Shacknews has 2 articles up from the GDC

9 Mistakes in WoW
Lead Blizzard Dev Outlines 9 WoW Quest Problems, Admits to Designing Stranglethorn Quest - Shacknews - PC Games, PlayStation, Xbox 360 and Wii video game news, previews and downloads

Lots of good thoughts in there from Kaplan(who admitted to designing the Green Hills of Stranglethorn quest)

Also, this one was slightly surprising

Progressively increasing drop rate
Blizzard Details Secret World of Warcraft 'Progressive Percentage' Item Drop Mechanic - Shacknews - PC Games, PlayStation, Xbox 360 and Wii video game news, previews and downloads

I was waiting for someone on the Blizzard staff to admit how horrible vehicle implementation was. It's interesting though, I wonder if he had stayed with WoW if we would currently have Flame Leviathan staring us in the face for Ulduar...

Mods like QuestHelper and Carbonite add to the "gather up the quests as fast as you can, kill, come back" syndrome. I know that using Carbonite for Northrend sped up my leveling by about 1000% at the cost of not reading a single quest text in full.

Is there a video of this anywhere? I'd like to see some of the images he showed.

Kaplan seems to be very much against expanded lore and backstory. Why? I quote: "Just watch kids play it, and they're just mashing the button. They don't want to read anything."

Personally I like the current quest system, mostly because it's divided into three main parts:
1. An elaborate story of the quest and questgiver, giving you backstory and motivations for doing the quest.
2. A compact version of quest objectives ("Go to X, kill Y, collect Z, then return to Questgiver A in Questhub B").
3. The Loot.

If you don't like reading much you can just skip straight to 2.

I'd be very sad if they largely removed part 1. I love reading all the lore and story behind the quest. A well-written quest makes me far more involved in it when I do one. Removing all that story from WoW quests just because kids don't like to read would just be dumbing down the game.

You don't seem to be getting at what he was saying the issue is. The problem is that the lore is almost delivered entirely in the form of paragraphs. They've got better means via ingame cutscenes etc to deliver the lore and he was advocating they should be moving to putting the player as feeling they part of the lore instead of reading the lore. This is of course harder and the big examples they did in WotLK I really disliked because it never felt like you were actually involved and were really just watching a cutscene that lasted 5 or 10 minutes while one guy fights and you watch him (the Undercity quest in particular where you just watch the king fight wave after wave of NPC's and you could potentially participate but you end up doing less than a percent the damage he does hence it being pointless). The good examples are more where you see some NPC's talking fight breaks out with you participating and potentially the NPC's continuing to talk during the fight etc.

Well I'm sure he had some time with Uldar etc. It was probably too late to really change anything by the time they decided vehicles were badly implemented assuming they wanted to get Uldar out in a timely manner.

Well the people who don't actively read quest text or anything else for that matter wouldn't read anything else anyway, so why bother catering to them in the first place? *Boggle* I read all the quest text, I admit I'm a lore-whore, but I'd be a little annoyed if every single quest and it's text were dumbed down because other people "Don't like to read."

This is like when they removed the flavor text from all the NPCs in the game, is clicking "I'd like to browse your wares" after reading their greeting really KILLING the experience for anyone? The 2 seconds it takes you to click that.

I usually don't read all of the quest text when I pick up the quest, but I do skim it or read most of it while flying/autorunning/whatever to the next quest objective. I think it's already split up fairly well into "part for people who care about lore" and "part for people who don't". Now I don't read his comments to mean that they're getting rid of that entirely, but more that they're shifting the major events into more interactive form. I'm fine with that, I just don't want every quest text to be literally "Hey you, go kill this guy and take his things".

I agree on the click-through text quests though, those are usually a bit too long for me. I usually read the first few, skim the next few, and then frantically click through the rest of it. It seems to me that this is normally a problem with the writing than the format, though. Most of the dialogue just isn't that interesting, especially when you only have one option that is essentially "Go on...". It feels like they just tack on some of the back-and-forth to warrant using the mechanic, rather than being lore relevant.

Yeah, I agree that Kaplan is way too hard on the game actually having a story... I have a feeling that, on net, most people consider this a plus, even if it means that you might actually have to sit through the occasional cutscene. Personally, I wish more cutscenes were used instead of quest text to advance the plot, but I really can't believe that people have serious issues with these things. It's not like having to sit through a minute of text every time you make a Kael attempt.

Also, I have to say that I liked the Green Hills of Stranglethorn quest, at least in theory... it was hardly mandatory, and the real problem of pages not stacking.. I can't imagine that they couldn't find a way around that if they felt like it. Oh, also it sucked that some pages appeared to be much rarer than others, or only appeared on mobs that were rarely killed. What sucked was having five copies of pages 1, 3, and 4... and missing a 2. If you want to see the "worst quest" in the game in terms of implementation, I'd point to those Helcular's Rod quest, things like that.

And I had to say that a lot of the vehicle quests were pretty awesome. The problem was that several were overly gimmicky and tended to have bad exp rates since you don't get experience for killing mobs while on a vehicle. But I think you see a lot of improvement in the vehicle quests across Northrend, up until the ones in Icecrown which for the most part are generally pretty fun.

