It would be great if these features could work as a part of the gameplay instead of a switch-off-able menu/HUD feature. I remember Dan Vávra mentioning several times he wants to avoid traditional game menus and HUD and find ways to work around these.
Like making the map and compas as obtainable items that you have to get in-game and can put them away if you want. Or like having an optional mind-compass Perk/Trait to get either at the game’s start or during the later character development.
That would make it much more immerse. I approve. Would bring me back to my Morrowind days.
Thanks for the update Tobi - Sounds excellent!
(will be going fully hardcore myself ;))
I agree with many of the ideas here saying quest markers on by default isn’t the best idea (sure it’s easy for an average gamer) I have to disagree whith the folks mentioning darker nights, however as for caverns below ground of course they’re dark but I guess some people really do have bad night vision if they think “realistic nights in skyrim requiring a lightsource to see anything around 10-50 meters was actually realistic” I love the idea that HUD elements being customizable…My guarnteed Mod every time in Skyrim was SkyUI it’s what Bethusda should have done for the PC port.
Yes it’s nice idea ! 
Regarding darker nights: I agree that some mods/ENBs make the nights unrealistically dark, but if you get a decent/realistic one (True Vision ENB for e.g.) it vastly improves the game. Nights are scary and you don’t want to be caught out unprepared, this is especially true when in forests which are even darker. Traveling in snowy areas becomes more appealing than temperate areas as the snow on the ground makes everything much easier to see (but then with Frostfall you run the risk of freezing… :)).
In Skyrim and Fallout NV nights were never threatening and didn’t really have much impact on gameplay. Darker nights make a real difference to how you play - “Will I make such and such a town before nightfall?” and the fear of realising you’re lost as the sun sets really adds tension and gives the player more interesting decisions to make (particularly when you throw other survival mods into the mix). With the default night lighting values there’s no real threat as it’s not much harder to see than day and thus there are no real fears or interesting decisions to be made (IMO anyway).
I hope that in KC:D we’ll have different night lighting based on the moon and cloud cover/weather. Walking across an open field on a clear night with a full moon should give you pretty good vision. The same situation but with an overcast sky and rain should be another matter entirely; inky dark and a dangerous prospect for the lone traveler. Then you have all the in between states, both weather and location; whilst a dense forest is always going to be dangerously dark at night, lightly populated woodland might be quite easy to navigate on a good night but ‘off-limits’ under bad conditions. Of course the weather is dynamic as well which should lead to more interesting situations developing (depending on how rapidly it changes and the timescale of the game).
Regarding HUD: If you haven’t already given ‘iHUD’ and ‘Less Intrusive HUD’ a go (for Skyrim) you should do. Both work well with each other and SkyUI. These three HUD mods combined allow for a massive amount of customisation.
This is such a major issue, honestly. If the game is going to be a seriously immersive and realistic RPG, then it either needs to completely remove quest markers, or make them optional. I suspect the developers will choose the second option, to coddle those who cannot go without. I want to explore this world and ‘happen upon’ where I need to be to do my role as I ascribe it. Have the characters actually give you directions, make people explore the world dynamically! That’s what I want, anyway. And yes, the example everyone gives is Morrowind, an RPG that did many things right. Let us not speak of Oblivion, however…
The ability to turn off any HUD or quest markers or in-game tips is definitely worth the effort.
I would back you up on your request about ability to record the gameplay or take a screenshot combined with a possibility to remove or apply the HUD afterwards.
Exactly what I think!
that’s what I like to hear. I love options. I think ill play hard core mode first to see how it goes cant wait
As it is mentioned in the current streamvideo, you have some trouble about a game without questmarkers. This makes me sad, because a game with questmarkers destroy the immersion.
It makes quests to be a kind of meta-game where you don´t listen to people, don´t look at the world and only search for questmarkers in your HUD. Your world is to detailed and done with love to do such a thing.
If you have to search for people, this is an important part of the game. So please stay at a thought on the hardcore-mode without questmarkers.
I have an Idea:
To have a world without questmarkers is difficult, because you have to ask people about other people and places. This can´t be avoid, there will be a lot of text and voice. But I have an idea to avoid inflated dialog options: link it with your quest journal. Make people and places in the quest journal selectable as “searched” objects. So you could have one searched object at the time and this object will be an option in the dialog.
So you can ask everyone you meet for this objects. For example “the Blacksmith of Samopse”.
You could ask someone in Rataje about him, and you probably will get the standard answer: "I don´t know about him."
There could be tree types of answer:
1) unknown Every voiceactor should have the possibilty to say: “I don´t know know about him/her/it.” so you have 90% of all answers in one sentence.
2) uncertain information People who know it or him, but are not so important can answer something like this: “Well, look in Samopse about him/her/it.” Every character should know every city or village in Kingdom come. In most cases this would be enough information to have a start point. This would be an manageable amount of sentences, because there are only nine locations with individual names:
Rataje, Sazava, Ledecko, Talmberk, Mrchojedy, Samopse, Vranik, Uzice and Stribrna Skalice.
Maybe you also could add some more uncairtain locations given as answers: In the forests, near the river, near the bridge, on the streets, near the fields, at the white house, at the wooden house, at the castle, at the church, in the village, in the town, at the mill, at the tavern and at the store So every Voiceactor should be possible to name this in a sentence, this unknown and uncertain informations.
3) accurate information Some characters should know more and answer specific things: "Oh yes, i know him. He lives in Sampose and often wears his red gugel, during the day you probably can find him at his forge at the center of Sampose."
