I can't get lost (Skyrim related)

[Woodsey]

Morrowind's idea of navigation: here's a blank fucking map, and a not-brilliantly-written journal, now go. Which is wonderful, if you want to spend the entire freaking game lost.

Just turn the marker off in Skyrim. Problem solved.

You mean, how you would actually have to find a new location if you were a stranger in a foreign land? Unless you've actually discovered it already why should you instantly know the exact location of one of hundreds of locations? Is it too much to ask to ask for a challenge in the exploration, because god knows I've managed to break everything else to make even Master difficulty a sunday stroll.

Because no one would have a map detailing at least the main cities lying around. MADNESS.

Yeah, but not one that details every obscure abandonded cave and mine. Also where did Dovahkiin get his map from?

The App Store.

 

[Kavachi]

People should really stop comparing Morrowind to Skyrim. It's a way different game, and it doesn't put focus on the same things. If you like Morrowind, play Morrowind, if you like Skyrim, play Skyrim, but stop saying that one is superior over the other cause that's not true.

 

[Kavachi]

Every time i get a quest where i have to "find" something....there is no "finding", there is only the "follow the mark on your compass until you bump into that person/item/location".

Haven't played Skyrim (and I probably won't in the near future) but hand-holding like this really p*sses me off - especially in games that are advertised as sprawling and open-world. Yes, Peter Molyneux, I am looking at you, and you can take your "golden path" and stick it up your... ah, you get the idea.

Ever since I was a young kid, playing on my Atari VCS and Master System, I used to daydream happily about what the Games Of The Future might be like - I imagined huge open worlds, where you could walk through immense forests, talk to every inhabitant of a village and interact in them however you like, where you could make your mark on the world, for good or for ill. Well, the future is more or less here, and... It sucks.

What happened to the idea of truly free-roaming, in an immersive environment? Using your own wits, knowledge, and memory to navigate the world? I don't WANT a bloody HUD in a game that has a medieval tech base. I don't WANT to have an always-on compass-cum-radar in the corner of my screen, and I don't WANT objectives to magically appear, with unerring precision, on my Ordnance Survey-quality world map.

I want a Skyrim-style game where you have to navigate by landmarks, by the position of the sun and the stars. If you want to see where North is, you have to read your crummy and inaccurate compass (by the light of your lantern, if it's at night), or check which side of the trees lichen is growing on. If a villager tells you important information, you have to remember it yourself, or even -shock, horror!- note down details on a piece of paper in real life.

Aah well, I can dream.

You could ofcourse play Myst 1-4 and stop bothering people that do enjoy Skyrim. Also, you have a speech ready for a game you haven't played yet? Nice.

 

[trouble_gum]

What happened to the idea of truly free-roaming, in an immersive environment? Using your own wits, knowledge, and memory to navigate the world? ... not(ing) down details on a piece of paper in real life.

Aah well, I can dream.

Masochist.

Thankfully the days of Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, which provided you with a pad of gridded paper to map each of the 10 levels are over.

Now, when I played Wizardry: PGOTM I thought the game giving you this so you made your own map was a neat little thing. But Wizardry's levels were a set size (and they were all the same size), had no vertical movementor anything else to further complicate the task of mapping them, beyond using your own colour/abbreviation scheme to denote traps and areas of magical darkness.

Of course, the fact that most games then didn't map themselves because they couldn't made asking the player to do it themselves on paper much more acceptable.

Forcing the gamer to work with their own tools outside of the game engine wasn't too much to ask when games were a lot smaller and easier to self-map; as the environments have grown in complexity and scale this has just become significantly less fun to do. I wouldn't want to have to play Skyrim while sketching out the interior of each barrow or the layout of every town. And neither do most of the rest of the people who'll play it.

Maybe if Skyrim gave me an OS-quality map in the first place and let me actually make my own marks and notes on it, and also let me create landmarks in-world by say, stacking the corpses of all those thieves who think robbing someone in steel plate armour is a good idea into little cairns or using my woodcutters axe to chop wood and make signposts a la Minecraft.

Like mentioned before the problem is Bethesdas RPGs became famous for having this "faff about for 70 hours" style. If you don't like that, don't play Bethesdas RPG.
And you having to put some effort into the game is not an arbitrary method of prolonging it.

I always thought the 70+ hours of faffing around ignoring the impending end of the world was half of the idea in a TES RPG, right?

Now, I'd actually like to see a little more of the kind of things you mention; actually having to find out about things like Meridia's Beacon by means slightly more involved than having a brief conversation with the initial quest-giver and a beacon of your own appearing in the map for you to walk over to.

There would, however, have to be a limit to this; quests that become extremely lengthy series of "Go here, talk to Bob the Scholar who will give you a small piece of information that will lead you to Jim the Miner who once had a drink with Steve the Orc who knew Dave the Lumberjack who..." you get the idea. It's a fine line to walk for many RPGs between making you put in a little effort and either the simply laughable level of player effort envisaged by Batou or artificial and tedious padding of the game by making you go through an unnecessarily long series of repetitious stages to get from Quest Given to Quest Solved.

 

[Batou667]

You could ofcourse play Myst 1-4 and stop bothering people that do enjoy Skyrim. Also, you have a speech ready for a game you haven't played yet? Nice.

Calm down precious, I wasn't attacking your game so there's no need to get your knickers in a twist. If you'd read my post without taking undue offence, you would realise I'm criticising games in general that enforce excessive sign-posting and hand-holding, that drain any kind of free-thinking or effort from the game... and remove a lot of the reward of figuring it out for yourself.