Make a case for quest markers in 2000 characters or less

Make a case for quest markers in 2000 characters or less

People who want a puzzle game would play a puzzle game instead.

They're cool and I like them because they make the game a little easier and my friends like them too. Ownt much?

>having to use your real-life transferable orientation skills to move around in a world crafted to possess landmarks and signs is equivalent to solving a puzzle
You're the kinda guy that uses his phone GPS to walk to the convenience store a block away, right?

A space where you brainlessly follow specific instructions to receive positive stimuli is the literal definition of a skinner's box

Here's a quest marker to the thread, this discussion needs to be had

It makes the stupid fetch quest I'm probably doing less stupid.

Fetch quests find their true value in giving you scarce information about the item you're looking for, rather than a big glowing sign that tells you exactly which way to go. Compare the quest where you find the Elder Scroll in Skyrim and the one where you find the cube in Morrowind

Without the quest market the average normie would never make it past the first quest, making the game a commercial failure

>pro quest marker

For when you don't have consecutive hours to just explore and find what you find.

>anti quest marker

For when you DO have consecutive hours to just explore and find what you find.

>why not both

Why NOT both? Most of those games let you turn quest markers off. You failing to utilize customization features to fit your preferences is not the game's fault.

As someone who has been regularly playing his Dunmer Mage I can say that if Todd took more time with the game, used more than the 10 voice actors they used, and put effort into directing you to places, even with little hints, I would ALL for no quest markers.
Beth just got lazy with Skyrim.
You'd kind of, in a meta way, give yourself clues in Morrowind in your journal.

This is the result of years of dumbing down the media to make it more accessible to the average Joe. This is another thing you see reflected in society where people are less prone to commit to something and will instead seek to prolong the cycle of immediate gratification.

However, I do believe that people can go back to having to work for that positive stimulus. This does mean that the intended audience will be much smaller.

Some games are simply built with quest markers in mind while others aren't. Quest markers are needed in games where the environment may not possess any noticeable landmarks for the player to use to determine the quest location or when character dialogue isn't either recorded or specific enough.

>Why NOT both? Most of those games let you turn quest markers off. You failing to utilize customization features to fit your preferences is not the game's fault.
Enough of this retard argument. Games with quest markers are designs with quest markers in mind aka fucking terribly. No designer is going to pull the double effort and ALSO include creative visual cues and dialogue hints when the game just blips where to go on the map.

>just turn the shit off
Any game that has quest markers and allows you to turn them off also don't adequately explain the location of said quests via dialogue in order to make no quest markers viable. As an example just read the quest dialogue in morrowind vs oblivion

>This is the result of years of dumbing down the media to make it more accessible to the average Joe
It's not only that though. A lot of people seem to see gaming as a relaxing and passive hobby, so they don't want challenge.

Giving you the option to turn off quest markers does not inherently mean that the game was designed to adhere to these standards. Try playing Skyrim without the quest markers. The quest design of the game makes it so no direction whatsoever is given to you aside from the holy floating arrow that'll lead you to your next objective. Additionally, lazy design such as this one encourages further shortcuts in development and simplifications.

Furthermore, the value of a content is not the quantity of it, rather its quality. What you're saying is you'd rather do 10 quests where you're mindlessly following instructions that tell you exactly what to do rather than having to actually work for a single quest where you'll end up feeling more so accomplished and fulfilled afterwards.

The beauty of accomplishment is in overcoming the challenges (which Dark Souls takes as its primary philosophy; a game that people have fallen head over heels madly in love with). There is literally no challenge whatsoever in blindly following an omnipresent immersion-breaking arrow, but there is in actually having to interact with and observe the game world to find your own way.
If finding the objective was as much of an objective as the objective itself, almost every single RPG would be a better one.

Quest markers are shit because you could just make a good map.

I liked the quest markers in Skyrim because I could bring the game volume down to 15% or so and listen to podcasts instead while barely paying attention to the game.

People don't play game to "relax". There is a reason why we enjoy playing games, and it''s that dopamine rush after successfully completing a quest/level/beating a boss/whatever. The philosophy of instant gratification which has long become standard in the video game industry is one that ensures that the dopamine rush would continue without interruption throughout the experience, and the consequence of this is that the overall challenge in games has taken a drastic nosedive to compensate for the median of the player base. Not only is this philosophy extremely dissatisfying from an objective point of view, it is also literally anti-evolution and will do harm to civilization on the long run.

I really hope this is ironic funposting.

>make a "good" map
>put no quest markers
>general consumer base and critics STILL complain about lack of markers and how they had to search youtube

"General consumer base" is a very broad statement. If someone is too fucking stupid to figure out simple directions as given to you by an interactive theoretically well-designed world, they're an actual waste of oxygen.

