Quest compass and marker

[SymbolicFrank]

I think the main problem is that people today expect everyone to have GPS and internet. Yes, even their swords & sorcery avatar.

 

[Carrion]

Quest compass and marker, when they are introduced, should be optional, so that you would be able to turn them off and enjoy a more oldschool feel.

Unfortunately,that would require more work from the devs.

A simple improvement that would require no extra work at all would be to replace the compass marker with map markers, which usually already exist in the game anyway. That alone would make the player pay a lot more attention to hs surroundings instead of just staring at the magic compass. Don't make the markers omniscient either, just have them roughly point to the right village or cave and let the player figure out the rest. It's ridiculous when you're supposed to find an item in some huge dungeon, and there's a giant arrow pointing straight at it the whole time.

Hand-written directions would be the best, but it's probably too much to hope for at this point. Maybe in some niche incline game in the far future.

 

[Cael]

Just give me a blank fucking map with some key locations written down like a real world map and let me annotate and add markers to it as I wish.

The concept died with Origin Systems.

You can thank EA for that one.

 

[SymbolicFrank]

Long ago, in a galaxy far away, there was no internet, and to find out something, you had to go to the library.

Most people I talk to either cannot imagine or don't believe me. Just check your phone, if you want to know anything!

 

[Zombra]

Bah, don't act like this is new technology.

 

[anvi]

I think EverQuest did it best. There was a huge world with no maps at all, but you could learn your way around it just like you can learn your way around your own town. It could be too hard in a bigger more open world with places that all look the same (like a desert etc), but that should be part of the game design. I don't think players should be able to auto map themselves. I think if there would be maps it should be given to the player only after they have explored an area multiple times without a map. The same goes for fast travel. So you get a quest to visit a warlock on the northern side of the forest near a river, so you manage to find him. Then you have to find your way back. Then you have to visit a captain of the guards on the eastern edge of the forest near the mountains, and you manage to find him. Only then does he give you a rough map of that area.

Everything is so much better when you find it for yourself and you use your bearings to get to places. Getting a map much later to help perfect your knowledge of an area is fine, just don't ruin the players ability to discover things using their own skills.

 

[ilitarist]

Surprised no one here sees the real problem.

Around the time of Oblivion (and even Morrowind had it) the technology had reached the point where fidelity of details come dangerously close to the reality. You can look at the table and see dozen of items there. You can look at a landscape and not see cave or building among forests and hills. It's fine when there's something secret, like a key dropped under the table for a chest you can lockpick anyway. But you can't leave anything important just lying there among other stuff because it would create an experience as interesting as looking for your car keys. Different devs coup with this in different way:

1) Just not use detailed objects. Put everything important on a pedestal or in a highlighted chest. Risen and Kingdoms of Amalur do it this way: you rarely find stuff just lying in the world. It is similar to how adventure games (Tomb Raider) have a special texture for cliffs you can arbitrarily climb making the world look copy-pasted.

2) Use some highlighting. You can rarely see it in RPG - maybe as this top down RPG highlight items button. Dead Space had it: there's a lot of objects in the game but important ones have a small hologram appearing beside them.

3) Use your witcher senses. Or Batman Detective mod. Or Dark Vision. Or whatever Deus Ex Human Revolution thing is called. It helps but it still requires you to lower fidelity of details: you can throw a dozen items at a table, it would be inconvinient to look at them with the special vision.

So as you may see all those solutions have a common problem: they force you to adjust the map. If you take a screenshot of the games I've listed where the character has to interact with something it would be very obvious that this is a game. If you take a screenshot of Skyrim or Fallout 4 you'll see a place first and game arena second. This what the guiding arrow gives developers: a power of being sure that you will still find a quest item after its holder was thrown 50 meters away after you had blown him up. Knowing that you would understand that this small trapdoor is a door without a giant sign near it. You may snobbishly say you don't need those crutches but you do, and no amount of NPC descriptions will help you. It's only partly a cop out by devs solving the problem of bad level design; it's still mostly one of the solutions for inevitable problem.

 

[Krivol]

What? You want to say that Oblivion and newer games has items/world etc so detailed that it's harder to find cave/key on table than in ,let's say, Morrowind (which was perfectly easy to play and only idiots had a problem with finding dwemer puzzle box) or Gothic?

