Well, if you’re going to clone World of Warcraft, you could do worse than listen to the guys who cloned Everquest. Jeff Kaplan gave an opinionated talk that will probably have WoW players posting furiously for weeks.
“This is the worst quest in World of Warcraft,” he said. “I made it. It’s the Green Hills of Stranglethorn. 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.”
Most of Kaplan’s points boil down into the following:
- People don’t like Lake Wintergrasp
You’ve played that shooter, that shooter that is fucking awesome… and then it’s got the one gimmick vehicle level, which you can tell they didn’t know what they were doing with vehicles, and it felt all floaty and things didn’t shoot right. The same mistake happened in World of Warcraft.
Lots of these vehicle quests, they’re more fun for the designer than they are for the player.
- People don’t like delayed gratification
It’s a quest that starts at level 30, it spans 14 levels. And it ends with you having to kill Myzrael there, who’s a level 40 elite mob. So it’s basically like putting a brick 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.
- People don’t like solving mysteries
We can unveil a mystery story, but at the end of the day, in the quest log it needs to say, ‘Go kill this dude, go get me this item.’ The mystery can’t be what to do [on the quest]. We wanted the action in WoW quests to be in the gameplay, not in figuring out what am I supposed to do.
- People like choices. But they’re wrong.
…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.
- People don’t like to read
I think it’s great to limit people in how much pure text they can force on the player. Because honestly… 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.
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.
World of Warcraft has 12 million more subscribers than you do.
#1 by Eduin on March 27th, 2009
Well let’s be clear here – it is highly likely that Kaplan’s sideways move is the same as him being fired. And he will have been canned over the abortion that was WotLK.
Just reading how he views the quests system, and having played his vision in WotLK, it is clear why the game has lost so much of its enjoyment – and Kaplan is that reason.
Green Hills is a fun ancilliary quest. It works because its done in parallel to other quests. Its part of a design ethos that ran all the way to WotLK launching which was “do everything there is at the same time”. Go to a zone, get all the quests, from all the hubs, work through it.
That was throw out with WotLK. Instead of getting all the quests from two or three hubs, the hubs work like mini zones. There is no Runner to take you round the zone, you do everything there is to do for the hub within a few hundred yards of the quest giver then you go to the next hub.
This completely changes the Exploration based zone discovery from the core game. Take TBC – go to Hellfire, pick up all the quests at your first base, spot the obvious Runner quest to the other hub, start exploring, work the Runner while you do, get the quests from the other hub and work it *all* together. This is fun. This encournages exploration. This removes most of the need to resort to spoiler sites.
Instead WotLK effectively splits each zone into 2 to 4 mini-zones, where all content is related to the hub and happens next to it. Runners are always once the content at that mini-hub is clear. There is a lack of co-existant questing and no Ancilliary questing (doing something for the whole zone while you work other quests – like Green Hills).
I won’t go into all the other numerous problems with WotLK but its clear that as the man in charge, the whole abortion was Kalgan’s fault, and it is no wonder they moved him the second they realised they were about to leak a couple of million subs – which by all accounts they are doing.
Regards,
Eduin
#2 by sinij on March 27th, 2009
No, you need to stop writing bad fanfic. Nobody wants to read that. If you want to convey the story… use fucking cutscenes, voice-overs or at least scripted in-game dialog or don’t bother at all.
#3 by sinij on March 27th, 2009
@Eduin
I think leaking subs has more to do with shipping early than anything else. WotLK had none of the usual Blizzard polish. I think servers still occasionally crash.
#4 by Angelworks on March 27th, 2009
@Rog
Yup my fault
– sorry about that.
#5 by Dragoncroft on March 28th, 2009
“World of Warcraft has 12 million more subscribers than you do.” Ya know, the WoW snark gets old. You think gamers aren’t tired of WoW? You think we aren’t starved for new worlds to explore and spend our money on? How about releasing a game that isn’t fundamentally _broken_ at the core system level at release? How about releasing a game on time? How about releasing games that offer the systems as advertised? Your industry is broken at very basic levels and you can blame the marketing guys or the producers all you want but you’ve become the epitome of the guys in the ivory towers. Smug and out of touch. I realize that most of you think you know better than the unwashed masses but, from obvious metrics, you’re wrong. Warhammer Online, AoC, Tabula Rasa, (insert name here)..they didn’t fail because of the marketing guys or the producers or the CS guys or _gasp_ even the players. They failed because YOU, the “guys in the trenches”, can’t get working systems to market and your consumers, who you all seem to despise, are no longer willing to pay for 8 months of testing. I don’t like Jeff Kaplan. I don’t think he’s correct. But Blizzard has figured out that polish counts and that players are more willing to pay for cotton candy that tastes like cotton candy than advertised filet mignon that tastes like dog crap.