>No one is allowed exploration games

>People don't play game to "relax".
People absolutely do and they've become the majority. They struggle on easy and demand no-combat-modes so they can enjoy the graphics and story without the challenge. Just look at all the reviews of games where people claim they're ultra difficult and when you play them, the only thing you die to is boredom.

Have you even read the entire post?

Bioshock 1 had a objective marker that could be turned off and everyone said explicitly where you'd find your next objective and there were signs everywhere.

>cherry-picked example
What's your point exactly? Bioshock is not an RPG btw.

I have, have you?

Quest markers are pretty much mandatory for the new style RPG like the witcher games and bethleda stuff, where you have a massive landmass, hundreds of locations, as many many as 20 quests going at once and little to no guidance or railroading from the devs.

For old style rpgs that have much smaller playable areas, fewer quests and more direction and linearity from the devs, quest markers are not really necessary.

That said, fallout and morrowind in particular are kind of unicorns in that they really could have benefited from some form of quest marking on the overworld map and quite a lot of players use mods to do that (and organize the journal a bit better).

As humans, by and large, we're a psychologically predictable race. People in general don't do arbitrary things for no reason. People play games for the dopamine rush. The feeling of "relaxation" as you put it is a byproduct. Either way, arguing semantics is beside the point.

No normie wants to spend more time aimlessly wandering around rather than actually playing through the game.

If you don't like quest markers, there's always mods for autists who don't want them

Quest markers are absolutely NOT mandatory. TW3 initially was supposed to have none but the idea was scrapped midway into the development to make the game more accessible (which is literally the cancer that's growing in the industry today).

The size of a world absolutely does not mandate quest markers. For example, as opposed to being told to go see X in the town of Y and being given an immediate marker and GPS route to said location, you could be told by the NPC that X lives in the town of Y, which is a mile north behind a forest. You can either choose to follow the beaten signed path which is safer or attempt to cut through the forest and risk getting lost or running into animals/bandits/whatever. Then, once you make it to the town of Y, you could ask around for X (say ask the guards), maybe ask in the local tavern.

There's hundreds of ways to guide a player towards an objective in a well-crafted game. An insulting and mind-numbing quest marker is literally the worst and laziest way.

I don't give a shit.

>but there's mods
This isn't an argument. First off, mods are not official content developed by the producer which may not necessarily carry the intended purpose of the modded function. Additionally, modders do not have access to the same resources that developers do, and therefore, their work will almost always be inferior technically. Finally, quest and level/world design work hand in hand; a world that is designed to be navigated WITH a quest marker will almost never be well-designed enough to accommodate for lack thereof.

P.S: mods don't excuse lazy game design

Quest markers allow for the simplification of a game's goal systems. If a game's focus is primarily on the combat/story/whatever else that isn't the exploration aspect or they want to provide a handholding system for the retards to not get left behind, it's good by the developer's standards. However, as Skyrim readily shows, taking Quest Markers as a baseline design idea is a piss poor idea. Let's do a what-if that actually happened to me on my first play of Skyrim. I saw quest markers and found a mod to turn that shit off.
>No quest markers
>Early on it's fine, follow the road and then talk to the people who tell me about Bleak Falls Barrow, the spooky place overlooking the village, know where to go
>Get to Whiterun
>People start giving me sidequests with no description of where to go, the quest log isn't any more helpful since most small quests are line items with no descriptions, just a location (many of which aren't marked until you find them) and what to do
>Some of these can be cross-map and you'll never find them without a marker/autistic combing of the entire map
Basically, Quest Markers as a baseline implementation in a game means that the quest-based interaction between NPCs and players will suffer. Weaker writing, weaker descriptions, reliant on this HUD marker that tells you "this way!"

>quests will never be this good again

An RPG's primary focus should never be "combat/story/whatever". If there is only one thing that must shine above all in a true RPG (in the actual sense of the term), it is immersion.

>enjoy the graphics and story
What kind of pleb-speak is this?

inb4 someone posts the gothic 2 "proper quest" picture detailing a quest where you have to find a weapon and then compares the game to witcher 3. Skyrim has a bunch of quests like those. They're the miscellaneous fetch quests. There is no quest markers and you can obtain the items multiple ways.

Oh I agree. Nonetheless, if the game is targeted at a casual audience, Quest markers are fine from a development standpoint.

games on the left are better

>tfw people born 18 years ago are now old enough to post here
>tfw they've been posting here for years already

>tfw someone somewhere unironically believes this to be true

In 5 years, Skyrim will be heralded as the best "modern" Elder Scrolls.

jokes on you i've been legally allowed to post here for 2 years now

You don't expect me to remember all that shit do you?