Try to be as accurate as possible here. For example the in Alpha, the Bowmaster: “Come later to my archery range near the wood.”, what about “Come later to my archery archery range UP near the wood.” So everyone knows you don´t have to search in a wood in a valley. But it is absoultly okay to let people search for someone or some place, this is an interesting part of the game!
This system could also be helpful to ask for a constant Quest:
Maybe you could select the get “a job” object to get this as an dialog option. So you can ask everyone for a job. And as it is with other “searched” objects, also here could be the standard answer: “no, I haven´t.”, an uncertain information: “No, maybe ask the blacksmith/miller/ barkeeper”, and of course, the accurate information: “yes… open questline here”.
Maybe there could be also an idea to make it possible to ask for food, money or a place to sleep with this system, and this question could lower your social status and of course most of the people would say “No!”
I would really appreciate the possibility switching the modes.
look at the alpha. no quest marks. it works fine. we even discover some things not specifically mentioned. so i think it’s possible without markers of any kind. compass can go as well 
Yeah, its fine at the alpha. Beautiful, I love it. Really, but Dan is not sure if they should keep it this way, he talk about it during the streamvideo of the alpha.
Therefore we must persuade him.
Questmarkers are pure evil. They suck the joy out of the game. And they somehow negates the beauty of open world games and make them corridor like. You can give the player all information needed more creatively without doubt.
Id like no quest marker option as well… but I want hand drawn maps that I can write on
I don’t think that will be so hard find somebody even in larger town after npc daily cycle and stuff will be fixed.
Now you don’t know if bowman sleeping in the field or sitting on the roof.
Give us info, find XXX, he is XXX, he likes to go XXX and do XXX. Nice, let’s go. No problem. Small challenge, maybe. But i like it. I hate going from marker to marker aka Skyrim.
Exactly. 
Actually even for Skyrim there are mods that tries to get rid of the quest marker and update the quest descriptions the good old Morrowind way.
Actually at first I felt quite lost in Samopse in alpha. But soon I learrned the geography of the village and can orient myself even unconsciously now. I played the alpha for just maybe an hour. It’s similar even in case of big cities - e.g. Lost Heaven of Mafia. At the beginning of my first gameplay I got lost often. But after while I got used to the geography of the town and now I can orient myself even at high speed of automobile traffic without problems.
Why? Because the geography of Samopse (and Lost Heaven) makes sense. I suppose the geography of the whole game area would make sense (at least that’s something Dan talked and wrote about) - therefore we should be able to orient ourselves quite easily. Notice the peculiar shape of the hill on the other side of Samopse - perhaps you would be able to see it even from distance and therefore you will know there is Samopse at the foot of the hill. Or you would know that little stream tends to go down to the river. Etc. Perhaps you would like to hide yourself in the forest but at the same time need to orient yourself outside of it? Brilliant possibilities of emergent gameplay. In fact quite similar to my memoires of Flashpoint.
In the end you would be forced to scout every village and town before you would be able to navigate through it easily. And that’s surely good think. It’s immersive and only natural that in case you are a new person in a town you will have to know it before you can e.g. perform some thievery there without problems.
I would understand the need of quest markers for more casual players used to them. But please design the game with “no markers” approach in mind and let us at least choose whether we want to use them or not.
I would definitely prefer to play without them and even without the compass. 
This is unnecessary if the game is what i expect it to be. Nobody gave anybody clear directions in Dark Souls, for instance, and the game is amazing nonetheless. Discovering the story on your own from tiiiiiny fragments is always fun. But back to the point: you only need semi-exact directions, just like in real life, provided the people and places stay relatively the same. I mean, in a realistic, no dragons game, such as this, some landscape elements will become your minimap. I just started playing and I am not looking at the compass at all (mainly because I’m not used to it; if I had a minimap or a lay-over minimap like PoE, I couldn’t help it) and it took me a few runs around the village but I can go to the forest at night and reach the witch and all and it feels great).
Therefore, super-exact directions are needed just as much as you need them in real life. Not really at all, if you can read roadsigns and people speak your language and you know WHAT you’re looking for…
I think we can have a personal journal (quest journal) which contains update-able entries about each quest. You can update those standard information pieces about each quest at will, as you find out more about the quest. The updated info should be standard-ish and easy to enter, no typing involved.
Every quest is a WHAT. And it needs a WHERE and a HOW. That’s it. Usually you get a very distinct WHAT and a vague WHERE and/or HOW in the beginning. So every quest should have some standard changeable information that you can enter or not for you to view later.
For example, let’s say you have to retrieve someone’s lost necklace. That’s the WHAT. You also get some basic WHERE (“I lost it at the fare, I think”) and a hinted HOW (“I was with so-and-so, maybe you could ask them” etc.). Therefore, you should have the option of entering a new quest in your journal or not. Let’s say you want to: now a new semi-standard quest page opens up, with some semi-strandard fields usually regarding the WHAT, WHERE and HOW. The WHAT field is the quest title and/or background story, the WHERE field contains standard details about location - village, house, person, place etc. and the HOW maybe some miscellaneous details related to your quest and maybe some personal strategy notes, don’t know. The information of any of those fields should be changeable. Here’s a way: from a few preset options/names generated based on the dialog that prompted the quest.
I think this is how quest markers and automatizations could be avoided. The game deserves a try in that direction and I’m sure better ideas than these can come about, by the way.
