The Great Debate: Should quest markers be included in open world games?

I don't have time to get lost and I'm quickly losing my love of side quests (I just want to mainline most games now), so I at least need the option for markers.

Absofruitly. The idea of no marker is novel, but it always ends up being tedious after a while.

Pfft, quest markers, I wish games offered the chance to turn off quest logs. Why am I mindlessly doing tasks on a list when I could be mindfully creating my own list or just wandering around aimlessly wondering what the hell I am supposed to be doing?

More seriously, I have never understood why people believe a quest marker is suddenly the end of their ability to explore. You can ignore it. You can use it simply to get you back on track after hitting a long diversion. I would rather know that I have the freedom to get massively sidetracked because I know I can always find my way back to whatever it is I am supposed to be doing eventually than worry about straying too far so I don't halt my progress trying to work out what is next. Optional is the obvious solution here but if it is a binary choice I would say have them and if you want to ignore them, do so.

Yes they should be included in every game. And yes, there should always be an option to toggle it on/off if you want. I want it because I would feel lost/aimless without it but I can understand people who turn it off so they can fully immerse themselves in the game.

Yep - never understood that - as I said, if you "dumbly follow an arrow" that's your fault not the game's.

Optional > Forced > None. The best ones allow me to press a button to highlight the exact path I should take, as that way I have zero confusion when I want to get stuff done, and zero interference when I feel like having a confused wander.

For quests, I don't mind, but I do think there needs to still be some sense of discovery when it comes to games and I feel we're losing that a bit.

@arjailer said:

Because exploration is "the investigation of unknown regions." If the Giant Arrow of God is telling me exactly where everything is the game world is no longer unknown and I therefore cannot - by definition - be exploring.

@lawgamer: Yeah, except quest markers don't necessarily remove your ability to navigate unknown areas. Which is all a weakness of the question, really, since how quest markers function and when they are used can all wildly differ.

I can have a quest marker to tell me, say, to talk to some old monk dudes on a mountain top but on my way to the mountain top I'm still more than able to duck into a village I am passing and see what is happening there, or take a detour to investigate an abandoned fort I saw off aways, or chase a Dragon then spelunk through a spooky cave that was near where it landed. All of that is still exploring, just at the end of it I have some idea of where I should be going to move the game along. Personally, I feel more empowered to do all that because I am not losing track of the other thing the game is expecting of me.

I voted "no" but at this point in their existance it's like taking wheelchairs away from the paraplegic.

The problem is this: either / or isn't the answer. All on, and things become too mindless. All off, and things can get too difficult. The waypoints simply need to be made *better*.

"The house you're looking for is just around the corner from the Courthouse" -> Courthouse gets a marker since it's commonly known, you look around for the house.

"Find Magician Greg" -> well, Greg wanders and is just a questgiver, go ahead and put a marker directly on him.

"Retrieve the Magic Stacking Doll in those Ruins" -> make a waypoint at the ruins, with a big circle- the doll is *somewhere* in the circle. (Except if there's crazy physics like Skyrim shouts, then it needs a direct pointer once you're within 10 feet, or that would be a nightmare.)

Developers just need to put some better thought into waypointing. Study if the *finding* is fun. If not, just pick it out. If it is fun, or gameplay etc, waypoint a little sub-area.

As a personal preference, I think all markers far away from your location should start at the nearest, say, town or stronghold. "These quests are all kind of associated with Shanty Town, so their markers are all condensed onto that town. I don't have a marker pointing randomly into the exact spot in the wilderness of a forgotten cave." But I'm pushing for this one a little less.

Maybe just an option to turn them off would suffice?

The two games you mentioned both allow you to turn the markers off if you want. Why actively remove them when the people who don't want them can just turn them off? Seems insane to me.

Let's also not forget about MMO's. Can you imagine playing without a quest marker saying who you are supposed to be talking to. Or if every single quest it said 'find the man with the white tunic standing next to the food shop'.

