My Eloquent Opinion on MW's Journal

[nerdistmonk]

Morrowind's quest journal is bad. Its a mess of mixed pages in no particular order, its hard to find what your doing or what you have done, or what needs to still be done and well basically its one of the main most complaints i have with the game.

The reason i suggest this to the OpenMW team to improve is because its been 12 years give or take, and not one soul has attempted to fix it which means it must be as big a nightmare to fix as it is to use, otherwise you know someone would have at least tried to clean that mess up by now.

Oh and also: hello everyone

[bahamut]

Morrowind's quest journal is bad. Its a mess of mixed pages in no particular order, its hard to find what your doing or what you have done, or what needs to still be done and well basically its one of the main most complaints i have with the game.

The reason i suggest this to the OpenMW team to improve is because its been 12 years give or take, and not one soul has attempted to fix it which means it must be as big a nightmare to fix as it is to use, otherwise you know someone would have at least tried to clean that mess up by now.

Oh and also: hello everyone

Call me a nostalgia blinded retard but i love MW's journal, because its feel like a real one not just some anticlimatic quest/PDA/GPS log newer TES games have, also expansions made some improvements to filler out entries by quest

[nerdistmonk]

Call me a nostalgia blinded retard but i love MW's journal, because its feel like a real one not just some anticlimatic quest/PDA/GPS log newer TES games have, also expansions made some improvements to filler out entries by quest

I don't need quest markers, and the map works well enough, i have no issues with those parts of the morrowind interface, however...

I would really like a no-nonsense journal like the later games come with, i beat the main story then promptly uninstalled it because my journal had become the stuff of nightmares, only half of the people i talked to who gave me a side quest were even listed under the 'active quest' filter, even then some quests were so vague i could not even determine what city the person of interest was in, so i just gave up on it.

Its not like a real journal at all because i can flip through a real one in far less time and toss out what i don't need, this games journal writes a record of every belch, fart and case of indigestion i get during my adventures, its all clutter that makes it very hard to navigate.

[Greendogo]

I'd like to point out that you haven't given us your suggestion yet in the form of a suggestion. I can infer you want the journal to be better, but a suggestion usually comes with some more concrete ideas behind it.

[nerdistmonk]

I'd like to point out that you haven't given us your suggestion yet in the form of a suggestion. I can infer you want the journal to be better, but a suggestion usually comes with some more concrete ideas behind it.

A more organized and useful journal:

*Active Quests front and center
*Finished Quests have their own tab
*Ability to completely remove any journal entry or hide it altogether
*Ability to sort things out in the journal and take notes for those vague quests.

The Active Quests tab is limited in usefulness due to the fact that not all quests even showup on it properly, its a tacked on feature that the expansion packs added, that was bethseda's only attempt at trying to tame the beast that is the quest journal.

Those features listed above would at least give the player the power to sort his journal to his own liking, keeping important entries on their own tab along with any notes needed, cause this game has some really vague side quests that tend to lack important info (like being able to write down what city the quest giver is in, and what the quest giver told me to do because the journal makes no mention of it), its hard to get back into your game after you leave it for a week because of this.

[silentthief]

this games journal writes a record of every belch, fart and case of indigestion i get during my adventures, its all clutter that makes it very hard to navigate.

This is hilarious.

I remember that there was a mod (probably using MWE or MWSE) that let you write your own journal entries? Perhaps I am thinking of a mod to a different game (Oblivion perhaps?). This is going to be a place where there is likely to be some mod improvement regardless of if the core openMW handling of the journal is not changed. That is the beauty of this by the way, openMW has more inherent capability for modding than MW did.

ST

[Tes96]

I love the journal system in Morrowind because it feels like a real journal book I'm flipping through. And yes, a real journal with that much information would be a pain in the ass to go through. But so are a myriad other things in life.
There is Journal Enhanced which allows you to write in the journal. But it requires Morrowind Enhanced. And I'm sure a mod similar to that will be done again in the future after OpenMW takes off.

I haven't played Morrowind in over a year but I believe when you finish a quest, whether you failed it or succeeded at it, the quest will turn gray in the quests tab. All other ones have yet to be completed.

I propose that OpenMW have the ability to edit your journal implemented. They already have the feature to type in the value you want to barter with during transactions. You just hover your mouse over the number, highlight it, and type to change the value.

With the journal, you couldn't erase things. But if there was something you wanted to remove, you could highlight it, press the S key to strikethrough it, as that's what you would do with a quill pen soaked with ink. Or just rip out the page. And to write freely in the journal, you could click on a page in the journal book and it would automatically insert the date and you could type your Topic name and then type your entry. I'd love for it to be more interactive like that.

[Okulo]

I love the journal system in Morrowind because it feels like a real journal book I'm flipping through. And yes, a real journal with that much information would be a pain in the ass to go through. But so are a myriad other things in life.

Which is why e-readers nowadays have search functions. Really, the reason that some conveniences are absent
in books is because the medium doesn't support it. We have always had to make do with things like bookmarks and folding corners of papers. You'll never approach a book experience in Morrowind anyway. Best just embrace it and make it a fleshed out skeuomorph instead of insisting on aggravating users.

[Tes96]

I love the journal system in Morrowind because it feels like a real journal book I'm flipping through. And yes, a real journal with that much information would be a pain in the ass to go through. But so are a myriad other things in life.

Which is why e-readers nowadays have search functions. Really, the reason that some conveniences are absent
in books is because the medium doesn't support it. We have always had to make do with things like bookmarks and folding corners of papers. You'll never approach a book experience in Morrowind anyway. Best just embrace it and make it a fleshed out skeuomorph instead of insisting on aggravating users.

True. I'd prefer then to have OpenMW allow for the ability to edit and change the journal during gameplay via a mod made through OpenCS. So without a modification, the journal in OpenMW would be the same as it is in vanilla Morrowind. Hopefully there will be much more leeway and freedom in the OpenCS and modders can make a journal system like the one in TESV Skyrim and others can make one that is similar to what I described in my previous post. That way everybody gets what they want, in theory.

[nerdistmonk]

I love the journal system in Morrowind because it feels like a real journal book I'm flipping through. And yes, a real journal with that much information would be a pain in the ass to go through. But so are a myriad other things in life.

Which is why e-readers nowadays have search functions. Really, the reason that some conveniences are absent
in books is because the medium doesn't support it. We have always had to make do with things like bookmarks and folding corners of papers. You'll never approach a book experience in Morrowind anyway. Best just embrace it and make it a fleshed out skeuomorph instead of insisting on aggravating users.

^This, Morrowind's Journal is _nothing_ like a real journal, that illusion is blown away the split second i take a real journal and proceed in ripping pages out of it and casually tossing them in the rubbish bin.

Morrowind is the only game of the modern trilogy with this type of journal for good reason, and you can clearly see by the time tribunal came out, Bethesda tried to correct the journal by adding the master index plugin (rough quest listing system), but its still not good enough, its still quite bad to deal with. Its like 1990s internet in book form, hyperlinks everywhere, end up in a maze of pages trying to find useful info.

If the journal were that easy to fix 'via mods' it would have been fixed a decade ago when morrowind was fresh.

Anyways i do not know how to really fix it, i suggested it should resemble the later two games, simple, clean and easy to select a quest to act upon. If that's too unreasonable, i would like to be able to delete entries from the journal, and move them around if need be, when i finish a quest entries about that quest should be moved out of my journal to a different spot...just like the newer games, could you imagine trying to play oblivion with the journal full of old stuff? Thats what it is like playing morrowind.