I'm sorry if this is against the rules, but that http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1184875-would-you-be-okay-without-quest-markers-in-skyrim/page__st__180 had too much going for it.

I've included a poll as a good measure of public opinion thus far into the argument. Both sides bring up some really good points.

My opinion, on the matter (My belief is that the OP shouldn't be biased when there's a poll present) Besides, this wall of text looks bad as an OP

Quote from Merari:
I agree on that totally.
Another factor that makes voice acting less immersive than text is exactly the the same reason that a book is always better than the movie.
When you read a book your imagination fills in the voices of characters. How they sound, where they put inflexions and emphasis is totally up to you, and therefore perfectly tailored to suit you personally.
When things are voiced, actors might say things in ways you think are 'off' or they might have a voice that doesnt sound at all like you would imagine the character. (imagine Divayth Fyr with an Oblivion Dunmer voice. Argh.)
Or, as in Oblivion, the voice work could be often mediocre at best with the actors very noticably just reading lines from a sheet of paper.

Text dialogue allows for tons of more dialogue so you can flesh out a character better.
Its more immersive.

Sadly, I dont think we will be going back to text and thats a shame."


Why is Bethesda tailoring their game to the 1% of people in every western nation, including America, who can't read? Yes, a very small number of those people are dyslexic, but every dyslexic I know works around that.

The directions in Morrowind were precise and accurate 99.99% of the time. In the whole game, there two instructions to the player that were inaccurate. All the quest markers in Oblivion did was take away the fun of the game and allow Bethesda to use voice acting.

All the voice acting in Oblivion did was balance out a masterpiece of a game by creating a lack of dialog that destroyed the feel of the game. Characters were two-dimensional and quests were boring and repetitive. The principals behind Oblivion are broken. It's not going to make it all better by using better voice actors, because the characters still won't have much to say about themselves, and the use of Radiant Story is going to make the dialog equally as fragmented as Oblivion's was, perhaps more so.

Keep the voice acting for the moments when a 'cutscene' is necessary and to add ambient background noise to the environment. Every SINGLE piece of literature in the world exists in a textual format, and it's only movies that would really suffer if the entire world went blind, except for one one-eyed king who could tell them all the stories they can't read. Besides, how many movies do you see based on a book don't manage to completely kill the book? The literature that is still remembered today 2000 years and more after their authors have been nothing but dust certainly doesn't come in BlueRay. The great films of our time aren't masterpieces because they look and sound pretty, they are masterpieces because they are incredibly well written. Inception and svckerpunch both use heavy special effects. The thing that differentiates them is that Inception is brilliantly well written, intellectual as well as superficial, whereas svckerpunch is "an unerotic unthrilling erotic thriller in the video game mold". It DISGUSTS me that a movie critic should compare a monumentally terrible film, like svckerpunch, to the video game industry. The video game industry has the capability to be influential in the modern world on the way that people think. It doesn't matter that Bethesda softworks is near to the top of the industry, they are still a long, long way from producing a product comparable with Wilde, Williams, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Shadbolt, Mansfield, dikeens or countless others. Next time I open my English literature exam paper and see that you can answer a question on a video game you studied, I shouldn't think "Haha. That's a failure waiting to happen"

This entire debate isn't even 'voice acted'. It's all written down. I have never met anyone on this board, and I will never meet anyone in this board. In the written script of a verbal interview the Skyrim executive director, Todd Howard, seems to be an inarticulate moron incapable of stringing a single sentence together. We all know that he isn't, yet the writing gives more evidence that he his than the sound track does. If anything, the sound track of the interview backs up this point of view. The power of the pen over the speaker is undeniable, and the developers really should remember this before they bring out a game on a par with svckerpunch. The voice acting in Skyrim needs to be in addition to the richness of the characters in the game world, not detracting from them, and certainly not detract from my sense of accomplishment at completing the game. RPG with voice acting, like Knights of the Old Republic, did it well but as a necessity were narrow in scope, and boxed in. It felt like you could achieve every single combination of responses in conversation, and as a result, you felt that the game had a point when you would achieve every single thing. Oblivion felt the same. Morrowind felt absolutely limitless.

It's obvious from this forum that the gamers already playing the Elder Scrolls are all perfectly capable of following a text based argument, and replying with their point of view. Making the assumption that we are all illiterate is plainly wrong. I imagine that the gamers on the forum are a perfect representative sample of the people who will play Skyrim, and I imagine that only a very, VERY small number are at the stage where they can't actually read the subtitles and need the voice over to understand what is going on.

