Hi there!

It might sound weird, but one of the things I enjoy most in an Elder Scrolls game is getting lost somewhere out in no man's land. Not knowing where you are, what dangers (sabrecats! ) might lie ahead and where you are going to end up at the end of the day. Discovering new places, stumbling upon random stuff and treasures as well as getting surprised and eaten by dragons

It's almost impossible to get lost with a compass and the GPS map. On the first days of the game, some people even covered the compass on their TV screen since you cannot get rid of it on the Xbox or Playstation. I also removed the "You are here" GPS marker on the map and try to use the paper map that shipped with the game.

Not knowing how to orientate by the sun, the moons or stars, it took me days to find a way out of the Reach again, back to the open plains of Whiterun. I even managed to get lost for a while climbing up High Hrothgar while there was a massive blizzard going on.


What about your experiences? Do you always stick close to the roads? Do you know how to orientate by the sun?

I like the exploring part of Skyrim. i haven't explored the whole map, because the game haven't worked as good as I would have hoped.

When I first played Oblivion I got lost and turned into a vampire in thje sun and died

I'd love getting lost but I know the land like the back of my hand. The world is too small and there are are just too many reference points to actually getting lost with no clue where you are.

Sometimes I get lost on purpose.
Sometimes not, and fall prey to my own trying to take shortcuts and wind up on the far side of nowhere.
Then again, getting lost is an adventure, and that why I play these games.

I play without compass and such help, but I still feel like I cannot get lost. It's a small map, and I know it pretty well already.

Get quest, activate it, look at map (let me mark that for you), deactivate quest markers, head off hopefully in the right direction, see what happens and where you end up. Sometimes end up nowhere near where you thought you were going. Only way to play for me.

Yes. The greatest part of any Open World Game is always discovering someting new, or rediscovering a lost location.
I get lot much easier on my old laptop because of the lack of memory to render distant objects. On the PC I am using now, climbing a Hill will usually reveal my characters location.

I wish Skyrim had Oblivion and Morrowind's map.. You know how it could fill it in on the local map and it would stay there (unless the land changed. Though the overview map is pretty terrible too so yeah.

That's a big reason I had exploring in Skyrim because I'm not sure if I came a certain way or not and I enjoy looking over everything. In Oblivion and Morrowind I could see where I have been and where I haven't been clear as day.

I have the absolute worst sense of direction, in-game or out, so orientating by the sun is straight out. I still use the normal in-game map, markers and all, but I often find myself turning off the compass quest markers and navigating on my own. I definitely try to do that for quests where you're not supposed to magically know where something is--finding a certain artifact in Blackreach, for instance. My character was scouring that place for 4+ game days before she finally found it, and it made finishing that quest that much more rewarding.

The trouble now is quest directions are written with the idea that you'll always be using the quest markers to guide you, so they're really light on the actual directions. (Skyrim's not the only game guilty of this. LotRO does it too, and Borderlands I've found is absolutely terrible this way--no quest directions at all; you're entirely reliant on waypoints.) Makes me long for the days of Morrowind with the crazily detailed directions...which somehow still got you hopelessly lost.

When I finally start a fresh Skyrim game I think I'll look into that Better Quest Objectives mod which is supposed to take a few steps towards fixing that, and then maybe I'll finally be able to turn the compass and quest pointers off altogether.

Hell yeah! I always disable the compass completely. I like to follow rivers and getting out of trails.

I loved Map Marker Overhaul mod for Oblivion, not only did it hide your position on map, it also prevented the map from auto-focusing on your position, and map markers for locations weren't added to the map unless they were close to a previously known location. Combined with Ayleid Steps that could throw you pretty much anywhere on the map, there was a lot of "...where the [censored] am i now? :ahh:" moments

So in short, yes Though with a map the size of Skyrim, or Oblivion for that matter it's impossible to get truly lost. You always have a rough idea where you are, even without using map.

Absolutely. I regularly do it. Skyrim is so big and fascinating that one minute I'll be in Winterhold and be like "Oh, what's that on my compass?" and end up saying "How the hell did I get to Falkreath?"

In addition if you haven't been on the mountain pass between the Rift and Falkreath I would strongly recomend you go look for it. Most beautiful part of the game IMO. I doubt even hardcoe Morrowind fans could say it was not beautiful.
FYI it will take about an hour and a half to two hours if you let it.