#6 by Brent Michael Krupp on March 28th, 2009
Eduin is completely insane. Wrath is an amazing expansion and the quests are wonderful — just about the best in WoW to date. If you hate WoW that’s your business but don’t make shit up about Wrath sucking.
#7 by Aufero on March 28th, 2009
“Show, don’t tell” has been one of the few universally agreed on rules of fiction for a long time. It’s interesting to see quest designers rediscover it.
#8 by Mist on March 28th, 2009
Whoa, whoa, are you really this retarded? Being lead designer of Blizzard’s next flagship MMO is the same as being fired?
#9 by Longasc on March 28th, 2009
Eduin, small typo: Jeff Kaplan = Tigole, not Kalgan. Kalgan = Tom Chilton. Formerly known as Evocare, he did some odd things to Ultima Online under this name, before moving on to do greater damage to the whole MMO genre with WoW!
And while people are criticizing Eduin, I think he is going too far, and Tigole has not been fired, as people pointed out. Rather promoted.
Which is a sad thing, as his GUIDED BUS TOUR quest driven content-delivery is what makes WoW/WotLK a one-shot singleplayer experience, a game, not a virtual world. Then you have the totally different group endgame content, the dumbed down raids. As the whole game was casualized, the terms “casual” and “accessible” becoming synonymous with easy and dumbed down to the very lowest common denominator.
Basically, unless you are driven by lust for somewhat better raid items, you can stop playing after questing through WOTLK to 80.
We should better play singleplayer RPGs with even better story and more varied quests than online-singleplayer games with some nice MMO light touches like WoW.
I wonder how the next WoW expansion will be: even more guided bus tour for stupid gamers that more and more forget how it is to explore by themselves?
#10 by Ed on March 28th, 2009
I’d say Kaplan is right on the money with most of this stuff.
#11 by Mist on March 28th, 2009
Nothing is more GUIDED BUS TOUR than Warhammer Online. The whole game you follow a single road through each race’s PvE area from quest hub to quest hub, with absolutely no deviation. If it wasn’t for the occassional scenarios breaking the monotony, no one would put up with it.
WoW’s bus tour is at least somewhat non-linear, particularly in WOTLK, but still not much better. Adding in bonus quests in out of the way places would be preferable, the original game had tons of those.
I think when analyzing WoW, people should focus on the original game (minus the original endgame.) That original level up process is what got people hooked, what got WoW to become this cultural phenomenon with critical mass to constantly attract two people for every one self-realized addict that quits cold turkey. Blizzard themselves should not so quickly write off their ‘mistakes’ from the original game, because they might not be as much of a mistake as they look. This is one case where hindsight might not actually be 20/20.
#12 by Davide on March 28th, 2009
Seeing as they lost all immersion when they put big explanation signs and question marks over NPCs heads why not just keep going and put a summary string at the start of the quest text.
[Hide]Summary: Kill 10 rats.
Then put a glowy trail on the ground that will lead the player to a rat, then the next rat, then to the turn in PC, then create a glowy trail to the next available quest NPC.
Give the little newbie every ounce of hand holding you can think off cause after all, its hard to find a character by name without a giant glowing neon arrow over their head and a glowy path leading you to him.
Now that you have made it possible for every moron in the world to be able to play your game give players the option to turn all that shit off and reward them with some percentage of increased Experience/Faction.
#13 by Adam on March 28th, 2009
Davide, surely you’ve heard of Questhelper. It actually does something close to what you’re sarcastically talking about. And it was so popular that its author was able to make a full-time job out of it just through donations.
That’s the real lesson of WoW. People say they want immersion and good lore and everything else. But most people don’t actually care about what they say they care about. Most want to level as fast as possible and get shiny purples. And the game company cynical enough to realize this is making a fortune.
