Ever since I have turned those markers off I have found much more interesting stuff in Skyrim than with them :D It makes you look around more.
As for Oblivion, yes, it was designed with compass in mind. But I find that all caves and generally everything marked on compass is somehow highlited in the world by it's design. I would still never turn off quest markers, but exploration is much more fun if you need to notice clues the world gives you.

I'm one of those people who hate quest markers in TES games. I loved being lost in Morrowind. One of my most memorable moments from that game was the time when I needed to find a cavern called Milk following the directions in my journal that I've received from an NPC back in Ald'Ruhn. I was stumbling about the region looking for landmarks for hours, and it was just a great and really immersive experience. And of course I'd find all kinds of whacky crap wandering the wilderness. In Morrowind pretty much every quest was like that.

I know Bethesda is trying to sell their games to a more "casual" player base, but I really wish they would give players the option to find the quest locations themselves. And I know that would cost them extra effort and resources (since their writers would need to write up directions for quests), but I wish they did it anyway.

Also, fast travel. I appreciate the introduction of carriages to Skyrim, but they had way too few destinations to be a useful substitute for click-to-teleport fast travel.

You can turn the quest marker of. Take a look at the map, remember the general direction and go find that bitch! (That's how I did it)

The problem is mostly (I guess) that when the dialogue is recorded, the gameworld isn't yet fully designed. While you can always type a few directions on the fly, voicing them isn't really an option.

IIRC, there was a quest in Skyrim where you had to find a location only described in a book without marker...

While I would also advocate that all dialogue should be written, only with a few "identifying lines" spoken. Think of PS:T.

Indeed, back in those days dialog was much more flexible. Plus fully voiced games are pretty much impossible for the average user to create quality content for with NPCs in it, because voice acting/recording is something that's easily identified if on an amateur level.

I'd argue though that it was still possible to include quest directions in a fully voiced game like Skyrim. As one possible solution, the quest giver NPC could just say something like "here, I've written down the directions for you" and then give you a note in your inventory or journal.

In a few cases, they could even have the voice actors recite the directions. As far as I know voice acting is usually recorded in the late stages of game development and by then the game world is not likely to be subject to major layout changes. If some changes are made after the voices are done, they could even cut parts of it and then fill in the details in the journal.

Yes, it's a lot of extra work, and they're quite unlikely to chase this feature on future games. Still, it would be awesome.

For the time being, there is this mod for Skyrim that does something similar to what we've been discussing.

It's not exactly drm free as it says Impulse Reactor in protection type.

That mod's bloody useless with the GPS map Skyrim's got. It's using proper names for rivers and valleys and mountains and everything, you know, stuff you'd expect to find on a MAP.

Indeed.

New Vegas added a lot of flavor dialogue with directions. It was also kind of a smaller world, which made it easier to go without an arrow. Oblivion, Skyrim and Fallout 3 however you HAVE to have that arrow, and I am sure those of us who turn it off are not a large enough market for Bethesda to change their system and add more costs.

Fast travel is the same, there is no in-world travel mechanic that makes up for ignoring it, so you have to use it. Skyrim added carriages, and now ships with Darnguard, which is awesome, but with no mark and recall spells or intervention spells it's still impossible to not fast travel.

I've personally never really had a problem with Fast Traveling. For quests that require a lot of back-and-forth, not fast traveling would be hell (though I do think replacing it with a middleground like carriages at every city or teleportation spells or something would be fine). Depends on my mood though. If I'm in an explore-y mood I won't fast travel, if I'm in a questing mood I will.

I do agree it'd be nice to have a quest system similar to Morrowind, though (and a map system, for that matter. I like how the map fills in as you explore).

My excuses for necroing this thread but I'm playing New Vegas right now and boy ... I had to get some stuff off my chest:

Some quests are seriously bugged. Especially the order you do stuff in makes the game bug out big time. This is how I played the game:

- I went to Benny, got the chip off him and found the Yes Man.
- I then got the chance to go to a fortress below Caeser's camp and so I decided to go there
- because I killed one of the legion guards, every legionair went hostile on me - no sweat, I easily wiped everyone out including Caeser.

Now this is where things get buggy: Mr House speaks to me inside the bunker underneath the camp and goes on about how Caeser told me to destroy the army of robots. Erm, no he didn't. Nor was there an option to tell House Caeser is dead.

I do everything there is to do there and go to the Lucky 38. Only for Mr House to suddenly go "well did you get the chip off Benny?". Erm, of course I did - I already used it and yet there was only an option to hand it over. Buggy, much?

Now thing is, the game skipped a large part of the story despite me doing nothing the game didn't tell me to - the game told me to go to the fort if I didn't want to hand the chip over to Mr House and so I did. It seems the script was really rushed and not well prepared.

It's not a bad game but it has so many dull locations that serve no use and while I like a lot of the stuff it does, the game feels rushed and poorly designed in many places. Over half the locations aren't even worth being mentioned on the map. A tiny shack with nothing to even loot? Really?

Yes, that's why companies do so few open-world story-based RPGs. New Vegas is special by all the combinations you can put together, it often responds to all the stuff you can possibly do ... Aaaand often it doesn't. It's impossible to get ALL the combinations, and sadly, sometimes, some people will inevitably hit a spot that devs didn't quite predict. Therefore, I wouldn't call it poorly designed (tho it was kind of rushed,) in it's current state, including unofficial patches, it's just about as good as it possibly can be.

yeah. like if they had left the original junktown endings in fallout 1 only different(they should have combined the 2 imo.

Thing is, what I did was logical. Think about it: I got the chip and the game says "either give it to Mr House or decode it in a fortress below location X". Then some legionair comes up to me and goes "yeah, Caesar wants to talk to you at location X". Well well, why not go and check it out instead of just doing what Mr House says, right? Except I don't deal with Legionaires (my game character hates them) so I blow the head off the guy at the boat and go to the camp to wipe them all out, including Caesar. It's still a natural thing to do and nothing very weird. From then on, the script is all messed up and I don't see any reason for it to be. It's not some convoluted combination but it was a QUEST - it actually stipulated what I had to do and I did it. For the scripts to break like that makes no sense.

The whole game feels underwhelming, really. It lacks the same creative locations that Fallout 3 had - out of the 150+ locations, maybe 5-10 are really interesting and the rest is something any modder could have whipped up on a bad day. Even the good locations don't really deliver that well - you constantly feel like they squandered good opportunities and I can guess the reason: time restraints.

When you then look at the DLC, you can see the talent and you wonder why the full game has so little of that talent. Sierra Madre, despite getting lukewarm reviews, was pretty brilliant in idea and even in execution. The atmosphere was spot on, the way you felt like you had to survive was what I missed in FNV and even though the DLC had some weak areas but in general, it was way ahead of the other quests I had to do. Fallout NV quests were mostly very superficial with very few interesting quests to do which is a big shame.

And I have never said it's not logical. What I did say is that New Vegas is one hugeass game, and the ammount of combinations in which you can do quests is immense. Bugs like these are to be expected, because it is impossible to predict all outcomes. You could try downloading unofficial patch if you don't have it yet, altho I doubt it would help you now.

Then again, most people are satisfied with precisely what you are not, so I'd say Obsidian did a pretty good job with predicting the possibilities - since most New Vegas players are in awe of how the game reacted correctly to what they have done, and during my playtrough, I have been very much surprised on numerous occasions myself. I'd say it's more of a bad luck on your part than anything else.

And yeah, Fallout 3's world was designed way better than that of New Vegas, that's pretty much an accepted fact now. What is not an accepted fact is that Sierra Mandre was brilliant, but it just was, period.