In general, it's pretty clear that Blizzard has found a formula for "what works" in terms of quests and overall progression. No more easy-to-miss unmarked "Wanted!" posters, random questgivers out in the middle of the woods, quests that require zigzagging through all types of zones, etc. But these are mostly annoyances for experienced players, not newbies who might actually enjoy having to look for clues at the Shady Rest Inn or find Mankirk's wife or whatever (although those might be too unforgiving as examples.) In retrospect, the Horde BRD quests that force you to run the instance over and over are incredibly annoying, but I wouldn't have minded those before questing became a formulaic challenge of optimization rather than something which lead open exploration. I realize that by level 80 people won't approach new zones with the same sense of wonder, but I wouldn't retroactively go back and say that a lot of things are crap just because they suck or strike you as unclear on the 5th time you do them.

The point that Kaplan is getting at is not that there's too much lore in WoW, but that it's delivered in the wrong format. The story is all text-based, but we're not reading a book, we're playing a game. Breaking out of the game to read text is incongruous. Now, I don't know exactly what the solution is. In-game cut-scenes substitute a book for a movie, a more-related medium but still not the one we're in. The quest system is the place to start but I don't know what needs to happen to bridge the gap between "collect 10 bear ass" and "collect 10 bear ass... for the Horde!" Perhaps a hierarchical quest structure, so you can see the relation between the things in your objective HUD.

A good example of what he's talking about focusing on, in my opinion, are things like, for example, the Caverns of Time dungeons. Events happen explaining things, things aren't explained purely through quest text. You walk into Culling of Stratholme and Mal'Ganis shows up and says "Rawr all your peasants are belong to me!" and Arthas yells "ohnoes! We will kill the peasants before you get them!" and your running around the dungeon is done with the feel that you're facing a massive swarm of undead crawling out of the woodwork thanks to the plague. Meanwhile the infinite dragonflight is popping up and trying to butt in.

However if you notice, unlike, say, Durnholde/Old Hillsbrad, the dialogue is not done chiefly through quest text(in durnholde most of the exposition is done in quest text, very little of it is done in npc to npc conversing or npc to player conversing). In CoS, however, you have Arthas rallying the troops, you show up at the entrance to the inn and Arthas doesn't talk about how the next stretch of quest is gonna be going through the tavern, he yells "This way, there's a passage leading through in here!" and charges in.

It feels more immersive that way, in my opinion.

Best example I can think of though is probably Scarlet Wing Stratholme. When you're busting down the doors of Balnazzar's little fortress it actually feels like you're assaulting a base, not like you're grinding your way into a bunch of npcs who are just standing there waiting to be filled full of holes.

The advent of phasing probably provides a lot of the answers to this, but it's something we might not see the results of within WoW itself. Quests that ask you to "thin the numbers" of an encroaching enemy are meaningless in WoW because of respawn rates -- however, phasing the area after you complete the quest could remove any visible spawns of the enemy, and open up new quests or questgivers. The inherent flaw of phasing, though, is the inability to help your friends through the content after you've finished it. So it's a technology that can make your character's actions have a greater impact on the world, but also infringe on the MMO element of the game.

But imagine phasing taken to the full extent. Blackrock Depths -- you kill the Emperor and get the hell out of the place, and all of a sudden there are no more Dark Iron dwarves doing business anywhere in Dun Morogh, Loch Modan, the Wetlands, or the vicinity of Blackrock Mountain. NPCs comment on rumours that it was you who killed the Emperor. New quests open up several levels later about a new uprising of Dark Irons, based out of Grim Batol or some previously barren joint elsewhere. You have a whole new set of objectives, perhaps even whole new instances full of content that wouldn't be accessible if you hadn't done prior work. It would be like attunement, only with an actual sense that the attunement wasn't just a "create a key" exercise, but actually completing the first act of the story.

From a thought experiment perspective, it's interesting to think about how different the classic game and BC could have been if phasing had been part of the design kit from the start. Now it's just a matter of seeing how Blizzard uses that and other tools going forward.

Much of Tigoles comments can be summed up with the quote:

The key word is read. We all want to experience the game more instead - in more meaningful ways than what WoW currently offers.

Players want to be important, do important things and have a hand shaping important events: Getting distracted by figuring out what to do when you have 20+ quests in your log, quests to perform irrelvant and haphazard tasks and having to read extended blocks of text in general just doesn't accomplish that so well. Who can disagree?

If Tigoles comments are a glimpse into that secret Blizzard MMO project, i'd be quietly optimistic. The focus surely will be on more integrated player involvement and better interactive, innovative ways to deliver it (without the gimmicks!). A game that can really pull this off really would be worthy of the label, "Next-gen MMO".

What is meaningful story telling? It's very subjective, but one of the best examples I think is Kalecgos'. First you meet him in MgT, free him from his Sarthrovar the Corruptor in Sunwell, he helps you progress after Felmyst, then assists you with a crucial role during Kil'Jaeden and finally is there afterwards when he's defeated. We see lots of good and bad guys come and go in WoW, but how many of them did we actually care for?

To me Kalecgos is still one of the best examples of meaningful story/character development and interaction in WoW to date.