Or 'stop somewhere in the middle of this wide grassy plain to trigger the next stage of the quest. You'll have to guess where because we aren't going to mark it for you.'

Quest markers are great.

I don't envy developers position on this. Coming from somebody who played WoW 4 years from beta I think all the markers were a must in that game.

For RPG's I would say I wanna see the main quest, the through line of a game while I wonder off to do whatever. On the other hand I certainly don't wanna see markers for initiating side-quest line. Ubisoft's traditional map filled with quests has turned me off from playing last Far Cry.

Having them as an option you can enable/disable at anytime is best
Sometimes I appreciate them, other times I find them kinda distracting

More games should give you actual directions though, rather then a quest marker just popping up.

Yes they should be in every open world game by law.

Then there should just be an option to turn them on or off.

Everybody's happy.

I think it totally depends on the game. Something like Dark Souls for example would lose a lot of the fun and intrigue if there were quest markers. In contrast, I think that a game like The Witcher 3 would be almost unplayable, in a timely fashion at least, without them.

For the extra mile I'd like the option to filter my quest markers. I don't want to see any repeatable "Radiant quest" style garbage, but unique sidequests I do want marked so I can go do them. Some of us have to get games out of the way with limited time. I wish I still had time to lounge around in games seeing the sights, but then I'd be broke again. Funny how that works.

Always and forever.

As with every other element of the UI it should be optional. Same for most genres, for example Alan Wake would of been a much better game with an option to turn off the hud and the button prompts.

They should be optional.

The obvious answer to this question is "Yes", specially for open world games. Removing them would be madness. I could see an option for turning them off for the already mad though.

That said, this question reminded me of how things were the first three or four years back when I played Dark Age of Camelot. That game had a pretty big, seamless world with no interactive map what so ever. Hell, there weren't even quest markers above the heads of NPCs, so to find the quests you had to run around at random, talking to NPCs.

Because there was no map and definitely no quest markers the descriptions would be something like "Go to the hill to the north west of town at night and wait for the Whatever to show." And so you would run off, look for a likely hill and hope for the best.

This would never fly in modern games, hell I am not even sure I would like to go back to it, but man did it grow the sense of community. Because there was no map, someone who knew the lay of the land and could navigate between different areas reliably was actually valuable for those skills. Finding someone who had done a certain quest was a huge help and if you knew where a certain dungeon was that was valuable.

I miss a lot about DAoC, but the harsh nature of the game (including the extremely grindy leveling) was great for making friends. You really didn't want to play DAoC alone, so no one did. If you found someone else you joined up with them and started chatting and you made friends. And you had TIME to chat, because downtime between fights for mana and health regen could be around a minute or more.

I think that is why I was so disappointed with WoW when it came out. Because of the heavy reliance on questing, fast health and mana regen and casters being able to cast magic while being punched in the face, there was no real incentive to play together. Every class was able to reliably reach the top without really interacting with anyone, except for the odd heroic quest. But that is another story entirely. Maybe this whole post was, really.

Yes, but you should be able to turn them off.

Note that most open world games that don't use quest markers (like Far Cry 2 and Morrowind) are designed with that in mind, so having the ability to turn them off could break some stuff in a game that relies on them for basic interactions (like, follow the marker to find this mission-critical object in this cluttered room full of similar objects; or the classic "follow the quest marker" as a quest).

Personally, I don't mind them too much... In Fallout and Elder Scrolls games I keep all quests tagged, all the time (but then I use mods to hide most of the hud anyway). On the Witcher 3, the quest markers are fine, it's the map full of "?" that drives me nuts; and on WOW you need them (the other option is actually reading the quests, and who wants to to that!?)