#14 by EpicSquirt on March 28th, 2009
PvE is so overrated.
#15 by Gx1080 on March 28th, 2009
Lets make a review:
*People dont read text because they just want to kill and get purples. Well, put voiceovers or movies or make the quest more interesting that: go kill x for y. (Either make y always drop or make different types of quests).
*Green Hills of StrangleHorn failed, not because was deep, it failed because our inventory space in those levels cannot hold all those pages. (Unless you are a twink). I like the Warhammer solution, an unlimited quest items bag and a normal bag.
*Going quest hub after quest hub its dumb. I dont say that we shouldnt have quest hubs, i say that quest hubs and quests in general shouldnt be the center of the leveling process, you shouldnt feel that you miss a lot of stuff for not questing, you shouldnt feel that the quests guide your advance in the game. Mkae a lot of untelated quests hubs, stop making quests that guide people from quest hub to quest hub, make that you can do one epic quest from each hub and make it that you dont end up with a boss that one shot a single player.
#16 by Arkenor on March 28th, 2009
Just because some people don’t read the quest text, is that a reason to do away with it?
I read it, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. Let the impatient folks click through if they want, but I don’t see a good reason to do away with it. It cannot cost that much to get the text written, as a proportion of development cost, surely?
If younger people today think they don’t like reading, the answer is not to remove reading opportunities from them; it is to provide high quality engaging quest dialogues that will make them want to read.
#17 by Mandella on March 28th, 2009
As if I didn’t feel marginalized enough before…
I like mystery, I like story, I like all those things “everybody” else hates.
Thank the gods for niche games…
#18 by Drakks on March 28th, 2009
It’s awesome when someone doesn’t let the fact they don’t know what they are talking about stop them from talking about it, in length.
#19 by Daniel on March 29th, 2009
I think there is a basic flaw in a lot of the comments in this thread. I agree that many players don’t want what they say they want and at the end of the day go after the purple items. The question is why. Some may argue that it doesn’t matter because Blizzard is a business and all they need to do is give their customers what they want. And that may be true in the short run but its not sustainable.
There is nothing inherent in human psychology that makes people go after purple things. Heck, even if you believe the numbers Blizzard puts out, less than 2% of all Americans have ever even played WoW. On one hand five million people is a lot of people. On the other hand, compared to other areas of popular culture, five million customers is nothing.
The real challenge for developers is not how to make a better quest system. The real question is how do you design a game that makes the 90% of Americans that have never played a MMORPG want to play one. Kaplan might have some of the technical issues around the margin right, but he completely misses the big picture. Right now, all the companies are essentially cannibalizing the same player base. WoW Recruit a Friend feature is a good example. It’s a step in the right direction, but it’s a step completely decontextualized from the larger context. The next step will not be evolutionary, it will be radical.
#20 by Queso on March 29th, 2009
I actually thought that the questing in WotlK was the only redeeming quality of the expansion. They ruined everything else.
#21 by etomai on March 29th, 2009
But the best example of expanding the genre is WoW. They took a niche and made it an order of magnitude bigger. And they did so through a commitment to polish and evolutionary improvement.
I would say more likely that truly radical, revolutionary ideas will play out in the margins, then a big company like Blizzard will take those semi-proven ideas and package them up in a way that small efforts simply cannot. Kind of like WoW. And that’s not a terrible thing.
#22 by Mist on March 29th, 2009
Blizzard did one thing that a lot of other MMO companies/design teams haven’t, and that’s publish successful single player and non-MMO multiplayer games before. Same for Origin. Verant got lucky. Funcom and Mythic might want to go try making a single player game before they do any more MMOs.
#23 by Arkenor on March 29th, 2009
They both have. Mythic and Funcom did not spring into existence with DaoC and AO.
#24 by Mist on March 29th, 2009
Mythic made a bunch of extremely niche, online-only games. Zero single player games, nor did any of their games really have plot or storytelling.
Funcom made some other games, but did the team who made AoC make any decent ones?
#25 by Tremayne on March 30th, 2009
I was just thinking that Lord Of The Rings Online is guilty of just about every single one of the 9 ‘mistakes’ listed in the article (no vehice quests, but the session play quests where you control an NPC instead of your own character probably count). Some of the quests there that make these ‘mistakes’ stand out as the best in the game. And while LotRO doesn’t have WoW’s numbers (who does?) it seems to be doing pretty well by any other standards.
