All the radiant quests I have gotten have had explination of why they want the items, usually theft, or needing X ingrediant for thier experiamnets.

I have yet to come across a raidtian quest without an explination for why they want said item.


Also what if they dont want to tell you why they want said item, there are many people who cant get things and ask others to get it for them without telling said person why they want that items/

Frankly I would find it silly and highly unrealistic if everyone just guished thier life story to you.

Would you rather have a few paragraphs that tell you things you already know or would you rather have a more developed quest? Bethesda probably realized that having just long quest descriptions is unnecessary and instead put more manpower on things that actually matter and people will notice.

I put forth an example and as you can see the quest description includes very little details. Even though this is a radiant quest, they do know the location of the quest. They could have tied the location to the quest description.

If I were to do this quests than I would have no clue how to finish it without the quest-marker because the description doesn't provide the location. All I'm asking is that they also put in the location (and where possible the motivation that was also provided in dialogue when I accepted the quests).

It is easy to add for Bethesda, all the data and information is available. You clearly don't need it because (as you said) you compleet quests right away, but I don't. So why would you have a problem with it? What is it to you? You might not gain anything but you dont lose anything either. I, however, gain a lot because the current logbook doesnt support my playstyle and a really small addition to the logbook could fix it for me.

I would rather have both.

Going from a underdeveloped quest to a developed quests takes a lot of time. I realize that they dont always have that so I'm not complaining that some of the quests in Skyrim are really poor.

On the other hand, putting a few extra sentences in the logbook doesn't take much time. Bethesda could easily do this, and greatly improve my gameplay. This is why I made this topic. No trouble for them, great enjoyment for me (and judging by some fo the comments as well as for many others. But for some reason, people who are uneffected like to be a grinch and dont want others to enjoy their game).

I doubt they would put more sentances in the logbook without first adding more dialog lines.

Secondly it would take the time to have to write the scripts that change the lines in the log depending on what random location the radiant quests, the oens that are under developed, locations are.

Thirdly it isnt your game please read the EULA.

I agree with OP.

Agree 100%
Simply turn down arrow like in emails
See full descp or short your choice

Prob is with some quest the have no marker at pints and it's very confusin because you can read enough to know its relayed

Why are you ignoring your previous arguments? I took my time to look up facts to support my counter-argument and now you seem to take a new route...

Here is my response to your new points:

Apparantly the location data is already in the game so they could link it to the logbook just like they do with object name and target. Location is really the only thing missing to make the quest system work without quest-marker.

I think by now I've delivered enough evidence to support my claim that the quets system doesn't work witout quest-marker, at least not all the time.

For the hand-made quests it would also be nice if they put the motivation given by the quest-giver into the logbook as well. It would look more like this:

'Mr. X has tasked me with finding object Y because he needs this to negotiate the release of his sister, who was kidnapped by bandits while searching for alchemy ingredients. Object Y is located in Cave Z which is south of Windhelm, Mr. X has also marked the location on my map.'

And than:

'I've retreived object Y from the spider filled cave. I should deliver it to Mr. X who has a house in Windhelm as soon as possible, as he needs it to safe his sister who was captured by bandits'.

I know... I know... I should definatly not be a writter But I think these examples do show how a little written motivation makes quests you accepted earlier on much more interesting to complete on a later date. Since both entries also include locations the quest can be completed without the quest-marker, which some of us prefer as it makes the experience more believable.

Absolutely right.

What do you mean ingorning my previous arguments?


Also I know the data is in the game to put it in the logbook, I pointed out that Bethesda wouldnt do it becuase then they would have to record the vocal directions which would take a lot of money and disk space, they wouldn't add one without the other.


As it is now the game imples the NPC marks it on your map, to get physical directions would mean they would have to record the NPC telling you the directions

Your previous argument was that quests were too random. I provided evidence that the majority of the quests (all the good ones + many misc. quests as well) weren't driven by radiant quest. I also provided evidence that radiant quests had data for location build-in. All in all there is enough data and information for Bethesda to easily improve the written quest description, which in turn would greatly improve how I (and many others) experience the game.

Your previous comment wasn't a response to this and instead focused on another argument: the need for more voice acting. I'll respond to this now.

FIrst of all a great deal of the voice acting already provides motivation as well as location. They just have to also write this down in the logbook as well.

Other times they provide motivation but not the location. Saying 'it is in a cave south of windhelm' or a standard 'I'll mark it on your map' wouldn't take up a lot of extra size or money. Besides the X360 version is only 3.5GB, there is plenty of room left for a few a couple of 100 MB more. Also keep in mind I'm asking for this to be an improvement on the next TES game, I'm not expecting them to build it into Skyrim.

So if they just say 'I'll mark it on your map' than the player can say in the journal 'a cave south of windhelm' as he could have seen where it was marked on the map.

Radiant AI quest don't have much voice acting to begin with, often they provide you with a piece of paper. This paper could include location + direction information which could than also be found in the journal.

I really don't see voice acting as a limitation here. Perhaps you could bring forth an example?

I do understand where you are comming from and you are correct in most of what you say.


However Bethesda would provide verbal directions if they were going to go back to more detailed descriptions. The verbal directions is a reinforcement technique that is something Developers add in regardless of if its nessessary or not in such situations.


Also looking through the quest list on UESP theres over 80 diffrent quests that use the radiant system to determin thier locations, that is quite a lot of quests, some in the MQ, some in faction quests, some mis quests and that is still quite a lot of voice over dialog to do.

