then there should be local guidance that could help you find it, like an NPC that could be persuaded to lead you to the target NPC or monster, or a note that could help you find the regular visiting place of the NPC, or some other guidance, like that.

And I would totally remove the radar marker, as the fact of it's being on the screen would be a constant remainder that I'm playing a game, and would result in loss of immersion as I regularly ignore the actual scenery and focus on the compass for guidance.

P.S. by related events, I mean that in the middle of the way there can be small encounters with the people or other events that are related to the actual current quest, and attending to the events, or trying to communicate with anyone related, should help you in your journey, and might even give you small new branches and optional objectives to the current quest.

I fear this would not work for everyone as console users would have no way in changing it. So having the function within the 'Options' menu might be best; preferably a menu that is only available from the Main Menu. That way someone would have to quit their current game and go back to the main screen in order to change it.

However, *if* an option like this will be present at all (which I personally doubt); I think it will simply be part of a 'Gameplay' menu that pops up when you press ESC (or the corresponding button on a console) instead of it being hidden in some obscure file.

I like the quest markers. It got annoying at times in Morrowind at times trying go find a cave entrance.

I know my opinion is in the minority here but I like quest markers. I am perfectly fine with have an option to turn them off and on.

Like other people have stated sometimes I just do not have the time to keep searching for something or sometimes there may even be a bug with an NPC that makes them impossible to find without quest markers.

To me the game has so much content and so many things to do that I really don't mind being led right to an item. I remember playing Oblivion and doing the Umbacano quests (which did not have quest markers) and basically ended up looking online because I did not want to spend hours and hours finding the correct Ayleid ruins. Now I did not look for the exact location of the relics in the ruins but I looked for which ones I had to go to. Maybe if I had gotten the quest earlier in the game that would have been different but I did not and I really did not want to go searching through ruins I had already been before just for a mere chance something may have been there that I missed the first time.

To me there are reasons to have quest markers and reason not to have them and I think having it optional is the best compromise.

You guys are asking for too much options! Do you seriously want 10 pages of options in the game? That's not The Elder Scrolls style.

I'd prefer to have quest markers...and no way to turn them off without mods.

I also do not get this poll. You ask "Would you be okay without quest markers?" So I answer a No to that. But then you ask "Quest markers (yes or no)?" A Yes to that. This is mind breaking! :brokencomputer: However, I'll still play/buy Skyrim without quest markers...so I guess I'm indifferent.

This is more my leaning. I'm okay without quest markers "if" the dialogue is designed for them not being there. Unfortunately with voice acting, and the limitations of "1 Disk" and "no HDD required" on the consoles there is only so much VO that can be put on the disk. I don't really see no quest markers being a viable option.

I'd be fine with only parts of the dialogue being voiced with "text only" dialogue filling in the gaps, but I don't see that happening either. I think the best we can hope for is better use of quest markers such as indicating general areas and not pinpoint arrows, marking the cave but not the objective, etc.

Adding one option to turn off the quest markers would not result in additional 10 pages, and the option can reside in the ini.

By the way, if there is no option to turn that off, then the quests would rely on its availability, and do not provide enough written directions to the targets, and we would be back at the Oblivion mess, which I really hope is not the case.

That's how it starts. One option. I'm reading through the forums and people want more options than just this. And it wouldn't be too bad if it was in the .ini. Just like colored local maps are for Oblivion. But I still don't want to be scouring around the world to find a cave.

Yeah sorry, I continued a previous discussion, used their topic title.

Though it is a question... So you answer the question.... Not the title of the post, which was the same title as the previous thread...

one of the reasons i never really got into MORROWIND was the fact that there were no quest markers and i had to find things on my own.
OBLIVION however helped me out greatly, maybe too much!
now that i'm a little older and wiser i would like to have no markers it will make the game much HARDER (like morrowind) and make me actually read my quest log

If there aren't markers, it wont be the end of the world for me, but I would prefer there are markers.