Skyrim - On Compass and Journal and the Road to Nowhere

[RPGWatch]

GameRanx has written an editorial about the compass and journal in Skyrim. They find that they affect how the players play the game in a negative way. Here are two snips; the first one about the compass: (spoiler alert - so read your own risk).

This has a moral element. Or rather, it has an amoral element. Skyrim's arrow will force you to be an *******. This is most apparent when you go to Riften, the town in the far southeast of Skyrim where the Thieves' Guild is headquartered. The first quest that points you to Riften will probably occur if you pick an "unusual gem", possibly in the temple crypts of the first major city you visit. Picking the unusual gem up immediately triggers a quest to find an appraiser. That appraiser - the only appraiser in the entirety of the province of Skyrim, apparently - lives in Riften. So, heading there and asking questions of the right people (whom you can distinguish because of, yes, the magical arrow pointing at them) leads to the quest to join the Thieves' Guild. Which involves framing someone for a theft that sends them to prison, and then extorting a bunch of local merchants for protection money.

And the second one about the journal:

The culprit is the journal system. When you are assigned a quest, it's added to your journal automatically. If it is set as active, an arrow is added to the map, as well as adding an arrow to the compass, both of which tell you exactly where it is. You activate the quest by selecting it from the journal. The journal is unspecific. Its words provide you with the bare minimum of information needed to know what the quest is, and not how or where to accomplish the quest.