Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Quest Markers Are Now Optional

Those who have been watching the footage of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning available so far will have noticed that those NPCs that have quests available to them sport quest markers over their heads. Well, many haven’t been pleased about this, enough for lead designer Ian ‘Tiberius’ Frazier to chime in on the official forums to announce the issue would be investigated:

Providing an option for quest targets (or anything else, for that matter) is sadly not a matter of spending 5 minutes on it. Unfortunately the implementation of any new functionality, even something relatively simple like this, is generally a pretty involved process on a multiplatform game of this size and complexity. Further, any changes made at this point in development have to be very carefully considered, as even the smallest changes have an unfortunate tendency to introduce new bugs into the game. Oftentimes something that seems like a no-brainer from the outside is in fact a really serious risk from a developer perspective.

That said, it’s clear that this issue is important to some of our fans, so tomorrow I’ll sit down with the UI team and get some estimates on the time it would take to make this a toggleable feature and the estimated level of risk (bug-wise) in making it a toggle.

I am by no means promising that we’ll implement a toggle for quest markers (if it looks like it’ll be a bad thing for the project, especially if it looks likely to introduce new bugs, then we certainly won’t do it), but I wanted to at least let you know that we take fan concerns like this one quite seriously and we will spend the time to investigate our options.

This was followed by a later announcement that, indeed, quest markers shown in-game would be toggleable, although they would remain on the map, in response to player’s feedback:

Ok, so I’ve met with the UI team and we’ve investigated our options. For a variety of reasons, toggling quest markers on the MAP is not something we’ll be doing. But the quest markers in the world itself? Yes, I’m pleased to report that our Principal UI Designer is going to work a little magic and make them fully toggleable (on by default).

If you don’t want to see floating !s, ?s, and arrows in Reckoning, you will not have to do so.

Another victory for vocal fans against streamlining it would seem.

Thanks, RPGWatch.