Its an absolute necessity that open-world, RPG, video games go back to text format. There's an expression, if it's not broken, don't fix it. Linear game worlds can get away with using voice acting, because they are only presenting the same story with few differences every single time. A game like Oblivion that is supposed to be limitless shouldn't be limited. Pick an NPC at random in the imperial city, and the odds are that they will only talk to you about rumors. The NPCs of Morrowind were boring. They stood around every instant of their miserable existence doing hardly anything. But you could pick one of them at random and not only could they talk to you about rumors, they could talk to you about their hometown, about every conversation topic either of us could think of. In many ways, they were much more alive than Oblivion's characters ever were, and in my head, on the planet Nirn, Vvardenfall lives on into the future, continuing to prosper. Tamriel doesn't even exist, because it was never real enough to me for me to care.

An option in the game settings menu where you could turn them on or off would be perfect. The only way to please nearly everyone, surely!

I like it without the Quest markers....made it hard, but more fun and forced you to explore the dangerous world. bliviongate:

Yup, you deserve this: :turtle:


I'm willing to admit that I am directionally challanged, and the QMs were a big welcome, seconded to only the removal of dicerolls for determining a hit.

they were. I loved both of those things about Oblivion when I first picked up the game. What I didn't like was the game being practically unnavigable without the quest marker, because the directions in game were so terrible.

You are the one! :goodjob:

Edit: Except for the moron part off course. <_<

I'd be perfectly fine without a magic GPS compass that knows exactly what Im looking for when the object in question wasn't even described or that without even asking someone I can track a moving target 50 miles away on my Omnicent map and compass of the Gods.


so long as the voice and text aren't as obscure and fragmented as they were in oblivion.



you literally had to work for very little in Oblivion,

no quest markers!!!, i would really like it to be like in morrowind, where u have to plan ur way to a quest.

Why are people against quest markers? It like the FT debate people want to get rid of things a lot of people like and use. I agree there should be better directions, just like how it nice there is a carriage system now. But don't take out the markers, that does not make any sense. How making the game less fun for other people help you in any way? Its just mindlessly selfish.

In FNV you could complete most quest without the markers, what about FO3, I have yet to get an answer yet on this. Could you complete quest in FO3 with out the markers?

(censored) non-hardcoe players optional or NO!

I want to be like :ahhh: around!

I agree with most of what you said, but i think a lot of oblivions quests exeeded morrowinds in depth. Take the DB for example. Most of their quests are deep and enjoyablo while morag tong ones were rather repeditive. Also, voice acting would be a good thing if they had more of it, like every single line in morrowind voiced rather than the pathetic attempt used in oblivion. Dragon age had superb voice acting that conveyed character and expression, allowing a player to comprehend the mood of an area, such as the demented and fearful voice of that cannible dwarf in the mines, talking of the monstrous brood mother. Oblivion, however, lacked this quality, thus it wouldve been better to have text. A larger veriety of actors is also needed, like the greeting actors in morrowind. Argonians and kajiits should not sound the same, and where's the dunmer's smokers rasp gone? I hope the tes3 actors make a return in skyrim; more often than not, they conveyed the characters well.

I hope they leave it optional. Anotherwards, if you want the quest markers, you press a button, and they will appear. Then you press the button again, and they will disappear. But most likely, they will be forced upon us, as usual. BETHESDA...NOT ALL OF US WANT THE BLOODY QUEST MARKERS!

i voted optional........obviously that is how everyone should vote. i hate magic map fast travel and plan on using the carriage system only but i wont begrudge people who want to chea.......er i mean use map travel. same thing applies with quest markers. at the very least i hope that it disappears once you get to the location so as not to guide you directly to the target if its not optional. i get sick of having to pick a different quest just to my current quest isnt ruined. or wait for a mod like oblivion.

You believe that Todd Howard IS a moron?

Ok... um.. I'll just be going now.



Oh yes, the Dark Brotherhood questline was perfect. But that was because every single character talked to you about each quest, and you had very clear directions on who to kill and where to find them, which (don't quote me on this) I remember as being available to you through the dialog.

Every single line voice acted would be impractical. It also doesn't allow good merging together, and it would be compounded if every character . An imperial guard who says furiously "You filthy piece of criminal SCUM!" can't follow it up by cheerfully directing you to the guilds while scowling at you heavily. Whereas in text, you would read his lines in the appropriate mood.

Optional for me. I prefer pretty hard core game (wrt game mechanics, not difficulty), but I have no objections switching it on if I can't find a location based on the description. I've also used them to "locate bugs" (looping waypoint bug in Skingrad house when the Orc takes a cliffdive), which would be extremely frustrating to figure out without it. With this on, it struck you as something obvious that something was very off. Secondly, what if the quest have poorly written descriptions? Internet for quest solving? Not my style, I would feel like such a cheat if I resorted to online help.

But the magic POI compass markers have to go. This is one part where I like to rely on my own curiosity to find things rather than my character, in a game that doesn't even feature a stat like Perception. I'll mod it out if I have to though.

You must know your in a very small minority of people that would prefer to go back to text based game. Thats like the movie industry going back to silent movies, its not going to happen, people want voice acting. It makes the game far more immersive for most players.