I've spent a long time thinking about this. I hate quest markers, but not because the quest markers are doing anything wrong. I will introduce my philosophy by comparing it to something else I've heard:

Ever heard by shoot-em-up fans that games that kill you in one hit, like Gradius or R-Type, are always better than otherwise seemingly identical games that have health bars? The idea is that a game with one-shot-kills must be designed so that it is possible to beat the entire game without getting hit once, whereas games with health bars don't have to be so tightly designed because the developer expects the player to fudge it, anyway. And so you end up with a game that doesn't immediately promise as high a skill ceiling to players that might want that type of challenge, or even the same measure of fairness. You might get hit sometimes, but othertimes not. Who cares. The designers don't.

Quest markers are like health bars. I don't think any game really suffers from having quest markers at all, but if you think about it, quite a few probably purposefully avoid additional world building, NPC dialog or recognizable landmarks because, who cares, there'll be a quest marker to show players the way, anyway. A game built without quest markers in mind would have to be much more tightly designed, and all games would benefit from attempting this.

To me, the first Borderlands a great example of a game that would be impossible to get around in without quest markers, because, unfortunately, the world is bland as hell and does very little to give you any sense of place or direction, in itself. It feels like most of that game's world is there to provide combat spaces, and sufficient distance between these combat spaces so they don't accidently run together.

Shockingly, a game that is very highly playable without any kind of HUD, once you learn the in-universe mechanics of it, is the first Assassin's Creed! It does take a lot of staring at maps and glaring down at the world through eagle vision to actually spot where you need to go, but every city has its landmarks, every assassination comes with some text and a map that you can use to find your way, and many of the side missions can spotted from above and potentially make noise when you get close, even without line of sight. I played through that game twice. The first as normal, and then a second, complete playthrough with ALL HUD elements disabled (thanks for allowing that option, Ubisoft!) and actually had a lot more fun the second time through. Many parts of the HUD becomes obsolete when you realize there's in-universe equivalents for almost everything it told you, and as a result you start to pay closer attention to the beautiful and fairly believable world you're supposed to be in, making it seem even richer than before. As an example, you can tell whether or not you've scaled a viewpoint before because all the ones you haven't used have an eagle circling them, which flies away after your first visit and stays gone for the rest of the game.

In short, clarity is almost never a bad thing. It is very difficult to give a player too much information, and often frustratingly easy to give them too little. But I hate to see interface used as a crutch, or a substitute for making a believable world with believable people giving believable directions to the player. Hey, remember Outcast? Remember how you could ask almost any NPC about almost anything you had in your mission log, and they'd literally get up and point in the direction of the object/person if they had knowledge of what you were looking for? Just that. That's almost literally all you need.

Edit: I managed to forget there's a Game Maker's Toolkit video exactly about handholding versus exploring: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzOCkXsyIqo

I voted yes, but developers should include an option to have turn them off. I know when I play BotW, a quest marker will be the last thing I'm looking at.

I think Horizon has a really good version of this, where you can turn all of the pointers off unless you tap the touchpad, and then it shows all of your HUD for a few seconds before going away again. It's perfect for keeping me on track without preventing me from exploring anything.

Options are nice.

I guess it would depend on the type of open world. A virtual cityscape would be a nightmare to traverse without it being be mapped and signposted like a real life one.

Id rather play with them off, but most open worlds are poorly constructed that it also makes it impossible to play without.

First, just to appease everybody, I would say to have the option for on or off.

That having been said, if I had to choose one way or the other, I would definitely choose to have them. It doesn't ruin immersion at all for me. Having a map with the place marked where I'm supposed to go seems like something someone would do so they didn't get lost. It would be like somebody giving you an address, but you couldn't use a map, or gps, or your phone (gps too, but still), or just being able to use google maps, or map quest or whatever the fuck you want to use. Aimless wondering is what turns me off a lot of these games. I want to be told where to go and how to get there. Then, it's up to me WHEN I do so.

