Dragon Quest IV
 

I've been playing Dragon Quest IV recently; which is a game that was originally on the SNES I believe, and then re-released for the Nintendo DS. While the story so far has been pretty linear it has reminded me of a game that all of us miss so dearly. Wyvern. The reason Dragon Quest reminds me of Wyvern is the way you progress through the story. It's very similar to the way quest progression was handled within Wyvern. Simply put, you don't explore you don't progress.

This made me think about how the majority of games today have nearly no use for exploration. Even in large open worlds a substantial amount of its "secrets" can accidentally be found by following the glowing arrow/circle/giant X on your map. Basically what I'm getting at is that I think a lot of games are too easy in the way that they handle quests/tasks to appeal to the masses. That being said I do enjoy the majority of today's games, I just wish that when I accept a quest that the solution isn't automatically highlighted and thrown in my face.

Yeah exploration and story progression is too streamlined in most games nowadays. I think that is part of why I like the Demon/Dark Souls series of games. A lot of what was hard in the first Dark Souls game was that the game didn't hold your hand through the game. Man I wish Wyvern was still around. So much fun exploring through caves and finding these awesome areas that people worked so hard on to make and then purposely made it hard to find it. Good times.

Dragon Quest (Which was originally Dragon Warrior on Nintendo) was our first jump into console gaming back in... 1990 I believe. So when it was revived into Dragon Quest we were excited. It is very much like Wyvern in many way.