It really depends on how the quests are designed. If the quest markers aren't there, then the quest dialogue must include proper directions so the player know where to go. Oblivion didn't really include directions in the dialogue.

But generally speaking, I would be ok without quest markers, infact I would prefer it. Would probably be a bit annoying now and then to find a certain quest NPC because they are walking around in town, though.

Optional, and can't PC users disable them in one of the xml menus if they want to. I think you can in the Fallout's at least.

Secondly, OP are you actually saying that a character like Sheogorath would have been better if he weren't voice acted and you had to read all of his dialog? Obviously, not every character in Oblivion was done as well as his, but for me, there's no question that actual voice acting adds a tremendous amount of reality to the game. It just makes it more real to me. Part of the fun of these games for me is to escape from my daily grind and have some fun in another "world". To have to slog through page after page of reading may as well be my day job which is the opposite of what I want to do when I get home. I have to do enough of that at work.

So I guess I fall into what you hard core types see as lazy, dumbed-down gamers. I play because it's FUN, and it relieves stress, not because it's just like my damn job.

I'd prefer them to be optional.

All this would have been avoided if Bethesda let us deactivate the active quest.

I love Morrowind, I still play it sometimes. But I still prefer voice acting and quest markers over more "in-depth" text.

Either way I vote optional when it comes to UI elements.

It depends on whether we have a proper actual map, or NPCs can give directions relative to your current location.



Because maybe it isn't about whether or not people can read. It might have something to do with the fact that in real life, when people talk, you hear it, you don't read it.



Number pulled from your ass. assessment of morrowinds intructions pulled from merai, which he pulled from his ass. There was more than 2 instructions that are inadequate. It's not about whether they are accurate, if someone asked me to find you, I could say "check out planet earth", and I would be correct. This would still be bad directions.



I thought it brought more life to the characters, even in Morrowind, it is when they actually talk that you get the best sense of immersion. Of course it would have helped if morrowind hadn't reused the same walls of text word for word between characters.

[censored], just as a picture speaks a thousand words so does a voice. Writing has one advantage, and that is quantity, but it will never have the quality, and convey the same amount of info as a voice, there's a reason why sarcasm isn't well done in text. With a single voiced sentence you can tell the mood and the intention of speaker. "We're watching you...Scum!" would not have the same effect had it not been voiced.




Kotor is a completely different kind of rpg than the TES series. You keep coming back to morrowind with this text thing, as if morrowind did it well. If your gonna argue for partial voice acting, pick an rpg that does it well.



Yes, it has nothing to do with being unable to read, I still want voice acting.



[censored], the NPCs of similar trade in morrowind would tell you exactly the same wall of text word for word, if you picked two different individuals. Not only did they not talk when they were supposed to, but because the same information is reused between characters, it becomes even more obvious that this is anything but alive. Morrowind is a horribly example of using text based dialog.

Morrowinds direction were not great, they were non-negotiable, so you had to rely on one interpretation, they were specific to a specific starting point, unlike daggerfall, which gave you directions relative to your position. The NPCs were unable to acknowledge that you even had a map, where they could make things more clear, if you found their instructions vague. You bring up age, because you want to ridicule me into not opposing your view, you insinuate that anyone which has a problem with the directions aren't mentally over the age of 9. You are not intelligent because you managed to complete a decent chunk without help, and people aren't stupid for having problems with the directions. First of is that Morrowinds directions when working, are as easy as [censored] grocery shopping, to be able to follow them means you do not have the mind of vegitable, It's a trivial task, and does not present a challenge to anyone whatsoever. When people still have problems with them it, because it's made "hard" through vagueness, missing road signs. The task is still simple, now it just takes forever because you have little to go with, it's basically fake challenge. Morrowind asks you to walk 10 feet, you accept, and he then chops off both of your legs, saying "Isn't this challenging!?? LOLOLOLOL U havin' fun!!?!?!?!"

When Morrowind directions are adequate, the task is so simple they might as well mark it on the map, and when they aren't adequate, it's either because the NPC assumes you know of a place, and you of course can't a ask him about it, because that would be the logical thing to do, or they describe something too vague, or stupid stuff like missing road signs.

It's not even how it's actually done in real life. In real life you have a map, with loads of information on it, and you have a compass, and then the job is to find out where you are, relative to everything else. As opposed to a [censored] non-descriptive overhead island picture, showing you absolutely nothing, except yourself, which is of course completely logical! Also lacking a compass, and then you just have to assume that up is actually north, how lucky we are that morrowinds "map" conveniently always turned the same way when you took it out, and then the job is to find everything but yourself!

No! I stand by my conviction, let's NOT, have morrowinds system again. For the love of [censored] everything. If anyone was really interested in this hiking thing, make it like daggerfall, or properly, like in real life!

No I read it bad, and I thought you agree with them. Sorry! :unsure: