world maps
Also use a level of detail system.
Take a look at any of the Assisin's Creed franchise. They use fixed size icons for everything, so when you zoom out, it's impossible to find what you are looking for.
You can spend ages zooming in, zooming out moving the target, zoom in again....
They know it's an issue as they allow you to turn off icons for groups of items, but it's clunky and horrible.
IMHO when you zoom all the way out, only the main quest should be visible and you gradually introduce other types as you zoom in.
So would you view being able to hide the markers in a more broken down format an improvement? Such as being able to single out certain quests for view or even the option to group quests of your choice and have them be viewable when you choose to.
A technique that works fairly well, and has been used on many games, you look at the quest list and have an option to "view on map", but it only works for certain types of quests.
Certainly giving the end user some control over what is displayed on the map is a good feature, it's how you implement it that can cause issues.
When it comes to something like a map, the useability is key.
If it takes 30 seconds to load the map, not good.
If you can do powerful filtering on the displayed items as long as you have three hands and a spare gamepad, not good.
If you can zoom in to an individual blade of grass as long as you sacrifice a goat and worship the great god Imhotep, not good.
Implementing a really good map isn't trivial and that's why you often get poor quality maps in quite good games.
I wouldn't mind having the map screen and the quest screen be the same screen, maybe with the quest(s) at the top (or left) and the map filling the rest of the screen. So you can press left/right (or up/down) to highlight an active quest, and its relevant markers are automatically shown at the appropriate zoom level. (Maybe it also shows you other quest markers in that area, but not highlighted, 'cuz one thing players will want to do is see at a glance how quest-dense an area is when deciding to go.)
In other words, a system where "view on map" is the default view.
(I figure there are games that use this system, it's just that I can't recall which.)
I wouldn't mind having the map screen and the quest screen be the same screen, maybe with the quest(s) at the top (or left) and the map filling the rest of the screen. So you can press left/right (or up/down) to highlight an active quest, and its relevant markers are automatically shown at the appropriate zoom level. (Maybe it also shows you other quest markers in that area, but not highlighted, 'cuz one thing players will want to do is see at a glance how quest-dense an area is when deciding to go.)
In other words, a system where "view on map" is the default view.
(I figure there are games that use this system, it's just that I can't recall which.)
World of warcraft had one like that. Not sure if it still does though. It used to be set up as a list on the world map I think and it had the option to hide the list of quests as well as quests themselves, although this may have only been with the use of quest helper but once again not 100% certain.
