At a 40 minute speech made yesterday at GDC (Game Developers Conference), ex WoW director Jeffery Kaplan outlined the MMO’s 9 major game dynamic shortcomings in particular with regards to the quest system.
Kaplan was one of the masterminds behind World of Warcraft, and played a major role in its design from day one. He is now working on Blizzard’s unannounced next-gen MMO, but was able to give an apparently candid account of WoW’s nine failures at this year’s GDC.
All quotes taken from Shacknews
1. The Christmas Tree Effect:
– Here Kaplan is referring to the manner in which quests show up on the player’s map as either a question mark or an exclamation mark.
“What this means, and this is kind of a weird one, but you show up to a quest hub, and your minimap is lit up like a Christmas tree with quest exclamation marks.”
“The weird thing is, if you ask our fans, they love this. This is to them a good quest hub… They go in and vacuum up the quests. But we’ve lost all control to guide them to a really fun experience.”
According to Kaplan, the problem lies in that players take quest without thinking, or becoming invested in them. It essentially becomes a numbers game.
“It’s much better to have a slow, guided experience,” he said. “I think if you go to [Lich King zones] Borean Tundra or Howling Fjord, you’ll always have a ton of quests to do, but you’ll never have more than 6 or 7 quests in your quest log.”
2. Quest text too long:
– Kaplan admitted that the quest outlines are “too wordy”, and that the majority of players do not even read them, but rather click accept and then look to the objectives that show up in their quest log.
“If you ever want a case study, just watch kids play it, and they’re just mashing the button. They don’t want to read anything.”
3. Games are not books
– “ I’m as guilty of this as anyone else. We’re so fortunate and privileged to work in a medium that is not only an art, but a revolutionary interactive form of entertainment. It’s unfortunate to see so many games try to be what they’re not, including our game at times. Of course we should embrace the concept of story… art, literature, film, song, they’ve all embraced story as well. But they all tell it in their own unique way.”
“I feel like we need to deliver our story in a way that is uniquely video game. We need to engage our audience by letting them be the hero or the villain or the victim. [Art, film, literature], they’re tools. But we need to engage our players in sort of an inspiring experience, and the sooner we accept that we are not Shakespeare, Scorsese, Tolstoy or the Beatles, the better off we are.”
“Basically, and I’m speaking to the Blizzard guys in the back: we need to stop writing a fucking book in our game, because nobody wants to read it.”
4. Quests should tell players what to do
– From time to time, WoW quests can be a bit mysterious, inevitably leading players to Alt+Tab their way to Thotbot in order to get a straight forward explanation of what to do. According to Kaplan, this is a problem.
“We wanted the action in WoW quests to be in the gameplay, not in figuring out what am I supposed to do.”
5. Poorly paced quest chains
“It’s a quest that starts at level 30, it spans 14 levels,” he said. “And it ends with you having to kill Myzrael there, who’s a level 40 elite mob. So it’s basically like putting ab rick wall in front of a player. Here you go, just bang your head against the wall for a while…”
“The reason that this is bad–it’s cool to have quest chains that span a lot of content, and feel kind of expansive and far-reaching. But the reason that this particular case is bad is because the player [loses trust] in the game.”
6. No More “Gimmick quests”
– Kaplan announced that in his opinion, quests such vehicle quests and the like do not work in WoW.
“We didn’t build the engine around vehicles, is what I’m using in this particular example.”
This one was a bit on a contentious issue, as many players insist that they enjoy the gimmick quests as they bring a certain degree of variety to the table.
7. The example of the Loch Modan quest was used.
“The problem with Loch Modan is the player didn’t have a lot of choice, and the quests were clustered up… you get a cluster of lets say four, five kill quests right away, and then you get into a cluster of collection quests. Has a very bad flow. It’s a side effect also of the Christmas Tree.”
8. Collection quest mistakes
– Here Kaplan spoke about how collection quests are often badly implemented in WoW.
“If I have too many creatures in an area, it’s going to take my longer to get through the combat.”
“For every raptor that I have to kill, I’ve got to wade through like three or four other creature types,”
Kaplan then went on to take full responsibility for the infamously annoying Green Hills of Stranglethorn collection quest.
“This is the worst quest in World of Warcraft,” he said. “I made it. It’s the Green Hills of Strangelthorn. Yeah, it teaches you to use the auction house. Or the cancellation page.”
“So I’m the asshole that wrote this quest. My philosophy was, I’m going to drop all these things around Stranglethorn, and it’s going to be a whole economy unto itself… It was horrible.”
“It was utterly stupid of me. The worst part… one of the things that taxes a player in a game like WOW is inventory management. Your base backpack that the game shipped with only has 16 slots in it. But basically at all times, players are making decisions. For a single quest to consume 19 spaces in your bags is just ridiculous.”
“So it’s a horrible quest, and I’m the only who made it, and somehow I am talking to you guys today.”
9. Farming quest inconsistencies
– Kaplan touched on an issue that has always bugged me with WoW collection quests.
“What the eff, the guy down at the hill asked me to kill bandits and I didn’t need to bring anything back to him,” mocked Kaplan. “So ‘A’ I’m asking why I need to bring the paws back. But then I get into this philosophical thing where I say, ‘Shouldn’t the gnoll have a paw every time I kill him?’ Or am I so brutally massacring the gnoll every time that..?”
“And then I’m like, ‘Shouldn’t he have two paws?'”
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