I never understood my most if not all RPGs or Adventure-like games don't come with a mission log and "What I am supposed to do next" box. You play a game like Sacred (PS3) or Star Ocean (PS2) or Yakuza (PS2) and don't touch it for a month or two. First thing you do after 2 minutes of playing the game is think, "what the hell was I doing? and where am I supposed to go?" I don't want to run to the strategy guide every time I have a problem because that is not always foolproof. I would even take an in-game notepad that you can type with any time in-game. So. How should something like this be implemented? Should it even be implemented?

Several RPGs do this, actually. Tales of Symphonia is the first that leapt to mind, but it's far from unique. Typically they take the form of a list of all of the "missions" that you've accepted, with a marker to indicate if they're complete yet, a note of where the mission started, and a brief description. "Mission" is in quotation marks because it can refer to just about any plot-relevant item, regardless of whether or not there's an explicit acceptance on the player's part or even any specific task assigned. For example, the start of Tales of Symphonia involves the party taking a tour of various towns; I'm pretty certain that each "go to the next town" item was its own "mission".

Assuming that the game has a minimap, a pretty easy way is to just plop down a big X over where you're supposed to go next.

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Original post by Alpha_ProgDes I never understood my most if not all RPGs or Adventure-like games don't come with a mission log and "What I am supposed to do next" box. You play a game like Sacred (PS3) or Star Ocean (PS2) or Yakuza (PS2) and don't touch it for a month or two.

Start playing Western RPGs instead of Japanese ones, and voila! Instant mission logs. :P

(I know Sacred isn't Japanese - I am being flippant. However, it's been a long time since I played an RPG without some sort of mission and quest log.)

If you are talking about Sacred 2 on PS3, the PC version had a map and quest system similar to any modern MMO. It pretty much pulls you around from place-to-place. Does the PS3 version not have map quest locations marked? Or are you talking about a different game?

I was actually thinking of console RPGs for this topic.

Console games still carry some bad habits they picked up back when a few dozen bytes of save space would add ten dollars to the cartridges manufacturing cost. Japanese games are worse for this because they have always been primarily developed for consoles where as until recently western game development has focused on pc's.

The recent (DS) Pokemon games have a helpful feature: whenever you load a saved game (or maybe it's just if it's an older save file; I can't remember for sure), the game takes a moment, before you gain control of your character, to show screenshots, with captions, of about a half-dozen important events you recently completed. Perhaps something like "Fought Mewtwo and won! / Flew to Pallet Town / Visited the Pokemon Center."

Metal Gear Solid.. 2 I believe gives a story briefing of your recent events as soon as you load up your save file.

Implementing something like this, you should ask yourself which of the following information you want to give your audience, as each is important in its own ways:
-directions on where you went/where you're supposed to go next (gameplay stuff)
-story briefing on what has happened so far (storyline stuff)
-both?

If your game is storyline-heavy, I'd give a start-to-finish recap of the game's major events, as it's easy to forget major pieces of a story as you're playing through a 30+ hour RPG. Without knowing/remembering entirely why you're supposed to go to X dungeon, it's easy to lose motivation when you're halfway through a game.

If you are looking for a more gameplay-style solution, I think it was "A Link To The Past" that had a fortune-teller guy you could go talk to, and he would tell you that sort of thing.

Otherwise, I liked the Metal Gear Solid series way of doing it. Whenever loading a game you'd be given a quick recap of the story so far, ending with a "And now X has to go do Y". That also helped you to remember important parts of the story you may have forgotten.

Oh, one thing I loved, was in Insomniac Games' 'Spyro', back in the 90s. It would display all of the things to do in the game world. That would be cool for people to start doing.

People try to focus more on challenging the player and end up frustrating them instead. Why not just focus on fun and display all of the things possible to do, just leaving much of the accomplishment's details out until you've completed it or learned more about it?

This would really appeal to the OCD players out there who wish to complete everything possible in a game.