We can never be friends!

What is this blue line you speak of? I've only seen the yellow line for story objectives. There is usually an exclamation mark where you supposed to go for side quest though, was that in the original game?

You press the button that brings up the infobox that gives more detail of where to go next, then you cycle to the right to the sidequest info box instead of the main quest info box. 

Yeah Xenoblade always had that quality even way back on the Wii, despite the hardware being basically a generation behind the competition, the sheer scale and artistic design of the world transcended its graphical limitations.

Ah thanks forgot all about dat. So they have indeed improved sidequest a bit then.

More than that. It never used to show you icons for the random items you need to collect. You'd just have to wander around every area hoping to bump into them.

It was more rewarding when you did find one, but it could also take you an eternity, and you were never totally sure you were in the right part of the map.

Not unless you had a guide, which I used via the Xenoblade Wiki page, but I also considered that cheating. But I was too frustrated and fed up to care, I just wanted to finish the damn quests and get the EXP and affinity. 

I didn't find myself doing that NEARLY as much with the Definitive Edition, which was a big plus in my book. 

I disagree with the quests being more rewarding in the older game.I found in the older games the quests were more or less just flavour text you got alongside some meaningless objectives. Definitive Edition, instead, feels like your getting little side stories, and you know exactly what you’re doing when you do it; it gives the quests a feeling of context in the story, and really adds to them as sub-plots (although some are silly like, “I need to fix a door, collect these 18 items so I can do it”).

In past games, quests were random noise, and you might complete 4 or 5 out of 30-40 of them randomly and without any memory or context of what just happened other than a “Quest Complete!” popping up after opening a treasure box or something.

I’ve found the world of Definitive Edition feels far richer than the previous games for the very reason that the quests actually mean something, now. Also, play sessions are far more manageable - “I need something to do while I wait for rice to cook” and instead of wasting time on YouTube, I can do something I actually enjoy, like playing Xenoblade Chronicles and knocking out 2 or 3 quests, and actually have some sort of meaningful context in what I did in that short play session.

In my opinion, the quest system improvements are the most important upgrade made to the game, more so than the graphical enhancements in this remaster.

Depending on what Monolith's next project reveal is the thread may be renamed to be Monolith specific instead of just being focused on Xenoblade given the speculation that the next project may not be a new XBC, it's known they have two projects in the pipeline.

Shouldn't be a problem. The Xenoblade games are very loosely connected to begin with.

Based on the concept art for their new project, which is all I've even seen or heard about it, I'd say it's completely new. Looks a lot more classic medieval-fantasy based.

(Pics for those who haven't seen yet:)

Just occured to me now, but seeing how it focuses on swords (one of them carrying a large one), main character wearing a crown(?), and a dragon hovering over her, wouldn't surprise me if it's Arthurian related. Wouldn't be the first Japanese property to turn Arthur into a woman.

Of course those are all common fantasy tropes.

Monolith is actually working on 3 new games at the moment.

The first is this fantasy action game that you have shown here.
The second is a new RPG project by the Xenoblade team. (X2 or 3 is my guess.) 
The third is Breath of the Wild 2.