I really hope in the next elderscrolls they go back to a paper map and not satellite GPS. What I really want is a map with major towns, roads and landmarks mapped and for the rest when you discover something (anything like a dungeon, a bridge, a useful resource) you mark it and name it yourself just as if you were making notes on the map. Better yet if you scrolled over your marker name there is a real note popup. And I would like a hot key to place road dots on the map as I travel so I could mark routes as I find the way to somewhere.

It's frustrating. You are walking through the mountains and find a gold deposit. Great. Now weeks later try to remember where it was. Or you go into a mine. Oh hell, vampires! I would really like to place a note on the map saying "Danger, vampires"

I didn't like Oblivion's paper-style map at all. I thought it looked unattractive and had very little functionality. What I would like is a return to something more along the lines of Morrowind's map.

I loved Morrowind's old-school fog-of-war map. With several characters I turned it into a fun little mini-game to uncover the entirety of Vvardenfell. I thought it was a beautiful map when uncovered too, unlike Oblivion's washed-out monochrome map.

Another important feature: you could see the entire map at once. There is no excuse for not displaying the whole map in a quality roleplaying game in the twenty-first century. I hated having to constantly move the map around a tiny viewing area to see where I was going.

And lastly, Morrowind's map updated itself instantly and dynamically whenever anything new was added. If Bethesda added a new island it was there on the map the next time you loaded your game. If a mod-maker added a town or landmass it was there on your map the next time you loaded your game.

I pray to the gods of programming that in TES VI we again have a map as attractive and functional as Morrowind's map once again.

Yes. I did like Morrowind's map best. I liked it more with a mod I added to place your own map markers with attached notes. I would really like that back. I liked the game of uncovering the map also.

"Fog of war" (as used in RPGs) is one of those things that annoys the daylights out of me. It's an antiquated design intended to prevent you from getting too much information or to create artificial difficulty. It's designed to limit your visibility so you don't see everything at once, but it doesn't account for the fact that you can see farther than the map will have cleared, which doesn't sit well with me (this also applies to top-down RPGs like Baldur's Gate; unless my character has 5/20 vision, I should be able to see much more than the circle of light surrounding me allows). It really annoys me when I can see something in-game, then when I try to go back to find it, I can't see it on my map because it was just outside the fog radius from where I walked. It also annoys me when my map finds something before I do just because it was inside the radius... how did it get on my map if I didn't (or couldn't) see it from where I was? At that point it's no longer like a map, but some kind of magic locater device.

The map is supposed to be a generalized record of the area, not a detailed imprint of what exactly you saw or may have seen. As such, there's no reason for it to be blacked out except for the area around the path you've walked. Well-traveled areas have no excuse to be unmapped until you're within 5 feet of things to be imprinted on it, and there are better ways to handle unmapped areas than an antiquated concept (in terms of RPGs) like a fog of war. How about findable maps, or a place where you're given a good view to make a map (Ubisoft's infamous fascination with towers, while way overdone in all their games, is not a bad concept if done right), or perhaps perks that lets you map out an area when camping/sleeping?