>spend hours trawling the ruins finding lore, cool dwemer items, and robot spiders, but no Dwemer Puzzle Box
>finally figure out it was in a small room adjacent to the foyer the whole time
>I literally could've gone and left in a minute

>my niece will be old enough to do porn this year

well looks like it's time for me to give up porn fellows.

All games are puzzles. That's what gameplay is; small puzzles that you solve one at a time. In chess the puzzle is what move to make. In DMC it's what combo to make. In doom it's what weapon to shoot with and which demon to shoot first. It's how you enter a room and how you leave it. If you don't like puzzles you don't like games, fucking period

FFX doesn’t use quest markers.

then the joke is on you

How convenient that all the games on the left are hated by So(n)yboys while all the games on the right are beloved by So(n)yboys... really makes me think.

It uses one for the main quest.

>ffx
>quest markers

>Planescape Torment and VTMB
>Loved by Sonybros
What?

>sonyboys
>literally only one of those games is released on a current gen Sony console
>cuck literally sees BB, a game that he's still salty to have never played, got triggered and this is the best he could come up with
>tfw this is who you argue with on Sup Forums

They can run on modern toasters, therefore poor So(n)yboys can pirate them and pretend to have actually played them while pretending they're better than modern PC games
>literally doesn't even pretend to not be soy
Top fucking kek

I repeat since you're still speaking in autism too thick to understand, what?

Like I said, that's ok if you have a handful of quests going at once and player progression through the world is old school i.e. subtly railroaded from one hub to the next with the majority of hub quests taking place in the immediate area with minimal travel time.

In contemporary rpgs, you would have 20 NPCs in town telling you about the quest location north/west/northwest/east/past the big rock/near the lake/near the ruins etc. and each location could take you 5 to 10 minutes to travel to.

Morrowind straddled the change between old and nu and its journal system ended up being an absolute disaster that everyone mods. Its no surprise that TW3 included quest markers, because the game would be a complete mess without them given the travel distances and number of quests you pick up in each town.

Just because you liked a mechanic in a different type of game, doesn't mean that that mechanic would work in contemporary rpgs.

Why don't you look at it for yourself, faggot? Compare the number of people who own literally who games like Planescape or VTMB to the number of people who own Witcher 3 or Skyrim (on PC alone, not even counting sales on The One or Switch). Actual PC gamers don't give a shit about those games, snobby soyfaggots pretending to be PC gamers are the ones pushing those memes to try and drive people away from investing in a top of the line gaming rig. We already drove off the retarded soynigs who kept forcing their HURRR QUAKE AND DOOM R BETTER THAN MODERN FPS meme, why can't we do the same with these games?

quest markers are acceptable in gigantic open world games where there's no possible chance you can remember all the landmarks, but not small and linear ones,

I guess we can all agree that the real problem lies on how creating a game with a gigantic open world is more trouble than it's worth. The novelty wears off really fast, anyway, you will be abusing the shit out of fast traveling methods before you complete half of the game.

the real problem is the developers making a gigantic openworld and filling it with "new content" and "new quests" to increase game time

>"go to the city southermost part of the city Dicksuck and find the tavern called Big Black Bull and ask the bartender how to find the entrance to the Faggot Quest Guild
WOOOOOW HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO FIND MY WAY AROUND THIS VAST OPEN WORLD

Reminder that Sega owns the patent to overhead arrows pointing to objectives through Crazy Taxi

The journal in Morrowind is great though, after expansions. The only problem it has is requiring two clicks to get to the quest menu. Otherwise, it's quite astounding. The journal uses the wiki-style link system, so one could see the specifics of certain items if necessary. It's very accommodating to quests with multiple simultaneous objectives, like the Vivec Informants quest, which contain a higher amount of information that must be organized.
Also, games like BotW and even TW3, still have a noticeable amount of quests designed the old fashioned way, despite having immense worlds that dwarf others like Skyrim in size and scope.

(you)

There literally isn't a single argument in here. You're stating opinions and making an unjustified attack against a perfectly functional system.

Dude... darksouls, bruh what about that one game with the dude that made dbz? lmao

>being this needlessly antagonistic on a bangladeshi spider web harvesting advice exchange picture forum
Fresh victim of puberty, gentlemen.

>no quest markers
>game expects you to follow simple instructions
>quest markers
>game expects you to be retarded
(You)'re not retarded, right?

>no questmarkers
>hey hero go find this NPC to further the quest, he likes to hang out around (area)
>stand around for 30 minutes waiting for NPC who never shows up
>quest failed

That's just bad game design.

Also, name one game.

dragon's dogma

You can't complete Skyrim without quest markers for a first blind run

i just love how new vegas isnt in this image

>just because it works doesn't mean it works