A good example of a game that desperately needed quest markers was Lightning Returns. Some of the "hints", and I use the word very loosely, that were given were essentially to go north of where you were. That wouldn't be a problem, except I was nearly at the bottom of the map. The item I needed could have been nearly anywhere on the whole map. That, coupled with the time constraint made that game unbearable without a guide. And even with one, it was still a pain in the ass. On top of that, one of the first quests you get lies to you as per the section the item you need is actually in. With a simply quest marker. I could have gone straight there, gotten the item, and returned.

Fucking hell, I hate not having quest markers in open world games. These games are massive nowadays. I don't want to aimlessly wonder and pixel hunt in an area the size of a small city. I value my time way too much for that. I don't know how people can stand it. And don't say "exploration". You can explore AND know where to go next for a story mission or side quest.

You should at least be given the option to turn them on/off in every game. When i was a kid and had piles of time to play games it wouldn't have bothered much. But now that i have less time for gaming if i have to search around often i will either just pull up a FAQ -which defeats the purpose of not having markers, or i will just drop the game entirely.

Which is a bummer - i dropped divinity original sin for this reason even though i thought that game had a lot of cool stuff going on. Just got bored checking off items on a FAQ

The problem is that when they do give you the option to turn these markers off, the game itself is not designed for it so you get lost.

Horizon is a good example, I turned all that HUD shit off, but the characters often don't explain where you have to go and the world doesn't show you. So you have no clue where to look. Most quests are designed pretty bad if you look at it that way. Another example; Assassin's Creed. The HUD clutter is real with this one and the floating waypoints direct you to enemies, objectives and treasures. Good luck finding anything with that shit turned off.
Good example: Breath of the Wild. One of the few open world games that I played that is actually cleverly designed. Everything is optional and every piece of (side)content unique (except for the trillion Koroks, that shit is straight from Ubisoft ;)). I hope developers pick up on this design philosophy. Death to the handholding clutter-HUD!

Nothing better than options. Which wasn't an option on this poll.

I just couldn't bring myself to play a Morrowind-style game again. I don't have the energy to spend a trillion hours listening to some mage not actually remember where the quest point is. It's not funny and it's not interesting. I want to go on my adventure not one of those 1,000 episode animes.

A tough question. Generally I prefer that they not be there, since I think it it's pretty immersion breaking to have the Arrow of God pointing you to the exact place you need to go. It's particularly jarring in cases where the entire quest revolves around something that is supposed to be undiscovered and/or super-hidden.

Having said that, I can totally see why some people would want them there. I won't pretend like exploring every nook and cranny for hours is something everyone will find fun. It's probably best that it be left as an option, since that gives players the best of both worlds. There for people who want it, but hide-able for people who don't.

Really, this is a combination writing/world design issue. Generally, one of two things tends to happen: either the devs write the quest text on the assumption that the quest arrow is going to be there, which results in directions that are too vague to figure out without the arrow, or the directions are specific but the world design doesn't keep up (i.e. "the location is north of the rock that looks like a dog's head," where there isn't anything in the world that actually looks like a dog's head.)

I not only want quest markers but fast travel in every game. Then the game needs to complete the quest for me when I get there and automatically check in when completed. All I should have to do is watch the numbers get bigger.

For people with lots of free time, there should always be option to turn off HUD/Fast travel/arrows and go hardcore immersive. Or at least mod support. I don't always have time to spend hours running around just trying to find another fetch quest objective. I loved Morrowind, but damn that log journal.

Optional with the work done to communicate where it’s at. Okay with map markers to an extent but prefer those off as well.

I always have and always will prefer a more complex engagement with a game. One of the reason’s I love a game like ArmA is that our missions had no magic GPS (just one that spit out a coordinate every couple of seconds that you needed to know how to read) no enemy or shot indicators, no objective markers other than on the map from the planning and briefing, and the way I have it set up little to no HUD, pretty much just something to tell me what grenade I have readied at that moment. There’s a compass you can use like in PUBG but it’s an actual compass you take out and read. You can tell the time by pulling up your watch. Use that to time a fuse or breach or LZ.

