Why do people HATE quest markers?
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I really like the way Mirror's Edge (and possibly others) handle this: have a button to be pointed in the right (general) direction
Quest markers do an amazing job of one thing: taking me out of whatever world the game has attempted to immerse me in, there's something about the gigantic arrow that makes me very aware of the fact that I'm playing a game rather than (for example) being a Nord warrior in a Scandinavia type world engulfed in civil war and being invaded by dragons.
Yea, it's like a coloring book vs a blank canvas.
One is mindless kindergarten easy mode, the other is actual exploration and the resulting successes are mush more substantial accomplishments.
They have their applications though.
Some objectives are just too obscure and hard to find without guidance.
That said, quest markers aren't necessarily the best way to do it.
Dishonored's Heart lighting up and beating faster and faster when pointed at and approaching objectives is a great way to find objectives.
Just because you know WHERE something is doesn't mean you know how to reach it, and even finding it in the first place is still a puzzle on its own.
One is mindless kindergarten easy mode, the other is actual exploration and the resulting successes are mush more substantial accomplishments.
They have their applications though.
Some objectives are just too obscure and hard to find without guidance.
That said, quest markers aren't necessarily the best way to do it.
Dishonored's Heart lighting up and beating faster and faster when pointed at and approaching objectives is a great way to find objectives.
Just because you know WHERE something is doesn't mean you know how to reach it, and even finding it in the first place is still a puzzle on its own.
I remember playing Far Cry 3, tried to walk more the second playtime through and then back to car again for the third. The quest markers allowed to traverse widely different aspects of the landscape (honestly the biggest difference was the walking). If you do missions in different order you will always traverse different terrain.
If you follow direction from a quest giver you can only go the same way as it becomes a series of markers instead of just one. You actually see LESS of the terrain. It reduces exploration. The designer pretty much only lets you go one way. I remember this being a huge problem in Morrowind.
You can argue that you can get lost and randomly find places. That's awesome... for you. I usually do it another way. With Fallout 3, Morrowind and Oblivion I search the area by grid patterns after reaching a certain level (really annoying in Oblivion due to monster scaling). I'd move only about 5 metres from the last line of search and set across from one end of the grid to the other until I search the whole width of the grid. I literally found everything (this is the time before I starting using the internet to do things similar. Now I have a list of places and cross them off once I visit them. Did it in Skyrim, New Vegas and Dark Souls. In fact, I played the first two the same way through two playthroughs and found totally different areas as I never went in the same directions to new places. i.e. sometimes I'd go north to south but the next east to west).
Fast travel and quest markers are a different matter, as you can just zip to the right area, reducing the possibility of exploration. BUT the same problem occurs with the instruction from a quest givers. So you could blame fast travel. But I have a kid now, I only have a limited time to play games, so if find quest marker essential especially when I'm tracking 10 quests at a time. I need ways to make the game less (irrelevantly) time consuming.
If you follow direction from a quest giver you can only go the same way as it becomes a series of markers instead of just one. You actually see LESS of the terrain. It reduces exploration. The designer pretty much only lets you go one way. I remember this being a huge problem in Morrowind.
You can argue that you can get lost and randomly find places. That's awesome... for you. I usually do it another way. With Fallout 3, Morrowind and Oblivion I search the area by grid patterns after reaching a certain level (really annoying in Oblivion due to monster scaling). I'd move only about 5 metres from the last line of search and set across from one end of the grid to the other until I search the whole width of the grid. I literally found everything (this is the time before I starting using the internet to do things similar. Now I have a list of places and cross them off once I visit them. Did it in Skyrim, New Vegas and Dark Souls. In fact, I played the first two the same way through two playthroughs and found totally different areas as I never went in the same directions to new places. i.e. sometimes I'd go north to south but the next east to west).
Fast travel and quest markers are a different matter, as you can just zip to the right area, reducing the possibility of exploration. BUT the same problem occurs with the instruction from a quest givers. So you could blame fast travel. But I have a kid now, I only have a limited time to play games, so if find quest marker essential especially when I'm tracking 10 quests at a time. I need ways to make the game less (irrelevantly) time consuming.
I dislike them, because you just end up following arrows around. you are always wandering towards the next marker, and i find it incredebly boring. But it might not be the markers that is the real problem, it might just be that games featuring quest markers has a tendency to be uninteresting.
And I totally agree with thisRacecarlock said:
Take dark souls. Pretty much no directions give (maybe look in an area). Go play that if you are so concerned. I found it pointless. I was lucky to go the right way most times, but some of my friends gave up after 10 hours because they didn't know they should go through Undead Burg.
I remember a few quests in Morrowind where you had to go a certain direction from a road marker. The problem being that there is a big difference between NNW, NW an WNW. You could get lost for a while and I remember looking up the directions on quite a few occasions.
It takes away the sense of exploration! I need to have a reason to explore a game, I can't blood well do it because I like the game, it has to be because someone tells me to go in a vague direction and I have to spend some effort to find it.
