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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

 

◊ Vectivus

I'm not entirely certain this merits its own thread, as there's not much to discuss here. They changed drop rates for quest items, and they admit that some of the quest-based game design sucks.

I... concur?

 

Zuel

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.

 

Lysara

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.

 

Cryect

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.

I need to do something useless.

 

Zuel

Unfortunately I'd say you're in the minority. The time it takes to read the entire quest text for a whole chain just isn't worth it to most people, especially when the quest objective is, "go sift through this pile of shit" or "kill ten bears." Maybe the quest is part of an elaborate story line that has a great ending, but to get the whole story you have to read what ends up being 5 pages of quest text. The biggest failures for this are the quests that make you read through a story, forcing you to click through sometimes 10 pages of storyline with the "what happened next, NPC X?" The average WoW player is going to click "next" without reading a single word. Like Cryect said, they can figure out better ways to tell a story.

 

Emeraude

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.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=CX81UJZ8
For the lurking Phoenix Wright faithful.
What is the most important thing to you? Won't you grant me the pleasure of taking it away.

 

footloop

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.

 

Liebestod

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.

 

Sharajat

In general, I agree with his point about CoD 4 vs. World of Warcraft.

CoD 4 told a story by having you play that story in the game.

World of Warcraft too often tells a story by having you read a story, doing some task tangentally related to the story you read, then read another block of text.

They made some good, good moves in WotLK with quests that phase you, make you witness interesting events, change the landscape, and otherwise involve you in what you're witnessing. That's what a quest should be - a story told in world of warcraft.

Also, if they'd thought it through, they would have made two categories of quests - tasks and missions.

Task - kill 8 boars.

Mission - Travel all over the zone, collecting 19 pages.

That way everyone would know what they were in for when they went off on some epic caper. Make missions spawn tasks, and it would really simplify the 'chain' mess. Perfect examples - Hodir rep. The chain STILL starts off some utterly random 'find a goblin' quest.

Yeah. Nice job blizzard.

 

PSGarak

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.

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...erks/Garak.png

 

Qaenyin

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.

 

Mr. Crow

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.

 

Zuel

I'd be willing to bet the reason Wrath is so much improved with quest, story, and plot lines is because Kaplan was thinking this for a while before he gave this little talk and wanted to improve upon it for this expansion. They didn't do everything right and he admits it, but in terms of quests, we had a lot of great stories and very few "collect 10 pieces of fruit because I'm hungry" quests.

The Wrathgate chain in particular is a pretty nice piece of work. It spans almost the entire zone, it takes you to multiple quest hubs and tells an awesome story all at once. If you were completing every zone chances were you completed the Wrathgate chain and saw the cutscene, which we hadn't seen yet in WoW and really excited a lot of players.

The Drakuru quest chain in Grizzly Hills/Zul'drak felt pretty cool too, and they told the story in such a way that you felt totally involved with what was happening (I mean, you were actually a scourge minion doing missions for this dude).

I'd say the coolest thing in terms of lore that I've experienced in Wrath is the Arthas chain in Icecrown where you touch his heart and the little kid takes you around and shows you everything that Arthas did during his campaign through Icecrown. In Vanilla WoW they might have pinned the story to an NPC and made you click through 15 pages of dialogue.

There might not be a way to entirely remove the feeling that you're reading a novel and playing a game at the same time, but if the gameplay is so inventive that you feel reading the quest text would add to the experience, it's a success.

 

Tyrian

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.

 

doogless

Forcing a captive audience to listen to lore by making NPCs say it is not really an improvement over having that same thing as quest text, unless you consider books on tape superior to regular books. Perhaps I'm just bitter because I've been through Culling of Strat 13 times and still have to sit through their crap each time, but the excessive dialogue in Culling of Strat completely kills the cool factor of the dungeon for me.

 

solbergb

Doing any dungeon 13 times is gonna kill the "cool" factor for you. I think a lot of the hate for BRD is tied to that, how quests kept sending you back.

The metagame changes to just "how can I do this efficiently". For Culling, that usually means turning it into a drake run. (all the strats I've done for drakes involve running ahead of arathas and sweeping away undead from pre-positioned points, out of range of most of his dialog).

What I really like about Culling is it doesn't feel static. For the most part if you stand in one place, stuff comes after you, and except for a couple points where Arathas waits for you to do something, he'll push the pace too. As opposed to most any other dungeon where you watch the guys down the hall standing around unconcerned while their buddies are being eviscerated in plain view, with lots of noisy effects.

The startup is a little slow, but it's still a billion times better than, say, Moradon where you get lost wandering around just trying to find the entrance to the stupid place while beating off nonelites dumb enough to mess with you.

All of the Keepers of Time instances have some of that effect, possibly becaue they feature wave attacks and escort quests as major gimmicks. Shattered halls kinda tried to have that feel in places but mostly didn't quite pull it off. ZA and the leadup to the bear boss had a nice sequence like that, but a lot of the rest of the place was static.

I'd like to see more of it, both in dungeons and in raids. I also like the phase tech used well....my favorite WOLK example is that tavern in the dwarf city near Nax. It starts out as an empty building. When you rescue enough villagers, it's suddenly a working inn, with instant logouts, an inkeeper to bind you and several useful vendors. It was totally understated too - they didn't club you over the head with "save these guys and get an inn". It just happened and it was way cool. But it was a use of phasing tech that didn't totally hose the interaction with other players.

I know a lot of people would LOVE to see phase tech where after getting a "kill the spiders" quest, they no longer spawned for you. Or whatever other annoying mob pushes people's buttons.