You are responsible for all of the thinking, planning, and execution in ArmA with the way I have it set up. That’s super engaging and at times demanding especially in a multiplayer setting when you’re leading guys in virtual combat and have to coordinate your forces against a reasonably intelligent or at least well dug in enemy.

Most games don’t have you convincing 8 other humans to execute covering fire and a maneuver to flank or assault an enemy position while relating your position to other forces while shooting back while directing someone to call in an artillery strike while watching your back for another ambush while searching for suspicious objects in the road.

I’ll turn off every crutch I can if the game is designed well enough to support that. In MGS5 I used a mod to turn off most of the UI stuff like tagging enemies and disabled reflex mode. I had to keep track of guys in my head not with magic X-ray vision. The only place it failed at all was when using quiet there was no way to know where a bad guy was unless I could see her laser but not a big deal. It was so much more engaging. I wish more games would try to achieve that. Is it as accessible? No. But if done well it could be really good.

Yes - but give people the option to turn them off.

No debate. Only yes.

It should be optional and depends on the game. This post reminded me of this video by hbomberguy at around the 20 minute mark.

Yeah I agree with you on that completely. Let's be honest though part of the issue with Morrowind wasn't just the log journal, the UI and how information was presented made trying to spend any time getting immersed in the lore or figure shit on your own mind numbingly hard.

But in regards to the poll, there should of been an option for allow people to turn HUD off and on as they choose in the options. That isn't that crazy of a feature request, as the amount of HUD and what some players prefer to have always differs. Have you seen peoples MMO layouts? Like everyone has a completely different way of wanting to have information shown to them. It turns out humans don't all think exactly alike, crazy right? :P

One of my big issues though is that is that in the games that present no HUD at all, and go for complete immersion, sometimes the lack of enough narrative context to push me in the interesting direction makes everything feel too disconnected. You then start trying to find your own landmarks to know where the important shit is. You can only really do so much of "find log journal in the woods" and have to read it in length to figure out the next spot to go before you get a little tired of that. Bethesda got a little better with that stuff post even Oblivion adding some more dynamic elements like people running up to you to start random quests and guide you to the interesting direction without having to worry about mini maps. But there just wasn't enough of it. A lot of open world games fall into the trap of just planting some random context sensitive thing on the ground that is just a bunch of text. And if the UI isn't great, or you don't have time to stop and read right then, you just default to the mini map at all times.

It depends on the game design, pace and level design.

When its important for the game that you go through a sequence of specific locations then a location marker is mandatory. And if said game is slow paced like Fallout then players can get the directions of intended location by just using in-game maps. However, a more fast paced games such as GTA need an on screen indicator as going in and out of the in-game map could detract the fun from the experience.

Still there are open world games such as Dark Souls where the player is free to approach the game through whatever direction he prefers and where exploration is encouraged by the interesting level design. This where a location marker could be more of a point of annoyance than a welcomed gesture.

This really seems like a question of, "Should quest markers be always turned-on, or should it be a selector function about how much information is automatically added to a map."

There is no one right answer, so I think some choices should be the standard way big open world games do it.

The right broad-strokes answer is they should be optional. A more complex answer is that the use / application of markers is rather varied and so their affect on games depends a lot on their implementation and the nature of the game itself. Further, you then need to measure this versus the nature of the player. That's the hardest aspect at the end there, especially because players themselves are varied and also liquid (our own nature/mood changes).

The first mod I ever downloaded for Skyrim removed all the markers from the compass. I don't mind markers on a map that either the game places or I set myself, but I generally play without any mini-maps or on-screen indicators of any kind (as far as direction goes).

I feel all open world games would hugely benefit by giving players a simple directional compass option rather than mini-maps. The simple compass is what stops you needing to jump to your map to judge your position / heading, which is often the biggest problem of the "No UI" approach. Unless you have tremendous sign-posting via landmarks (and even in a perfect game that isn't doable all the time) you can't help players being a little lost every now and then.