 

[TC Jr]

Surprised no one here sees the real problem.

Around the time of Oblivion (and even Morrowind had it) the technology had reached the point where fidelity of details come dangerously close to the reality. You can look at the table and see dozen of items there. You can look at a landscape and not see cave or building among forests and hills. It's fine when there's something secret, like a key dropped under the table for a chest you can lockpick anyway. But you can't leave anything important just lying there among other stuff because it would create an experience as interesting as looking for your car keys. Different devs coup with this in different way:

1) Just not use detailed objects. Put everything important on a pedestal or in a highlighted chest. Risen and Kingdoms of Amalur do it this way: you rarely find stuff just lying in the world. It is similar to how adventure games (Tomb Raider) have a special texture for cliffs you can arbitrarily climb making the world look copy-pasted.

2) Use some highlighting. You can rarely see it in RPG - maybe as this top down RPG highlight items button. Dead Space had it: there's a lot of objects in the game but important ones have a small hologram appearing beside them.

3) Use your witcher senses. Or Batman Detective mod. Or Dark Vision. Or whatever Deus Ex Human Revolution thing is called. It helps but it still requires you to lower fidelity of details: you can throw a dozen items at a table, it would be inconvinient to look at them with the special vision.

So as you may see all those solutions have a common problem: they force you to adjust the map. If you take a screenshot of the games I've listed where the character has to interact with something it would be very obvious that this is a game. If you take a screenshot of Skyrim or Fallout 4 you'll see a place first and game arena second. This what the guiding arrow gives developers: a power of being sure that you will still find a quest item after its holder was thrown 50 meters away after you had blown him up. Knowing that you would understand that this small trapdoor is a door without a giant sign near it. You may snobbishly say you don't need those crutches but you do, and no amount of NPC descriptions will help you. It's only partly a cop out by devs solving the problem of bad level design; it's still mostly one of the solutions for inevitable problem.

Yeah I think the advancement of graphics (more realistic at least) in modern games ruin loads of aspects, people are unwilling to accept quick "janky" animations and instead expect slow "realistic" animations which is why I feel every game is slow as fuck but that's another point haha.
As you said though, this could be solved with actual level design and not just throwing the MC into a massive open world that consists of useless shit and so we wouldn't miss key items or whatever.

 

[ilitarist]

What? You want to say that Oblivion and newer games has items/world etc so detailed that it's harder to find cave/key on table than in ,let's say, Morrowind (which was perfectly easy to play and only idiots had a problem with finding dwemer puzzle box) or Gothic?

Yes. You mentioned Dwemer Puzzle Box so you know lots of people missed that. And it was one of the few items you needed in the game that was placed in the world organically. Most of the items were on bodies or in highlighted chests.

Here's one of the few quest itemss in Skyrim without the quest marker.

Spoiler

This is a huge sparkling golden thing. It's still relatively easy to miss for lots of players. Few people ever complete this quest. And here's a random table and book case screenshots:

Spoiler

Now imagine you design a quest where player has to find a specific book. Let's imagine you even tell the character how to get to a building with the book. What then? The house contains dozens of books. Would you place it in some obvious place in a middle of a table under the ray of light? Would you leave a note from an owner explaining where exactly did he leave the book? Well then the note has to be placed somewhere obvious. Will you add a shining aura to that book or a golden cover? Or do you want your character to look through the whole building, seeing several tables like that, looking at each and making sure he checks all the books, and then looks at all the cases?

It's not even the worst example. Looking for something in the dark dungeon would be a nightmare. And in Gothic or any other example you can find you'd have a couple of chests in the whole dungeon and the item would be in one of them. You'd have no immersion and really won't have any real complexity - putting a very obvious place to contain a quest item isn't better than to have it clearly higlighted by the marker. Or do you expect every quest giver to give you a full plan of a dungeon with explanation where everything lies? Or would you still prefer to look for items in a detailed realistic room?

 

[ilitarist]

As you said though, this could be solved with actual level design and not just throwing the MC into a massive open world that consists of useless shit and so we wouldn't miss key items or whatever.

Yeah, but it would either mean you don't pretend the world is real (i.e. every location has an empty room with a boss and the thing you're looking for and the way there is clear) or you have to create a very convinient signs like placing important stuff in a middle of the room under a ray of light and things like that - which too breaks immersion if you use it often.

