Said and always will a million times. Quest markers for me are OK depending on the specific quest. If someone says to me, "Go kill me 5 crabs from riverlake road.". I'm sure he marked it on my map correct? Or pointed to where its at? I think if you have a quest where that person doesn't know where something or someone is, then no there shouldn't be a marker. But if they do indeed tell you or show you where its at, then we need the marker. Common sense, even in fantasy. :celebration:

I would be more than okay without it.

I personally would like that idea. But so many newcomers would be like "Where do I go!? I don't get it!". And I know what you're thinking: 'skrew them', right? Well, Bethesda knows that they'd lose a lot of gamers if they were just like 'skrew them', and to be honest, the fact that so many people play is the reason Bethesda has had so much success.

I hope to at least have the option to disable the quest markers.

The only quest where I truly got svcked into the TES dungeon delving explorer mind was when I did the quest 'Lifting the Vale'
I felt completely immersed while doing that quest and I hope I can have a similar experience in Skyrim

I wouldn't mind a Fable 1 style quest marker, that was actually okay in my opinion, but I'd rather have no quest markers, MORROWIND STYLE!

What games?

I would like a toggle option for it, with journal detail like there was in Morrowind.

If I had to guess there's probably equal people on both sides that do/don't want this. I see no point to take it out now that it's a feature a lot of people like, but at least give us the option to toggle it off if we don't want to.

It depends on whether we have to hunt down slaughterfish for another injured fisherman ...

A toggle or something more subtle would be my preference, but in Oblivion when I didn't want to use it, I'd just select a quest I wasn't working on from my log and ignore it.

I like and appreciate some sort of guidance to help me achieve an objective or complete a quest. Playing Morrowind, for instance, I find/found myself playing the with a notebook PC beside me so I could access online resources and actually get stuff done. Being lost isn't fun, at least for me.

I'm the exact opposite. Being lost in the game, gets my mind lost in the game. It adds so much to the immersion for me. I understand though why some like you may want the quest tracker, or those who only have a limited amount of play time.

No you're not the only one. Quest markers are necessary till they can actually give you the tools to navigate the world purely from in game clues and directions. Putting you on the east side of the map and saying "Look for the cave west of here" and sending you off to "explore" is the quickest way for me to turn a game off. Things like that are simply attempts to pad play time by wasting my time. Wasting my time isn't something I'm going to look kindly on.

Now if in that same scenario they gave you landmarks to follow, or you could ask others along the way for directions, or find notes/clues/books/etc to find your destination that would be fine. That is a lot of extra work to put into the game though for every quest and location you are sent to. I think it would be a worthwhile addition but not one I see many developers taking.

For me personally the best approach would be the 'Here, let me mark it on your map'.

That way the location for the quest objective is on your map and you have to check your map/compass periodically to see if you're still moving in the right direction. Once you reach the cave/dungeon/fort/etc and enter, the marker should no longer be present. So the questgiver provides you with the location of the objective on the worldmap, but not a magical tether that guides you to the exact location of an item/person/objective within a cave you've never in your life set foot in nor knew about.

So I hope they go with the 'Here, let me mark in on your map'. It's simple, incredibly effective and won't hog storage on the dvd by having tons of voicefiles for the sole purpose of detailed quest directions

It would be fine if the quest marker is gone as long as we get complete directions by quest givers to make it to our quest, because running around in circle looking for an npc is not my idea of fun.

Give me hints and directions in quests and lore, and I could not care less whether there are actually markers - if they are in, I hope they are, or I can make them, toggleable.

It doesn't matter in the least if they're toggleable or not if there's no other source for directions.

Consider the quest, and the specific point in that quest, at which I first turned Oblivion off in disgust, having realized that the magic map marker was being used as a substitute for information rather than an addition to it. When you go back to talk to Thoronir after breaking into Agarmir's house in Unfriendly Competition, Thoronir says NOTHING of any real use. "Well, he did say that he had something to do today.... you don't think that he'd? No...." What the hell does that tell me? It sort of implies that he's going to rob another grave, but that's it. There really isn't any useful information in there at all. And nobody else has any information - you can't go talk to NPCs who'll tell you, "Yeah - I saw that guy heading toward the Palace," or "Yeah - I saw him poking around that tomb over there," or anything at all. ALL you get is a magic map marker, so the ONLY thing you can do is follow it.

In order to make the markers optional, that sort of bluntly lazy design would have to go. I'm not confident that it has. As a matter of fact, with the hyped "Radiant Story" quests, I think it's even more likely that quests are not going to have any in-game information surrounding them, but are instead just going to be uselessly general statements from NPCs accompanied by the spontaneous appearance of a GPS waypoint.

I have little doubt that map markers will feature heavily in Skyrim and that the basic problem of using map markers instead of in-game information will be at least as bad as it was in Oblivion.

I'd definitely be okay without a quest Marker, but I sort of want one. The marker itself isn't really that bad, just how it's used by Bethesda as basically an insurance policy for poor writing.(Some justifiable because of storage limits, some not so much) Especially with "Tiny" objects, such as the Dwemer Puzzle box, or the Chewed Stealth Boy, the marker is damn near a necessity, since all the assets of observation a human has, really doesn't translate to the game world. You may really not even know what you're looking for, such as is the case with the Chewed Stealth Boy.

What I really have a problem with, is dungeon and point-of-interest markers. Now, I like that they're all marked on the map when discovered, but there should be no compass indicator before I've actually found the entrance (Fallout: New Vegas has a good tag-range). Why? Because if you mark every point on the compass, players are looking at a tiny portion of the screen, rather than at the beautiful world itself. What developer wants that?

I guess you'll have to figure it out for yourself. I wouldn't know. But if you don't like exploring, bothering to actually find people and stuff, i'm sure there are games out there for you. That's all.



Not necessarily. Could it not be a sign of a poor sense of orientation from the player's part? Look, you want markers. Fine. I dislike them. Fine as well. I cannot foresee a way to soleve the Radiant Story challenge without resorting to them.
It looks like you and I are stuck with those pesky triangles after all.

I could do without the location and objective quest arrows as long as they mark it on the map (as one of the moderators pointed out). If they had this in Morrowind it would have made it easier to find locations. Where quest markers are needed is when finding people. When ever this issue is discussed people tend to forget that in Morrowind people were static, so when you needed to return to your quest giver he/she, was standing in the same spot as when the quest was given. Or if they told you to go talk to so and so at the south wall corner club, that person would be there in the same spot through out the game. With the introduction of AI in Oblivion, even though it was scaled back, it was difficult to find people if they werent part of a quest. They could be anywhere, at the pub, at home, or just wandering around the street. The few times in Oblivion when I needed to find someone outside a quest it was difficult to track them down. If I had to do this for every quest it would be extremely annoying.

Yeah I would also suggest that kind of an approach to the quest markers, not completely remove them but instead a different granularity of the "hints"

Nah, leave 'em in. It's not like the markeris hurting the exploration or anything...

I hope we are made to think a bit more rather than always being led straight to where objectives are. I would prefer a more general marker i.e. go here and search for clues and talk to people.

Morrowinds Number one Flaw. The directions given by NPCs were terrible.
Quest Markers do much for game flow. But I would like to be able to turn them off, for when I just go off exploring.

They were fine, it only happened once that I had to use UESP to find to location of a quest and apparantly I was standing right next to it that time.

Should be a hardcoe mode that disables compass and adds hunger like in New Vegas but more fleshed out.