Map markers and the joy of getting lost

There’s a certain kind of video game memory that sticks with me. It’s not a final boss fight or a cutscene - it’s the feeling of being completely and utterly lost. I remember the frustration, the aimless wandering, and then, the sheer, unadulterated triumph of finally figuring it out. Not many modern games invoke that feeling. Why? The little arrow on my screen. The quest marker.

When we talk about quest markers, I immediately start thinking about The Elder Scrolls series. It’s a series that went through a change in quest marker philosophy between its third and fourth installments: Morrowind didn’t have any quest markers, while you’d be hard pressed to find a quest in Oblivion without a spot being marked on your map, and a notch on your compass telling you where to go.

Skyrim: “Go over there for your next quest target”.

In Morrowind, much of the quest design relied on the fact that the player will need to find their way around the world. The majority of quests are simple “fetch this” or “kill that”, but the fun factor came from discovery - you might need to ask around to find where a character is, hunt down a location of a cave, or figure out which combination of transports would take you to the location. Navigation is a large part of the gameplay, which was further supported by the fact that Morrowind was released in 2002, when looking something up online upon even a momentary slowdown wasn’t the norm. Printed guides existed, wiki sites existed, but tolerances for being lost or confused in games were higher. Or at least that’s how I felt.

In contrast, Oblivion introduced map markers for quests in an effort to streamline the game and make it more approachable. And they did reduce the level of frustration, and made playing the game simpler, but they also removed a degree of joy from exploration and the need to understand your environment and pay close attention to the world. There are times when these markers truly fall flat, especially when the quest author imagined a scavenger hunt, or any kind of a mystery. Where’s the secret door? Oh, here’s the arrow pointing to it. And you’d think game designers would be able to avoid this issue by just not including quest markers, but in a game where you train the player to expect an arrow telling you what to do, not having one breaks the flow and feels like a bug.

Oblivion: So many landmarks to explore, so much world geography to take in. Too bad you have a job todo and a quest marker to follow.

Oblivion, and its successor, Skyrim, offer a more streamlined experience. But, as it’s often the case, this experience comes at the expense of immersion in the world. The player doesn’t really have to engage with the world geography, lore, and quest knowledge as deeply since there’s no mechanical incentive to do so. This makes the game much more approachable and fun for players who’re not looking for that experience. And there’s a time and a place for approachable games - I prefer Morrowind over Skyrim, but I have more hours clocked into the latter. Likely because it’s easier to pick up and play, and the game loop is just the right kind of addictive without the added friction.

Here’s the thing though: navigation is one of the favorite gameplay mechanics. Figuring out where to go, or who to talk to, or what to do makes me feel smart, and makes me deeply engage with the world. Outer Wilds wouldn’t have hit as hard if I wasn’t the one figuring out mysteries of the universe. It’d be an entirely different experience, with a quest log and a list of tasks along the lines of “visit this planet”, “collect this thing”, “read that inscription” - ugh, I shudder thinking about what a terrible loss it would’ve been.

A little floating arrow is a kind of a game design shortcut. And like most shortcuts, it makes you lose out on the scenery. When a game offers you a quest marker, and maybe even an instant fast travel system to go with it - it makes you a tourist in the game world. No, really, here’s your tour, here’s your tour bus, don’t forget to tip your guide on the way out. No matter how beautiful or thoughtful the crafted landscape is, it’ll disappear as you’re following the little marker to check off the next quest. More than once I caught myself playing a game, heading towards the next map marker, not really knowing where or why I’m going. The game will tell me when I get there, I think. That’s a terrible motivation for setting out on a quest, isn’t it?

Outer Wilds: What’s out there?

And there’s nothing wrong with tours, and there’s nothing wrong with tourists. For tourists, a city is reduced to a number of locations with nothing in between, and not a coherent place to be explored. All of a sudden you need to figure out what the destination is, and how to get to a destination. You chart a route through streets and look for landmarks to guide yourself. Even fast travel becomes part of the puzzle. Do you take a bus? Train? A taxi? Do you need to chain different methods of fast travel?

Think of a game like Hollow Knight, where, to get a map of the area, you have to find a cartographer NPC. And to do that, you usually have to explore the whole area. Even then, the map doesn’t update itself as you move - you have to sit down at a bench and manually update it yourself. You have to explore and understand the world you’re in, you have to pay attention. No arrow telling you where to go, just a puzzle to solve. You are creating the map as you go, and because of that, every corner, every twist, every shortcut you discover feels like a genuine, earned triumph.

You’d think, given all this, that a game designer would just choose to eliminate the quest marker entirely. But it’s not that simple - in fact, it’s a total no-win scenario for a designer. The quest marker is almost like a social contract with the player. In a world where the vast majority of games have them, not including one feels less like a deliberate design choice and more like a bug. If you train the player to expect a floating arrow, and then for one quest, you decide not to include it, the player’s first instinct isn’t “oh, this must be a puzzle!” it’s “wait, did the game just break?”

This is why even some of the best games get stuck in a kind of halfway house, giving you an arrow that actively undermines their own design. My favorite, most painful example of this is the “Ladies of the Wood” quest in The Witcher 3. At one point, you’re tasked with following a trail of breadcrumbs left by children - a classic Slavic folk tale. It’s a narratively perfect moment of environmental storytelling. But the quest marker simply points you from one pile of breadcrumbs to the next, like a GPS giving you turn-by-turn directions. No longer a scavenger hunt, you’re just following map markers. The developers put so much care into crafting a moment of emergent discovery, only to have the UI flatten it into a checklist item. And while you have an option to turn off the mini map in Witcher 3 (and therefore the quest markers), some quests rely on you magically knowing where to go, which is unfortunate.

Witcher 3: A beautiful, well crafted world to explore. Oh wait - there’s a quest marker I should be following.

But some AAA games try to push back against this all-or-nothing approach - I think that’s a cool trend. Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, for all its mainstream trappings, offered players a choice. You could play in “Guided Mode,” which gave you the classic quest markers, or you could switch to “Exploration Mode.” In this mode, the quest descriptions give you clues instead of waypoints - “Head south from the village, look for a large shipwreck.” It’s an elegant solution. It puts the responsibility back on the player to read the world, to pay attention to landmarks, and to engage with the geography in a meaningful way.

So what’s the final word? The floating arrow isn’t evil. It’s a convenient, often necessary tool for modern game design. But when a game leans on it too heavily, it’s making a statement: that it prioritizes a frictionless experience over a rewarding one. I love games you can get lost in. The ones that trust you to get your bearings, to pay attention to landmarks, to listen to the in-game dialogue, and to find the way yourself. These games turn navigation from a simple act of following instructions into an adventure.

I still play games with quest markers. I have to, frankly - there are too many great ones. But I’m always happy to see games that don’t have them, the games that make me feel like an adventurer, charting my own course through the unmapped worlds (roll credits!), with nothing but my own wits to guide me.

If you liked this article, you might also enjoy when I didn’t speak the language of games, the joys of leaving the map behind, and don’t hide the worlds behind HUDs where I further explore the magic of getting lost and diegetic user interfaces. I also enjoyed Game Maker’s Toolkit video “Following the Little Dotted Line”, and you might too.