Yes, that was sarcasm and an attempt to piss off the kind of people who don't like quest markers. If I like a game then I will explore the game and find joy in discovering new things. If I get stuck in a game simply because I don't get an explanation of what I am supposed to do I get annoyed with the game.
The game I have done the most exploration in is Banjo Kazooie and that is after I had it nailed down where pretty much everything was. It's a brilliant game and I explore it because I like it, not because I get lost. That's the way it should be. Making you explore a game just because you can't find your way is stupid. Not exploring the game because you know where you're going is stupid. We aren't machines, we don't have to follow every lead we get. That's why my friend always driver over the mountains in GTA V. It's not the straight forward line, nor is it the faster one (in fact he often ends up wrecking the car and spending a lot of time walking to the nearest road), but it's the fun way. If you need the game to tell you to explore or to tell you to have fun then I just can't understand how you can enjoy it. That said in a game like Bioshock where you are navigating corridors I think a map should be the only tool you have rather than an arrow pointing you in the right direction. Also hidden objects should stay hidden.
Yes, that was sarcasm and an attempt to piss off the kind of people who don't like quest markers. If I like a game then I will explore the game and find joy in discovering new things. If I get stuck in a game simply because I don't get an explanation of what I am supposed to do I get annoyed with the game.
The game I have done the most exploration in is Banjo Kazooie and that is after I had it nailed down where pretty much everything was. It's a brilliant game and I explore it because I like it, not because I get lost. That's the way it should be. Making you explore a game just because you can't find your way is stupid. Not exploring the game because you know where you're going is stupid. We aren't machines, we don't have to follow every lead we get. That's why my friend always driver over the mountains in GTA V. It's not the straight forward line, nor is it the faster one (in fact he often ends up wrecking the car and spending a lot of time walking to the nearest road), but it's the fun way. If you need the game to tell you to explore or to tell you to have fun then I just can't understand how you can enjoy it. That said in a game like Bioshock where you are navigating corridors I think a map should be the only tool you have rather than an arrow pointing you in the right direction. Also hidden objects should stay hidden.
It's simply very impractical and costly. VA is hard to include as it is, and adding VA for directions for every single of the hundreds of quests in Skyrim is a big ask, same with even adding text direction to it, would require many hours worth of work.CpT_x_Killsteal said:
In the long sequence of "streamlinings" of the game over the past few years, the quest markers were the biggest single thing that caused me to stop playing WoW. The act of killing 8 mooks was already simple as hell but having a dozen quests and cruising the countryside wondering which quest item you'd happen upon next was endearing. Walk to the yellow dot, kill 8 mooks, repeat until 85 was just so boring I couldn't stand it even for the chance to play with the missus (we moved on to Borderlands).
I don't hate them per se, what with current gen graphics being so incredibly detailed that it can be hard to make out what you are looking for, but in the times before quest markers, I feel that gameplay was more organic.
The gameplay gelled well with the narrative, as it felt like you, the player, were driving the story: you were in control and the one shaping the world, the game was driven by your sense of exploration and by your curiosity.
Nowadays, that doesn't happen as often, the most recent example I can think of is Bastion. I think since development is becoming more expensive, (and since publishers want to broaden demographics so that their investment is more guaranteed a return) devs don't really want the player getting lost or confused, so they proceed to use the "carrot on a stick" technique.
Or it could be that they use statistics to build a picture of the average gamer, who is a white male teenager (most of the time), which leads to focus groups and all that other despicable "market research" nonsense, culminating in them thinking that their audience does not have a focused enough attention span to play the game using their own wits.
Which leads to an interesting catch-22, because even more active gamers (say, The Escapist; active participation in the community, certain genres in mind, etc.) start to become put off when a game(for want of a better phrase) doesn't handhold them. Case in point: Dark Souls, which is fairly polarising: one half treat it as digital S&M, and the other as the greatest game ever made. In this case, I do feel that the former half have been made complacement with all the nonsense that modern games pile onto a game to make it more accessible, which makes it harder for us to enjoy a game that dispells systems such as regenerating health.
'-.-
Sorry, went off on a tangent there.
The gameplay gelled well with the narrative, as it felt like you, the player, were driving the story: you were in control and the one shaping the world, the game was driven by your sense of exploration and by your curiosity.
Nowadays, that doesn't happen as often, the most recent example I can think of is Bastion. I think since development is becoming more expensive, (and since publishers want to broaden demographics so that their investment is more guaranteed a return) devs don't really want the player getting lost or confused, so they proceed to use the "carrot on a stick" technique.
Or it could be that they use statistics to build a picture of the average gamer, who is a white male teenager (most of the time), which leads to focus groups and all that other despicable "market research" nonsense, culminating in them thinking that their audience does not have a focused enough attention span to play the game using their own wits.
