'Very few' people would play a Morrowind-style RPG with 'no compass, no map' and a reliance on quest text, says ESO director, 'which is kind of sad'

Back in my day, we didn't have these fancy-schmancy newfangled quest markers and compass points—we had to download add-ons if we wanted the minimap to tell us where our ten boars were, and then walk up the hill, both ways!

If you've been playing RPGs since the early 2000s, you've likely got a similar old man yelling at clouds in your soul. Simply put, open-world RPG design has slowly moved away from the discovery part of «questing».

It used to be that quest givers in RPGs (both single-player and massively multiplayer) would rely far more on verbal instructions than UI elements. Morrowind in particular doesn't even have a compass—locking every quest behind some local's vague approximation of the land. That kind of design's gone the way of the dodo, unfortunately, as per an interview with Elder Scrolls Online director Matt Firor in a piece on open-world design by RockPaperShotgun.

Games that have «no compass, no map,» where «literally the quests are like 'go to the third tree on the right and walk 50 paces west'» just won't reach a modern audience, Friar explains: «If you did that now, no one would play it. Very few people would play it. So now you need to give them hints and clues, and nobody wants to really devote that much time to problem solving. Like they want to go and be told the story, or interact with another player, or interact with an NPC.»

Rather bravely invoking Morrowind's name, Frior goes on to add that «Morrowind is a great game obviously,» presumably because a mob had instantly gathered outside his place of residence with pitchforks, however: «the way it told its story with the open world is a little out of date for the type of gamers that we have now … they're not all PC or generation-one console diehards, right, who are going to go out and invest as much time in the game as possible.

»You really want to make sure that it's engaging and fun, and wandering around a field trying to gauge 50 steps from a tree is not part of that anymore. Which is kind