Not really. even morrowind had different directions between the actual quest giver dialogue and the journal entry. You could get the brief description from the questee and then a more detailed description with directions in your journal.

As for dynamic quests there is no reason why they couldn't also add those to the journal as well. You simply have to design a simple query for the information. First the quest giver would be linked to the quest which would be linked to the item or person which would be linked to general location such as a hold and further subdivided into a smaller region like a city or a territory around a cave etc. An example quest could be:

"Danny/Bob/Susie etc.

wants me to kill/retrieve/locate/find etc.

insert name of person or item here

which is

"insert direction"

of

"insert location"

And here you can add additional directions such as nearby a ruin or something.

Website designers do this all the time. how do you think you navigate around all the various webpages linked to just this one page for instance.

Once you have the database and a decent query system its very easy to do this stuff

If you do it right you can even make it sound just as good as a hand written quest albiet there won't be as much flavor to it. This was just pure laziness on their part nothing less and nothing more. I dealt with far more data when i was doing inventory for an oil wholesaler a few years back than these simple radiant quests.

Well Morrowind had text not voice, so it freed them from the size limitations, besides that Morrowind is the finest example of poor directions both in text and journal.

I never said that they couldn't put it in the journal, as I have clearly stated its the voice over work that is the problem. Having to have multiple lines re-recorded 5+ times for over 80 quests can take up alot of space.

I never liked the dumbing down argument. If Beth was scared of too much texts, why still implement the whole bunch of books for the sake of the lore? Why implement the library in the College?

I never liked the journal in Morrowind because I always had a problem with the logic. If you play as a warrior, I highly doubt Bonan the Carbarian will write "dear diary, today I met Mr. Blah and he told me I had to get the Blade of Lollygaggin' for his braindead sister". If you have stuff to do in real life, you take notes like the Quest "Journal" in Skyrim, why would any sane adventurer do something else? If you played a bard I could see that he will write an epic tale, but surely not while talking to the quest giver.

So for me, Oblivion and Skyrim made it more realistic. Oblivion had way better descriptions though, Skyrim really has nothing more than a to-do-list.

I support your points, except this one. That box was a pain to find, for me at least.

Even the quests with a fixed location and story don't always have much information like the one for Mjoll in Riften. She tells you a long story and you are given a specific location (always the same) but the quest log only reads "Locate Grimsever". I'm sure it wouldn't have taken the quest writers long to type up a little bit more than that!

Why not both?


You`re telling me that TYPING a few paragraphs extra of explanation for each quest is too much and would take away that much manpower?
They will already have all the quests lines written somewhere in all their scripts, detailing the stories. Just pop what the Player knows in the journal.

I have an alternative suggestion. They think that people are stupid and don`t want to have to read. It`s all part of the `too spreadsheety` and `dumbing down` attitude of games these days.

As someone else already pointed out in Morrowind the written dialogue didn't always include all the information that was later added to the journal. So they don't actually have to say a great deal more than they already do.

I'm not sure what exactly you're saying with the second paragraph but as I already said most of Skyrim's dialogue already has a great deal of information, it just isnt carried over to the journal. This is why a lot of the responses to this topic talk about 'just writting it down on paper', which actually is an option about 80% of the time. Of course this should be 100%, and it isn't hard to also write down this information in the logbook... which brings us full circle because that was the point of this topic.

With regarda to the 80 radiant quest you mention. The majority of them doesn't even have dialogue that supports the small bit of information that gets added to the journal. Someone would say: 'do this thing for me. You than get a piece of paper with details and than in the journal it adds: I have to steal X from Y. The radiant thieves' guild quests usually have clear quest descriptions. All it is misisng is good motivation but I guess that is impossible with many radiant quests, this is why I'm not a fan of the system in the first place but that is not the point of this topic.

What exactly is now your reason to be against a full quest description? I'm not exactly sure what your issue is with it at this point. Maybe if you could put the entire reasoning in one post, than we could keep this discussion more narrow.

I decided to reinstall Morrowind with that overhaul 2.0 mod compilation (which is amazing, btw) this week, and it made me realize how much I miss a proper quest journal in Skyrim.

Was it really that hard to have one person write atleast some form of quest descriptions with a tiny bit of flavour containing the very basic information needed such as name of the questgiver, the location and description of the context? I want to play Skyrim without the awful CoD markers but I can't because there's no alternative.

I mean hell, I'll do all the writing myself for free if Bethesda would promise to implement it.

I agree with this 100%.

I would love to be able to have a journal like in Morrowind and Oblivion again. And for the attention defecit players, let them have an option to play on GPS mode. But for those of us that like the journal style, let us turn off GPS mode.

The worst part is, it is so easy to do. I don't understand why they simplified the logbook as much as they did. Wwere there complains about it? I don't see anyone saying: I don't like to read 3 lines, can we dumb it down to 1 line? I just played a demo of Rage, and this is very much a FPS but in it missions have better descriptions with much more lines than in Skyrim, which is a RPG.

Imagine this situation: you haven't played Skyrim in almost 2 months. You fire it up and go to do a quest. You get a name and an objective for each quest, and can see the previous stages. How does that help you get back into the game?

I can go back into Oblivion and the game will GIVE me the entire history of the quest and character-made observations.
I can go into Morrowind and access the history of the game, although the information I want isn't necessarily there.
I can go into Skyrim and get my goals, devoid of context. FAIL.