Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General Larian:Why quest markers are absolutely necessary!

First of all, I hate quest markers...

But returning to the game after several months of real life, I have a screen's worth of quest backlog that I have forgotten about mostly. Basically, I'm drawing blanks on where most quest givers are and even some areas where I'm supposed to go. Currently the game is close to unplayable.

So here is what I want:

Please make the journal entries clickable or mouse-over-able, showing on the map where each entry took place. That would make returning to the game MUCH less painful. A real joy in fact.

To clarify: I don't want to be shown where to go. But I want to be able to see where I've been.

Read the entries?

I greatly hate quest markers too, and D:OS is a great relieve in that regard, as are many other Kickstarter RPG's.
DEATH TO THE QUESTMARKER.

Quest markers may not be needed but I think that an improved quest log is a good idea. You get told a lot of things through dialogue, but that does not get added to your quest log, and the dialogue log in Original Sin is short and only shows a handful of the most recent conversations. I think that if you get quest-pertinent information from dialogue, then you have already done the work, and that information should be added to your quest log.

I totally agree that a better quest log would add to the game. I greatly enjoyed the journal in the Witcher games. Important information was summarized in a novel fashion. I found myself reading the journal for fun more than actually needing to recall information from it.

A good idea to bring in more info into the quest log.
Me too do not love quest markers !

But because in the current state this extra information isn't in the quest log,
I make my own extra info log : making notes in a book,
a book only for D:OS !

Okay, this way I need very much time to play a little bit further since I do it handwritten and try to do it in English, and not my mother language Dutch .
My notes go about NPC's names & places with quest info ...
My notes go about leveling up : which points my heroes have invest, skills (un/re-)learned ...
Each new entry in the Source Hunters Journey I make a note of day & time (ex :Day 1 - 15:07 )

I just started saterday the 7th of february '15
This way I hope to end next year or the year after, or later ...

But in fact, it really don't care when I'll finish D:OS because it's a Fantastic Freaking Fabulous Funny ... it's my All Time Favorite One !

Is there by the way an official reason why the conversation log is limited to just the last few conversations? As far as I remember, in Divine Divinity all the conversations were saved (even the most trivial chatter...)

I'd guess performance / memory usage. In DD someone made a claim about how quickly gold could be made buying Rimmer's ale (through a dialogue option) and selling it, which sounded far fetched, so I ran a macro while I had lunch, or something, to fill my character's weight capacity to get the actual gold per hour value. I didn't bother reloading after that, and didn't notice until later that that caused a significant delay opening the conversation log (from virtually instant to something like 30 or 60 seconds).

You can increase the limit.

What would be cool is if you could expand a journal entry to show all the pertinent dialog so you wouldn't necessarily have to sift through tons of conversations to find the one line you're looking for. Having to remember the exact dialog pertinent to a quest is in one sense a challenge, but mostly it's just a hassle. Dialogs should be written so you have to think a tiny bit to figure out exactly what to do, but it shouldn't be annoyingly vague either. Of course that's insanely hard and just own preference, but I think a lot of D:OS fans would agree.

The journal really could be better. Increasing information shouldn't be a performance issue. The old game probably started to stutter because it never expected journal abuse. It would be a small matter to prevent that kind of thing in D:OS since it's still being actively developed.

That said, cramming the journal full of information is only useful if the info is readily accessible and the ease of use is substantial. An archive for archive's sake with a poor user experience is useless.