#26 by Jeff on March 30th, 2009
I think Blizz made some major progress in storytelling for MMO’s with the cut scenes and the areas that change as you progress through them. It’s hardly fair to expect that story to be fun and unique your 2nd or 3rd time through.
Mass Effect will get a little old the 2nd or third time through too.
#27 by Shannon B on March 31st, 2009
I get the feeling Kaplan went from making interesting gameplay at the start, to making a game for the forum community.
It seems like everything he says now correlates directly to the cesspit you see on the official forums. Too shallow/illiterate/lazy to read anything without lots of big pictures? Check. Obsession with finishing everything so you can get to the loot/end-game/next big thing? Check. Don’t want to explore or think and need to be lead through everything by the nose? Check.
Hell, since when did you let moronic terms like ‘TL;DR’ start to influence design decisions? What’s our next big design influence meme from the forums? lolbuttsex? Srs bizns?
I think Wrath is a great example of something designed for a vocal community which doesn’t actually know what it wants and whines every time it gets it.
#28 by ello on March 31st, 2009
=================
Hell, since when did you let moronic terms like ‘TL;DR’ start to influence design decisions? What’s our next big design influence meme from the forums? lolbuttsex? Srs bizns?
=================
Ever say “I want phat lewtz” to the boss in Plane of Growth in EQ? If not give it a whirl
#29 by Brian 'Psychochild' Green on March 31st, 2009
I used to read quest text in WoW. I stopped recently and I think the main reason is because I stopped caring about the game. Perhaps its the knowledge that I’ll never be able to affect anything. Why read all the backstory (of Van Cleef, for example) if all I’m going to be able to do is follow orders and kill the guy and then never hear about the story again? The few times they’ve tried to include a longer story through multiple zones/expansions haven’t really been all that great.
As for cut-scenes, etc., I agree that it makes you stop the first time around. The voiceovers in AoC were pretty neat, but they got tiresome. The mini-presentations in WotLK were just eye-roll worthy. Every time the Lich King showed up to blather on during a quest, I just yelled, “OZZY IS COOLER!” to entertain people nearby. With text, I can choose to read it when I want; I really like LotRO’s quest log because I can go back and read up on quest text even if I was in a rush the first time.
And, Gx1080 nailed why Green Hills of Stranglethorn failed: inventory space. Even with my twinks I buy the pages ASAP so I’m not carrying bags half full of the stupid pages.
#30 by EpicSquirt on April 1st, 2009
I’d be interested in PvE if it wouldn’t be distinguishable from PvP, IMO both should follow the same mechanics.
I’d love to see a MMORPG without a silly fog-of-war-map and markers for everything, but instead interested players would use a cartographer skill and maybe even craft maps and sell them. I definitively remove name and level indicators – this has to be the most stupid thing in all MMORPGs.
What happened to the perception questions and rolls from the pen & paper RPGs?
Players just run from camp to camp, do quests or AoE power leveling, if they’re stuck they don’t even bother reading the quest text, but spam global chat channels (they need to be removed too, the whole socializing excuse is bullshit, you can socialize when you meet someone or go to a place in the virtual world where it’s possible, e.g. a pub) instead and ask for help.
I am not sure why a dragon would do it, but the day I play an MMORPG where a dragon is in disguise as a rat in a starter area, I’ll shit my pants out of excitement and subscribe that MMORPG for a year instantly for many epic squirts to come.
The whole quest effusions of Kaplan result from ultra boring PvE – I wish someome would make an MMORPG more pen & paper RPG stylish. Is it only me suffering from nostalgia? Would anyone else be interested in this?
#31 by Shannon B on April 1st, 2009
@EpicSquirt
To make PvE any more exciting than it is currently, you’d have to make it more challenging.
I’ve seen the average WoW player’s reaction to ‘challenge’, chances are they’d lose most of their subscribers.
#32 by Queso on April 1st, 2009
@Shannon B.
You could say the same thing about any playerbase for any game(MMORPG or not). Most people want the easy way out. Not necessarily all, but most.
#33 by Yeebo on April 3rd, 2009
@Adam: all too true I’m afraid.
All too true I’m afraid.