 

[Cael]

Now imagine you design a quest where player has to find a specific book. Let's imagine you even tell the character how to get to a building with the book. What then? The house contains dozens of books. Would you place it in some obvious place in a middle of a table under the ray of light? Would you leave a note from an owner explaining where exactly did he leave the book? Well then the note has to be placed somewhere obvious. Will you add a shining aura to that book or a golden cover? Or do you want your character to look through the whole building, seeing several tables like that, looking at each and making sure he checks all the books, and then looks at all the cases?

You had to do that in Morrowind in the library in the Vivec temple...

 

[Darkzone]

Quest compass and marker, when they are introduced, should be optional, so that you would be able to turn them off and enjoy a more oldschool feel.

Unfortunately,that would require more work from the devs. The NPCs would have to actually tell us where to go, how to find important locations (like they used to do in Morrowind or Gothic). Travel directions would have to be recorded, voiced etc. Without it turning off the quest compass would make the game quite unplayable - or you would have to rely on bumping by accident on the proper locations.

What really irritates me is not even quest compass but GPS that leads you to your next quest by picking the easiest route. It really infuriated me in Witcher 3. I want to choose my own path!

Relatively compared to the individual parts of the game it wouldn't be that much work. Depended on the system it could be just a sentence in a separate column in a csv document that could be copied into a journal of sorts or some tags with a location on a map or the entire conversation with the NPC in a Journal. Or whatever the devs think is a integral part of the interface between the player and the game system (here i explicit say not necessary the UI) and depended on this thing is also the amount of work. So in other words it can go from nearly no additional work to extreme amount of work compared to the other parts of the game.

 

[ilitarist]

You had to do that in Morrowind in the library in the Vivec temple...

You could just buy it.

 

[Bohrain]

I think developers are just too lazy to play around with the concept. The casual audience doesn't like challenge so they'll usually blaster an automatic GPS and call it a day.
Morrowind had a pretty good map. It gave you the initial shape of the island and you got cities and some other locations marked down if you asked for them. Adding a compass system to something like that could work, assuming you had to direct the compass like a real life one OR ask for an NPC to do it which could have really interesting consequences.

 

[CrunchyHemorrhoids]

Caius Cosades considerations aside it seems a waste to have so much money poured into building those nice-looking 3d worlds only to then make the player navigate them almost exclusively by looking at the GPS minimap/compass rather than by looking at the actual gameworld.

 

[Sigourn]

There are only three advantages to quest markers.

- Makes work easier for devs.
- Gives retards and easy way to complete quests.
- Gives people who don't have the time to play videogames a faster way to complete quests.

Those are basically it. The advantages have been mentioned to death. It's time to accept there's no turning back. The majority decides, and the majority has decided they do not give a shit about quest markers. As a consequence, devs feel no need to make quest markers optional and complemented with a proper directions system.

The least we can do, in our position, is DEMAND the lack of quest markers in indie and AA RPGs. We can make our voices heard in that market.

This is a huge sparkling golden thing. It's still relatively easy to miss for lots of players. Few people ever complete this quest.

Bear in mind Skyrim has a gigantic worldscape with plenty of interior cells, some so irrelevant a lot of people never bothered to explore. Those things are so hard to find because the reward completely breaks the game economy, as I discovered when I looked up on the Internet where to find all of those gems.

 

[Zombra]

You may snobbishly say you don't need those crutches but you do, and no amount of NPC descriptions will help you.

What the fuck? Of course NPC descriptions will help you.

[The Unusual Gems in Skyrim are] huge sparkling golden things. They're still easy to miss for lots of players. Few people ever complete this quest.

The problem here isn't that these are hard to find, but the player's sense of entitlement in expecting to finish every quest. Unusual Gems is a rare collectible quest that most players are not expected to complete. There will be a few that do, and they will feel special when they do because they are special. This "everybody gets 100% achievements" nonsense is the gaming equivalent of "participation trophies". Only it's not just a participation trophy, but the expectation that every participant gets the first place blue ribbon.

Now imagine you design a quest where player has to find a specific book.

