Back in my day, we didn't have these fancy-schmancy newfangled quest markers and compass points—we had to download add-ons if we wanted the minimap to tell us where our ten boars were, and then walk up the hill, both ways!
If you've been playing RPGs since the early 2000s, you've likely got a similar old man yelling at clouds in your soul. Simply put, open-world RPG design has slowly moved away from the discovery part of "questing".
It used to be that quest givers in RPGs (both single-player and massively multiplayer) would rely far more on verbal instructions than UI elements. Morrowind in particular doesn't even have a compass—locking every quest behind some local's vague approximation of the land. That kind of design's gone the way of the dodo, unfortunately, as per an interview with Elder Scrolls Online director Matt Firor in a piece on open-world design by RockPaperShotgun.
Rather bravely invoking Morrowind's name, Frior goes on to add that "Morrowind is a great game obviously," presumably because a mob had instantly gathered outside his place of residence with pitchforks, however: "the way it told its story with the open world is a little out of date for the type of gamers that we have now … they're not all PC or generation-one console diehards, right, who are going to go out and invest as much time in the game as possible.
I am fully expecting my fellow PC Gamer writer and Morrowind lover Joshua Wolens, who isn't in today, to appear outside my door with a sawed-off in the morning for this, but… I think Frior is bang on the money here. At least, from the somewhat-cynical perspective of someone trying to keep an MMO afloat.
Instead, Frior maintains, the actually-marketable open world RPG strategy is to "make a space and then just populate it with things to do, and the players can do it in any order … sometimes you can't figure out what the players are going to figure out, because they're smarter than you. But that's what the world is like too."
