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GDC09: Spending time with the cruise director of Azeroth
At GDC09, we got to talk with many people and listened to a variety of panels on all aspects of game design. But there was little doubt as to which panel attracted loads of attention -- the Jeff Kaplan panel on quest design in World of Warcraft.Warcraft has come extremely far in terms of their UI design and quest implementation since the game launched back in 2004. Just between 2007 and 2009, Kaplan revealed that over 8,570,222,436 quests have been completed, while the daily average was 16,641,409. With those numbers in place, it's safe to say that World of Warcraft players are driven by their questing.Kaplan's panel revealed a few tricks of the trade, as well as his beliefs regarding questing, so without further adieu let's get into the meat of his panel.%Gallery-49071%
GDC09: Spending time with the cruise director of Azeroth pt. 2
Mistakes of World of Warcraft Kaplan was quick to note that Warcraft was far from perfect, and he wanted to highlight some of his own mistakes inside of the design. The first mistake was the idea of the "Christmas tree effect," otherwise known as having so many quests in a quest hub that the minimap lights up with exclamation points like a Christmas tree. While players enjoy this, Kaplan wanted to say that the developer loses call control over the player at these points, as the player will not read any quest text in their clicking frenzy. There's no control over what quest leads into what or which order the player will do the quests in. The second was the internet adage of "too long, didn't read." Quest designers don't need to write a book to get their point across with the quests. He brought up that video games had a type of "medium envy," where sometimes they get too preachy with their topics. Games should be fun first, story second. Mystery also falls in this category. The story can provide mystery, but the quest log should never have any mystery to it. The quest log should always point where to go and what to do, but the overall story of those quests may provide some solution to some mystery. Also avoid poorly placed quest chains, like the Chains of Myzrael questline in Arathi Highlands. The Myzrael line was hard to find, ended up spanning 14 levels, and ended with killing an elite mob that was level 44. This quest line was a "brick wall" according to Kaplan, because most players never stuck with it. It's good to have quest chains that span content, but quest chains like this break down trust the player has with the developer. When the player runs into a chain that he can't finish with a monster he can't kill, the player loses trust in the developer's sense of guiding them to fun. He also emphasized to avoid inserting "gimmick quests." His example here was part of the Oculus dungeon where players ride on dragons. These types of quests center around doing something the client may not be able to properly handle. Warcraft was not designed to accommodate vehicles. When developers resort to putting in parts of the game that center around a gimmick, it can detract from the fun of the rest of the game. The horror of collection quests Kaplan's speech ended with an analysis of why people hate collection quests so much, and a few tips on how to make collection quests into a better experience. His problems with the quests stemmed from three areas -- dense creature population, too few of a creature to kill, and having a wide variety of items required for the quest. Having a dense creature population can put off people, especially when there's a lack of the monster required for the quest. If someone has to kill four lions for every one raptor required for the quest, then there's a problem. His other point was that collection quests shouldn't require an insane amount of items. To everyone's amusement, he brought up the Green Hills of Stranglethorn quest chain (a chain he wrote) as the exact thing a designer should never do. Collection quests should be an easily obtainable number of items, and not such a long grind fest with the hope that your required item might drop. Lastly, never have the player question why they're collecting the item required -- it should be clear from the onset. Kaplan brought up the infamous gnoll paw collecting quests, in which gnolls may or may not drop paws upon death, where obviously a gnoll has four paws and not a number between 0 and 1 (which everyone applauded at loudly). Quests should make sense and not become a gimmick in their own right. This causes the player to once again, lose trust. Most of these points that Kaplan has brought up pertain to Warcraft, but can easily be applied to any game on the market. With all of this in mind, perhaps we'll get to see some better design in our MMOs from other developers, now that we're all on the same page... of the Green Hills of Stranglethorn.
The Queue: Item level, attunements, and more
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.Good morning/afternoon/generic time of day, everyone! I don't have anything funny or interesting to say here, so let's skip that part and pretend that I did it! Yay! Now imagine there's a silly poll for you to vote in! Exclamation points! More exclamation points! Not enough exclamation points yet! We need more!Okay, that's enough of them.Erogroth asked... "How exactly does item level work? From what I gather its almost like talent points for an item. So any item that is the same level should be about equal in how good it is. However often items of the same item level are no where near equal. So what's the deal?"
Anti-Aliased: Top 5 things MMOs should learn in the new year
var digg_url = 'http://digg.com/pc_games/Anti_Aliased_Top_5_things_MMOs_should_learn_in_the_new_year'; Well Happy New Year Massively readers! Hope everything is working out for you all on this second day of the year 2009! Did you get caught up on your favorite MMO yesterday during the holiday?With the new year finally here, we have all sorts of new games in production and slated for a 2009 release. But that doesn't mean we should entirely forget about 2008. All sorts of things have happened in 2008 that the industry and players can learn from, but what should make the classic "end of year" top 5 list?Well, as I am absolutely no more inventive than every other blog in existence, this edition of Anti-Aliased is dedicated to the top 5 things the industry and culture should learn and take into 2009, rather than forgetting. Some of it's funny, some of it's serious, but let's be honest -- it all goes towards perfecting how to have fun in virtual worlds.
