Ima buck thread consensus here, and say I like compass arrows and quest markers and fast travel. As in I prefer when games have them (when they are big open world type affairs) to not.

I like compass arrows and quest markers because I don't enjoy being lost, or listening to/reading long sets of directions. I remember real life navigation prior to GPS, when directions were things hastily scribbled on scrap paper and always failed to include some turn or weird bit of road or whatever. It sucked, I don't miss it at all, and I see no reason to go back to a virtual version of that.

I like fast travel because I may, on any given game session, not want to spend a lot of my time marching from A to B and dealing with ransom encounters. I may in fact want to make progress on a quest because it's engaging and I want to see what happens next.

Now I think they can be overdone. If the quest is look for clues, just give me the area and let me look. I don't want fast travel points everywhere, major regions/cities are fine. But I do want them.