First of all, your example quest is garbage. You want the player to find a specific book in a building filled with 2000 identical books, randomly scattered throughout? And that's all the detail you can come up with? This is the best you can do? If somebody hired me to do this, I would have a thousand questions for them.

What is the book? What does it look like? How big is it? Yes, what color is the cover? Does it have a drawing of a huge dragon on the front? Does it have skulls embossed on the spine? Why does the quest giver want the book? What's it about? Where would you keep a book on how to mix alchemical ingredients? Where would you keep a cookbook? Where would you keep a book on bird watching? Does its owner read it often? Probably, if it's so damn important. So does he read in bed every night? Does he read in the bathtub? Even if you choose not to make it visually distinct (Why? Do you have a good reason it shouldn't be?), NPC description can tell you a thousand things about this item and the person you're stealing it from, and give you clues or outright directions exactly where to find it. Just think it through and make a little damn effort.

It's not even the worst example. Looking for something in the dark dungeon would be a nightmare.

Yeah, if your quest giver just says, "It's probably buried under that mountain somewhere, go look," and you place it in a dark corner on the floor in a random room. If something is important, the characters will treat it with due importance. The Chalice of Light is damn well going to be kept on a shining pedestal in the throne room. On the other hand, if the quest specifically is to find a hidden object that no one could reasonably find by randomly looking ("Prophecies speak of a rusty dagger destined to kill the tyrant; it's rumored to be buried in So-And-So's Tomb, but that's all we know,") then it's dumb again for your PC to walk straight towards that dark corner and grab it like there was a spotlight on it. What the hell kind of story is that? Make there be a reason the PC was chosen to find it: he has a metal detector, or a clairvoyance spell, or something like this that can guide him.

It's not good design to make needles glow with God's heavenly radiance in their haystacks. Just don't write fucking needle in a haystack quests in the first place unless that's actually what you want your players to be doing.

 

[Sigourn]

What is the book? What does it look like? How big is it? Yes, what color is the cover? Does it have a drawing of a huge dragon on the front? Does it have skulls embossed on the spine? Why does the quest giver want the book? What's it about? Where would you keep a book on how to mix alchemical ingredients? Where would you keep a cookbook? Where would you keep a book on bird watching? Does its owner read it often? Probably, if it's so damn important. So does he read in bed every night? Does he read in the bathtub? Even if you choose not to make it visually distinct (Why? Do you have a good reason it shouldn't be?), NPC description can tell you a thousand things about this item and the person you're stealing it from, and give you clues or outright directions exactly where to find it. Just think it through and make a little damn effort.

Your questions fail because they assume the quest giver is able to answer all of that. They are question centered around a specific quest. In other words: if an NPC tells me to find a specific book (with beautiful prose on how it looks like and what does it talk about) in a great library no one has ever been to in a hundred years (and is allegedly haunted by its constructor), the player has almost no chance of tackling that quest properly with the info the NPC gives him. Moreover, inside the library there's no info altogether on how to find the book itself: it has been ransacked ot hell and back, books are everywhere on the ground, the records have been destroyed and there's nothing to help the player in finding the book.

The quest giver has told you he is willing to pay you 10.000 gold (an exorbitant sum of money) if you return the book to him. If you don't find it, he'll pay you nothing, but you know this in advance. So it's up to you to waste your time in this great library looking for a book that may not even be there, with the promise of great fortune awaiting you, or deciding not to take the quest at all.

How do you proceed? I've already given you the info: the book may or may not be there, you know what the book is supposed to look like and talk about, but there's absolutely no piece of evidence to tell you where inside the library it is located. Oh, and there's no magic spell that will help you find this book either, and no way to "trigger" its appearance somehow. As you will notice, the answer is quite simple: you have to work your ass off to find it. The key is in the reward: this guarantees that the task, though fucking boring, will be rewarding because of the money itself.

This is a very specific example that proves that quest rewards should make a huge impact on the type of quest you make. If you add a quest marker to find the book, you can't leave the reward at 10.000 gold because it would be a ridiculously simple job (for the player). But you can't lower that reward either, because realistically it would be a fucking boring and complicated job. With quest markers, this quest shouldn't exist. But there's also nothing to help the player find the book. The search will be long, tedious, boring (and the ghost may not even be there, it was all stories). But you compensate with the reward. And, ideally, the developer will make it so that the book is randomly placed inside the library (so no use of walkthrough to find the book).