 

diospadre

The lore speeches are awful beyond their first time, to the point that the game would be better were they never there in the first place.

Luckily, this is easily fixed with a "Shutup and go" option when you click the NPC.

 

Tunch

Yeah, but strangely the only one that comes to mind is Halls of Stone and that horribly-voiced dwarf. I really wish they'd implement the shut-up button for everything that lasted for any meaningful amount of time. Getting CoStrat started is an exercise in annoyance. I mean shit, I saw that information when I played Warcraft 3. It was cool to see in WoW too, but it wasn't even new to me. Shut up and go!

 

Douglas

There's a downside to this in a PUG where some people have seen it and some have not. A solution to that would be a voting system.

Actually, know what I think I like even more than a special-purpose vote? Make "accelerate past NPC dialog" be a side-effect of a completed /readycheck use. If folks aren't ready for whatever reason, let the dialog continue, but if everyone says "yes" to a /readycheck, go ahead and fast-forward the NPC.

 

Pheroz

Just as you are not playing a book, you are not playing a movie either. Cutscenes should be used sparingly. The Arthas beginning of Culling of Strat is just a cutscene without a fixed point of view. Not to say these things dont have their place, but they arent the end all and be all.

Besides, 'shut up and go' options aren't new, nor are voting groups for it new (see Guild Wars).

Unlocking the Hodir faction and dailies is, I feel, a fairly decent example of getting pulled into part of the games story through player interaction with minimal reading. Of course, that may be becuase questhelper doesn't know where the contacts are half the time for this quest chain.

 

Shadout

Starting to implement voting systems because of this might be overkill :P

Im sure someone pugging HoS enough would one day get into a grp who could be pesuaded to not skip the speech.

I certainly disagree with Kaplan about the quest texts though. Long quest texts are fine. No, I dont read all of them, but the good/important ones, which coincidently might also often be the long ones, I do read.

Though his point probably just is that a game 'shouldn't write it, but 'show' it!' (or experiment it of course), which is true enough. But sometimes text does give information which cant be shown in an easy way (or cheap).
The different ways should really just support each other, rather than throw one away in favor of another.

 

andastra

I kinda agree with the quest texts. I read through all of them my first time through, but a lot of them aren't really important to the overall story line. It would be nice if they can shorten most to them so only the ones really integral to the storyline stand out. On a long, say, 10 quest chain, we may only get 2-3 quests with long texts and a lot of intermediate steps don't have these long expositions.

I wouldn't want to watch a movie, either. I feel that the biggest failing of the Final Fantasy games after 6 (3 in US) is having all those incredibly long cutscenes. You can convey a lot of story without them and just fill in some of the not so important details later with supplemental text from NPCs or books.

 

Douglas

You know what would maybe kinda satisfy me as a lore junkie?

Once the Blizzard account system and account-wide achievement system and multi-game achievements are all fleshed out more and better implemented, give me access to a web site or mobile phone app or something that lets me explore the lore my characters have earned access to, while not inside the game (ie. on the bus and stuff).

I mean, some of us lore junkies avoid sites like wowwiki because of spoiler potential. I have friends who are happy that I guided them away from certain external lore sources before they finished Wrathgate, so they could experience it sans spoiler. Something along the lines of a Blizzard-controlled wowwiki-plus-media that would hide things that were spoilers to me but let me explore the lore content I had earned access to... if I could access it on the bus, or while my wife has me parked on the department store "man bench", or places like that... that would have appeal.

This is just part of a bigger issue for me though -- I want the option for more interaction with the game when I'm not playing the game. (I'd pay a lot for an iPhone app that let me manage my character's mailboxes and banks and professions while out and about. And I'd go positively berserk for something that let me participate in guild chat as if it were a desktop or handheld IM client. And it'd be great if I could get an SMS-based reminder for events I'm listed as participating in on the in-game calendar.)

 

Calixtus

The problem is that there's a limit to how integrated you can make the player involvment in an MMO as opposed to a more straight up RPG. The thing about player involvement, is that it's actually a bad way of telling a story. Take the AQ40 quest chain. It tells a story. It starts (well, restarts) a war. But the story isn't there for all players - the same goes for the war (though the gate openenings were on the awesome side off things in my PvP server). For the Sunwell, they removed the player involvement in advancing the siege due to complaints. You can't let the player get involved by having the player advance a predetermined story story - it'll exclude either other people or the MMO aspect.


We kill Kel'thuzad, and Sartharion and Malygos every week and it doesn't mean shit. In some cases, it's awesome the first time, but then - like in CoT - you've seen it and who gives a fuck, because it doesn't matter. The gameworld does not change based on player decisions. Compared to pre-WoW MMOs WoW has always been low on gameworld impact, and by popular demand, it's gone down.

Whether I'm watching a cutscene, reading a quest text, listening to a player dialogue, as long as it's all about what happend when I went down the dark, damp passageway instead of what happened if I choose to go down the dark, damp passageway, it might as well be a book. Tweaking of the delivery system aside, it is a book.

For the next gen MMO, I don't think you're going to be able to magically flip a switch and say "we'll do quests differently". You need repeatable content that is actually dynamic - PvP is an extremely underused delivery mechanism for that kind of content in WoW - where players aren't just a "part" of the story, they make it. I don't know, maybe it's just me, but I'm just not impressed by the whole "YOU delivered an important artifact that saved the land, JUST like 10 million other people." I don't really feel I gain something I couldn't have gained from reading a book - or at the very least the wowwiki summary. It's not about "being unique", it's about actually having an impact.