Riamus
Hunter
Not really. On foot, yes. On a vehicle, no. Especially if it's a motorcycle. I may forget that it's a fetch quest and hop on my motorcycle and start driving away and when I see the red barrier pop up, there's no possible way to stop in time to not fail. Having 30 seconds to stop and turn around would be very helpful and making that red barrier more visible since it can be very easy to not notice would be helpful to a lot of people. The timer doesn't need to be visible or can be a UI option.The quest objective and giant red wall isn't enough? Don't blame the game because you aren't paying attention to anything.
There's a red wall that appears when you leave the area. You don't have to watch for text. But it can be easy to not notice.The area indicator for the "stay within area" for quest activity is really poorly indicated.
It's just a word that slowly changes color as you get closer, I play on a 21:9 monitor and I HARDLY see the text in the corner. Why not just put down a glowing ring like a treasure dig, but for the entire area. Sure it's not immersive, but it's also already in place, just need to add it to the logic for that quest boundary.
3 minutes is extreme, imo. 30 seconds is plenty. All you need is enough time to stop and turn around and get back into the boundary.It's too late by the time you notice it if you're on a motorcycle or a mini bike. A 3 minute timer would be ideal.
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I think removing the stay within requirement would be fine. It does provide a challenge if you're under-geared and getting overwhelmed because you have to stay within the area, but that's minor. I think the biggest issue is that zombies disappear after a while, so if you leave and come back, you have to make sure the player can still kill every enemy. There have been times when zombies (mainly vultures) would leave the area and then not return and not respawn, making it so you can't complete a quest. Having that be a problem anytime you leave the area and come back later would be a serious issue so they'd have to fix that so it never happens. Maybe it's already been fixed since I haven't seen that happen in recent versions, but it's still something that would have to be considered. It can also make it possibly easy to cheese stuff, such as causing a lot of zombies to spawn at once and stringing them along down a road as you kill them rather than having to worry about walls and doors and furniture and such. I'm sure there are other similar concerns. Even so, I think it would be fine and it could easily just be a sandbox option.
The alternative is to have some kind of delay before you fail the quest so you can return if you accidentally leave the area as the OP suggested.