There's a lot of talk going on in a couple of forums about how we're being "railroaded" as players by having quests appear in our logs whether we wanted them or not; whether they fit with our style or chosen path for our characters or not.

I have to admit, I'm playing RPG's in a backwards sort of fashion from the average player. After dice based RPG's in my teens I didn't play another video game of any kind until the Burger King of MMO's came out in the early 2000's. I moved on to other MMO's and then found the single player games like Skyrim that are so much more dynamic and so much more compelling in so many ways that I'm totally hooked.

No more Amusemant Park style character and dungeoneering requirements, actual freedom to roleplay and develop characters that are entirely different from anything else around them, including being able to leave things off and develop my characters in areas where I want to do it and not just where my level should be for my class/type and race or faction. I love it.

And now I'm also thoroughly confused.

The complaint seems to be that the players feel they have no choice because things are appearing in their quest logs and they don't want to know about them.

So I'm asking you as other players: Is your quest log full of obligations that must be completed or do you find that the list of opportunities offer you a choice to make when/if you're interested?

A bit of both for me. I wish we could 'hide' quests we arent interested in at the moment (and their associated quest items), because I'm really anol about keeping my log as empty as possible, but I wouldn't want to cancel, or delete, any quests, because I may want to do them at a later stage.

Interesting point.
I've never really seen it as a problem personally. As a very lazy gamer chances are I'm going to ignore around 50 percent of the 'chores' in my journal anyway.

If I don't want to pursue a quest, then I don't pursue it. I don't see what the fuss is about.

*shrug* Personally, I tend to ignore stuff in my TES logs (right now, I'm playing all the games except Arena which is just not viable even in DosBox) that is something I know I'm not going to want to do. In this game, that's anything related to the MQ, the Stormcloaks, the Imperials, the really "evil" daedra, and the Thieves' Guild. The DB - well, I kill Grelod, then waste the DB. I do Azura's, Meridia's, and Dagon's quests - but Dagon's, I let whatshisface go, and off the daedra Dagon sends at me, then clean out his little cave.

But it's been difficult to MAKE that decision to ignore things in these games this time, because in the meantime, I've spent 6 years in WoW - where you pick up what you want to do, and if you wind up with something you DON'T want to do, you abandon it. So.... it's a matter of "willpower" if you will, from my PoV - I know I don't have to do all the stuff in my log.... but it's hard to NOT think "oh yeah, I need to clear that quest" since that's a WoW mindset of many years' standing now.

That was where I started on the other forum... I'm a compulsive quest finisher. I'd clear my logs or clear an area in WoW and in Rift. I also farmed for a whole raid group and managed a lot of stuff out of habit more than desire. This game has been such a beautiful and amazingly fun break for me that I found it wasn't so hard to give up some of the less fun habits and exchange them for being able to set difficulty levels, test my abilities in a certain type of character or... omgosh... play a pure mage, something I've never ever done before.

I honestly thought I was being helpful to suggest that you can ignore them by looking at them as opportunities and not obligations, I mean... it's not like having a full log is going to become an issue except in reading through them to see what to do next.

I agree it's willpower, and I failed my check on my first two characters who cleared everything they ever got, even if I hated the quest. Now I have one that I get a kick out of seeing what she has or hasn't done and comparing it to other characters. She's definately not a good guy. LMAO

I definately feel more free in NOT having to do a certain chain than I ever did in the other games where you had to do one to get to another or go back and finish it because you needed the rep or or or...

I went from a purely SPMR (single-player, machine-resident) gameplay life, to WoW. Except for a very brief foray into EQ (eww) early in its life, WoW is the only MMORPG I've ever played - or am ever likely to play (since I "use" it as a solo game because the "social" aspects are seriously NOT my thing.... I'm a HERMIT and proud of it!) - and "rediscovering" Oblivion just prior to Skyrim's release was cathartic, not to mention the most fun I've had in a game in quite a while!

In some ways, Oblivion is still more fun than Skyrim, though Skyrim is the most beautiful game I've ever played.... Beauty of course is not at all the only thing one should look for in a game.... but there are times when it beats hell out of whatever's in second place!

In WoW, I've got to the point where I regularly "prune" the quest logs of all my toons. Sometimes I'll pick stuff up without even thinking about it - and looking at it later, I KNOW I've done that quest before, it svckED, and I'm not going to want to do it again.... so it's gone. The nice thing about it is that you never feel as if it's something you HAVE to do (unless you're seriously anol-retentive, and I do know people like that....)

I knew empirically that I didn't have to do everything in my log in these games. But it was still a shock early on to "re-remember" that there's no way to "abandon" quests in TES. That was the point at which I had to have a STERN talk with my latent OCD self about how NOT to get stupid over the tag-ends of stuff in the log. And since then, I've been having the best time of my gaming life playing TES again. (Though I do have to say sometimes I get more seduced by mods than by the games.... heh.)

To start , I had that ingrained efficient as possible quest grinding thing going on.This is a result of my playing wow since it's release also , but from a different perspective.I started as a guild leader and raid leader , tried retiring from that and just being "one of the guys" but always ended up in at least an officer postiion somehow.In that game I spent years believing I had to set a good example to others if I was going to make leadership demands of them.Suddenly I was paying to work for a game I truly enjoyed even without a raid or group.Skyrim is the first game in a long time that's given me some nice peace and allowed me to literally do whatever I want on my own time schedule.