Because this is an RPG, there's also another solution: forge the book yourself with the aid of another NPC, as the quest giver has never seen the book himself, only read about what it is supposed to look like. Maybe there's an NPC in town that is an expert at making books, and by going to the library and returning some books to him he would have a good idea on how to forge a convincing imitation of the book.

 

[Zombra]

Good post Sigourn, and yes, this is also a perfectly good composition ... if you want the player looking for a needle in a haystack, then build your quest that way. (Deliberately designing it to be "fucking boring" is probably not a great idea, but this sounds like it could be a thrilling horror quest, searching a ruined library while a ghost may be stalking you! I also love the randomization idea.) If as in my example, you want more of a detective story where the player has reasonable information to find what he's after more easily, you can do it that way too. We can make up hypothetical quests all day long, and how we want the player to have to solve them (if they solve them at all), and how easy or difficult it will be. So far I can't think of any design where slapping a marker on it isn't crap.

 

[Sigourn]

Good post Sigourn, and yes, this is also a perfectly good composition ... if you want the player looking for a needle in a haystack, then build your quest that way. (This sounds like a great horror quest by the way, searching the library while a ghost may be stalking you!) If as in my example, you want more of a detective story where the player has reasonable information to find what he's after more easily, you can do it that way too. We can make up hypothetical quests all day long, and how we want the player to have to solve them (if they solve them at all), and how easy or difficult it will be. So far I can't think of any design where using a marker is the best, most compelling, or most fun solution.

Thanks! I agree with your last comment: a quest where a marker is the best or most fun solution is a quest that is probably a very shitty one.

 

[Master]

Why not just make the book a different texture like in Thief. If you ask the quest giver how does it look like he could say, you will know when you see it. Done deal.

edit: 10 000 gold for a book? That sounds like some shady business. I bet the book is cursed or something.

 

[SCO]

Remember than time that the devs of Thief3 thought it was a excellent idea to put 'loot glint' to casualize finding it?

Game studios simply don't have a sense of proportion because they're making games for people with no patience or (less often) time. So they make it retard proof and pat themselves on the back for saving money and time creating a coherent quest or game world.

Your suggestion is ok, as is the alternate solution suggestion or the 'directions' or 'drawing' suggestions - but it's going to go down to the shittiest, least effort, most generic implementation 90% of the time.

It's literally something you can't fight - there were people complaining about item clutter back in ultima 7 and most game worlds aren't even as bad now. Shadowrun Hong Kong, one of the least interactive games i've had the displeasure of experiencing on this decade had multiple teams working in parallel on a separate mission structure and still ended up with a incoherent quest structure and a quest compass with a game world of clicking on icons (my god, was ultima 7 really the last isometric game with crate ladders? Even frobbing is uncommon now, fuck this earth).

 

[anvi]

You may snobbishly say you don't need those crutches but you do, and no amount of NPC descriptions will help you.

That's not true, I've played games where you have to figure stuff out before. "Visit the Warlock on the northern edge of the forest near where the river forks." Games like EQ were full of that and there was no map at all, no quest markers, and not even a journal.

That kind of thing is unheard of now, and it shouldn't be.

(It didn't even have a clickable quest dialogue / interface. You had to type to the NPC to ask it questions to progress the quest.)

 

[Shinji]

In Skyrim it is common to have a quest log filled with dozens of unfinished quests in just a short amount of play time. I mean, by just talking to people a quest can be added to your quest log, you don't even have to agree for it to happen.

The issue is that there is an overflow of quests in such games. Developers like Bethesda seem to care more about quantity over quality, so that they can put on their marketing campaign "More than 1000 hours worth of content".

I think the developers of Bethesda probably thought: "How will the players keep track of such huge amount of quests?", and then added quest markers. Which in a way makes sense, because otherwise the player would have too think too hard for even the most menial fetch quest.

So for games that prioritize filler quests and quantity over quality, quest markers work.
But I think that's why I cared so much more about the game world in Gothic 2 than in Skyrim. Gothic 2 gives the player a small number of quests at a time, and I believe this helps the player to focus in finding out where he has to go next, what he has to do, and so on.

I wish developers would focus more in quality these days, but apparently it is more lucrative to make games for the Candy Crush generation of players.