Which leads to an interesting catch-22, because even more active gamers (say, The Escapist; active participation in the community, certain genres in mind, etc.) start to become put off when a game(for want of a better phrase) doesn't handhold them. Case in point: Dark Souls, which is fairly polarising: one half treat it as digital S&M, and the other as the greatest game ever made. In this case, I do feel that the former half have been made complacement with all the nonsense that modern games pile onto a game to make it more accessible, which makes it harder for us to enjoy a game that dispells systems such as regenerating health.
'-.-
Sorry, went off on a tangent there.
Oh, yeah, especially with quest descriptions like "go to cave A and kill there a guy B, but first find a thing in a village C" with zero actual directions where to find any of mentioned objects. Same with Oblivion. Problem is quest markers REPLACE directions, not support them, and their mere presence creates a psychological trigger "go there do that", making player to ignore lots of environment while plain running to quest marker.endtherapture said:
I actually find in Skyrim this is the oppposite. In Skyrim I'll often have a quest but on the way to it I'll get distracted and run off somewhere else. Same with Oblivion.Rastrelly said:
It's more likely in for example Dragon Age I'll follow the quest marker as it is a lot more of a linear game.
I like to use quest markers when I don't care about exploring at the moment and just want to advance the story or current quest I am on. I also like to use them when the developers made the location confusing and difficult to navigate.
I can understand why people dislike quest markers though. That's why I think quest markers should always be optional in the games that use them. That way the people who want the challenge don't have to use them and the people who do want to use them are able to.
I can understand why people dislike quest markers though. That's why I think quest markers should always be optional in the games that use them. That way the people who want the challenge don't have to use them and the people who do want to use them are able to.
Its the difference between "Go to the cave" in a world filled with a hundred caves and then simply going trial and error for possibly hours. and "across the bridge to the east of town there is a tower, turn north and the cave is behind the road sign at the T-junction" which means that while you have directions to go, you still need to explore a bit and it really makes the world feel more real than an arrow telling you exactly where to go in a place youve never been to.Racecarlock said:
Sure while the first offers exploration, its less searching in an area using your map and just needless trial and error for hours. While this actually works in something like Dark Souls it wont work in something like Skyrim. The reason Darksouls does it well is because its less free roaming in an open world and more choosing different paths to follow which means you have direction, and then its a simple case of going "enemies are too high level here, il go the other way" But in Skyrim if im told to go to cave X with no reference to where it might be it simply wouldnt work.
Quest markers are just a bandaid on the wound of bad design, for the most part at least. And a lot of people in this thread seem to think it comes down to elitist "git gud casul" type stuff. No, it does not. Though ironically, dark souls is part of my next point.
Good level design doesn't need markers. In dark souls for example, less obvious areas have torches leading the way, like the ladder out of blightown. It doesn't require much thinking, but it makes you notice the ladders while keeping you immersed in the game. A quest marker is a constant reminder that you are playing a game. They break immersion.
Another example is morrowind. Now i've not played a ton of it, but probably like 10 or 20 hours, and even though it looks like crap in both graphics and aesthetics, it's extremely immersive. You actually feel like you're in another world. Yes, sometimes things are hard to find, but the game manages to make simple tasks like fetch quests feel good because of how immersive it all is. Now on the other hand, skyrim has a quest marker for everything, which is a damn shame considering how amazing the world actually looks. Yeah, you can turn off the compass, but the game isn't design around that. You don't get directions to where you have to go other than go to X cave and a marker on your map. It makes every quest feel the same, you're not looking at the world around you, you're looking at that quest arrow and missing out of your beautiful surroundings.
It's nothing to do with making games harder, it's simply that good design will almost always have you know where to go through a subtle indication, instead of a big arrow telling you exactly where. It all comes down to how it breaks immersion and discourages exploration.
Good level design doesn't need markers. In dark souls for example, less obvious areas have torches leading the way, like the ladder out of blightown. It doesn't require much thinking, but it makes you notice the ladders while keeping you immersed in the game. A quest marker is a constant reminder that you are playing a game. They break immersion.
Another example is morrowind. Now i've not played a ton of it, but probably like 10 or 20 hours, and even though it looks like crap in both graphics and aesthetics, it's extremely immersive. You actually feel like you're in another world. Yes, sometimes things are hard to find, but the game manages to make simple tasks like fetch quests feel good because of how immersive it all is. Now on the other hand, skyrim has a quest marker for everything, which is a damn shame considering how amazing the world actually looks. Yeah, you can turn off the compass, but the game isn't design around that. You don't get directions to where you have to go other than go to X cave and a marker on your map. It makes every quest feel the same, you're not looking at the world around you, you're looking at that quest arrow and missing out of your beautiful surroundings.
It's nothing to do with making games harder, it's simply that good design will almost always have you know where to go through a subtle indication, instead of a big arrow telling you exactly where. It all comes down to how it breaks immersion and discourages exploration.