Skyrim is literally a blank slate when it comes to how the player approaches it.I now view my starting strategy literally as a huge mistake as I was trying to fit it into a mold that doesn't belong to it.Even with it's faults , this game has something to offer for everybody even if it's just for a short while for them. I now view the quest log in skyrim as potential things I can do after I accomplish whatever my plans at the time are. I don't see not being able to hide stuff in the quest log as a bad thing , because if you were playing wow with a timeline to address new content in a timely manner , I.E. getting geared enough to do it, getting keyed etc.Being able to hide quests in wow becaomes a bad thing to a degree in this setting because you lose out on certain quests that might have given you a head start on rep or whatever , and it makes you have to re-align yourself with the long-forgotten quests at some of your busiest times.

The quest log for me I can open it up , and see literally everything I've encountered in the game and make my next "plan of attack" from it.For me personally , having to flip back and forth to the hidden quests just always resulted in me restoring all those hidden quests to the active list in games with that feature anyway.I like the way you can't hide them in Skyrim , but I'm not functionally as organized as other people so I'm biased.

Amen to both of you, I'm reading my own experience and thoughts here. I was (still am, I suspect) a co-guild leader of a very large guild, and I like my fellow leaders there. But it takes time and energy to maintain things where I'd rather just log on and play. Even when I created a toon on another realm, it seemed inevitable that I'd be in some leadership position in any guild I joined. Well, in six days, one of my accounts will expire, the other at the end of March. At this time I just can't see myself playing in that hamster wheel again.

Skyrim let's me do just what I want when I want to. And there's no end-of-the-rainbow perpetual gear chase, either. By the time you are reasonably geared, a patch comes along and your are down a rung or three. Also, I'd much rather solo a dungeon, taking the time to appreciate the work that went into it, applying a strategy to get through it, rather than have to zerg through it with alternately impatient and inattentive people. Sadly, WoW is infested with people who seem to enjoy wrecking other people's enjoyment.

As for quests, I've gotten Loremaster on a couple of toons, one the old way, the other the new way. I liked being able to quit a quest which still left me the option of picking it up again later. I'm getting used to the Skyrim way, however.

Yeah , or the curse of being in a rading guild that rarely plays with each other outside the actual raids. I call them "wake n bakers" because after levelling and gearing you literally never see them online until right at raid time. Blizzard in all of it's infinite greed allows unlimited transfers anywhere as long as you have the money , so a good stable community that cares about it's reputation is just gone now. I feel that bliz has committed a great crime towards gaming in this respect because you simply can't ignore the financial benefits to a company for implementing these features in an MMO. Now you're relegated to pug's that just rush everything and kill ASAP , there's absolutely no enjoyment left in the content. If I was an artist for one of those dungeons I'd be rather upset.

I see myself going more towards games like these as long as other games keep promoting anonymity and no repercussions for acting badly in a tight gaming community. I even tried assembling a small guild of like-minded people to avoid that issue and that's when I found there's literally thousands of roaming players that care about absolutely nothing but themselves and lying is the way to gear your alt with pixels that will be outdated by the next big patch anyway , it makes absolutely no sense to me to be this way , but it appeals to an ever-increasing number of people today. Skyrim cost me an initial amount of money and my enjoyment is mine , nobody can affect that at all and it's a huge change in my gaming habits and expectations.

On the solo part , the closest I've come to Skyrim in the past couple of years is DDO , great fun in that game , but it's kind of dead-ended. When it went free-to-play , it literally got swamped for 3 weeks straight by wow kids spamming every chat channel about how horrible the game was , and how much better wow was etc. That was the first time I ever experienced being embarassed about admitting I played wow. But then everything got better again when they failed to be any good at all because DDO presents you with a steep learning curve literally from day one , and disappeared back to wow.

awww... well... I was trying to keep this thread clean and tried to respond to Serethil privately and couldn't... I played WoW and then Rift much the same way I play everything... kind of learning as I went and pushing farther every time. I always ended up being a leader and had a number of positions in the casual gamer guilds I was in as well as being raid leader of the couple of raiding guilds I ended up being in before forming my own.

After 5 years in WoW and a year in Rift I had achievements for all sorts of grinding accomplishments, raid and dungeon accomplishments and a serious case of burnout. I wish I'd realized then that I could balance my time between games like WoW and then Rift and games like Oblivion where the only voice in my head or person putting requirements on me is myself and any RP pressure I allow the world to put on me.

I had never played a single player rpg before and I'm really grateful after all of that grinding and obsessive attention to little details that I can now pay as much or as little attention as I want to to any of the details I desire in Skyrim. Nothing like realizing that the reason you're driven to get something done is because [insert npc here] really needs your help and you're the only one who can get it done. lmao

I find the freedom of a log that reminds me where I've been, what I've done and what I still have left undone is so much greater than a log full of the tasks I've assigned myself today (like dailies for rep rep rep or gear gear gear.) I like the reminder that there's still a whole world out there and a lot of it is still unexplored.

Sorry.... I have PMs set off due to some "issues" with idiots (not either of you!) Your feelings, Ju, mirror mine to a great degree. I still have my accounts in WoW and won't let them expire though because I still have family who play, and with whom I run instances. And every once in a while, I just get the urge to level a lowbie....

But for the foreseeable future, Skyrim is my real love of a gaming "home"! Not to mention that as I said earlier, I'm now replaying the previous games except for Arena. Good thing I'm retired, as is husband.... otherwise I'd probably have some husband aggro issues!

A bit of both for me. I think my biggest issue is how the quests are worded in the journal, and I often don't remember what it's about. I do still have the WoW mentality of clear out the quest log, and there are several quests that I'm not interested in doing that just stay there.