Winter crafts that will really WoW
The holiday season spawns many things. It can create excitement, anxiety, or shock that the big day's almost here. For some, it can manifest a sense of creativity that makes for really awesome gifts. There's a couple particularly cool items out there today, and your intrepid reporters at WoW Insider wants to make sure you get to see it all. If your knitted Boomkin could use a friend, Alice at the Wonderland blog found the Voidwalker plushy on Etsy. The little guy is a bit under a foot and a half tall, which makes him the perfect height for huggin' and squeezin' by a fireplace. His eyes glow in the dark to scare away any night critters that might need scaring away. Unfortunately, it looks like Glowgoyle is sold out for right now, but we can hope there will be restock in the future. BriarFox on the Livejournal knitting community created his very own Quest Giver Stocking Cap. It has the pictured exclamation point on one side, and a yellow question mark on the other. He used a "stella's hat" pattern, and modified the stitch to allow for the emblazoned symbols. He's not selling them, sadly, but maybe we can cruise around and find a commision. If you want a quest-giving substitute for your yard, you can check out the WoW-themed garden art Shelbi found Feral Glass last week. Okay, I admit. I'm shallow and wish I could have both under the tree.
Showing all questgivers on the minimap
Players have been asking for a way to track even their gray quests for a long time (in order to go back and do them for lore or reputation value), and now it looks like Blizzard is finally listening. Tigole says that in the next Wrath beta build, even gray quests will be trackable on the minimap, like normal quests are now. While a few players argued when the minimap first got updated that it would make the game way too easy, I've found (as I've been leveling my alt again lately) that it actually lets you focus on the important part of the game -- the quest text. Not poking around looking for those exclamation points keeps your mind on what's actually going on as you go back to a quest giver, and makes it more fun as you turn in the overdeveloped gizzard or whatever you're giving away.So good news on this one for completists -- if you've been thinking about going back and hunting down all of the old quests, for reputation, for the new achievements, or just for the heck of it, you might as well wait until you can see them on the minimap.
Breakfast Topic: Is the game being dumbed down?
We worried about this way back before patch 2.3, but now that almost everyone has gotten a chance to experience all the changes to the UI, we'll check in on what you think: did putting a glow around interactive items -- and in some cases, actual exclamation points above inanimate objects -- dumb the game down?Makabriel thinks so -- a quest in Dustwallow that used to revolve around the player finding hidden clues now has all the clues glowing with exclamation points above them. And I've seen some pretty nutty examples ingame, too -- while, yes, before it was annoying to have to re-search an instance for a little thing to click on, nowadays it seems almost so obvious that there's no game in it at all. Of course, I still do use the various resources online to find out-of-the-way mobs (those still don't glow), but item-finding isn't even a challenge any more.Of course, this isn't World of Findcraft -- the real game is in fighting creatures and increasing your character's stats and abilities. No one raved about finding little clickable objects in the first reviews, so why shouldn't Blizzard take that part out of the challenge? What do you think: is the game dumbed down too much, or do the glowing clickable items let you focus on finding the real fun in Azeroth?
Seeing low level quests again
Tenehuini over on the EU forums has an excellent point: currently, higher level characters have no way at all of seeing which NPCs, at a glance, have lower-level quests for them. What we need is another set of exclamation points, a toggled way of showing which NPCs have quests for us, even if they're below our current level.Aeus says it's a good idea that just hasn't been acted on yet, but I'll add my voice to the crowd asking for action. Before, when lower level quests didn't grant XP or rep, this wasn't that big a deal-- if you were going back to do a certain low level quest (for lore or completion purposes), you probably knew where it was anyway. But since reputation has been buffed on lowbie quests, there's value in knowing where quests are. And there's really no reason for Blizzard to hide that info, anyway-- the quests are viewable right after you talk to the questgiver, so why not throw a exclamation point up there?The only question, then, is what color. Later in the thread, Readbeard comes up with a whole list of exclamation point colors-- green, yellow, orange and red for quest difficulty, and black and gray for pre- or post-level status. As good an idea as that sounds to us WoW veterans, my guess is that Blizzard won't vibe with it-- explaining all the different colored exclamation points to a new player might be a little tough. But still, a toggle-able lowbie quest exclamation should be easy to implement, and would help those folks headed back to the starter areas to pick up experience, rep, or whatever else they want.
