Kaplan at GDC09, mistakes made in quest design.

[K9]

Lead Blizzard Dev Outlines 9 WoW Quest Problems, Admits to Designing Stranglethorn Quest

Admittedly he's left now, so perhaps he's more free to comment on these things, but at the same time I admire his willingness to admit to his mistakes, and explain what he learned from them.

[Koyasha]

I don't like some of his points, though I agree with others.  Point #4, the "mystery" point particularly irks me because he's basically saying players must be led by the nose at all times and told exactly what to go do.  I see that there should be an ample number of quests like that, but it shouldn't exclude quests existing where the player actually has to do a little thinking.  On the other hand, it's a fine line, due to quest sites and such.  It's imperative if you're trying to create a quest where the player actually has to think about solving the problem presented to them to give the player enough information that the average, reasonably intelligent human being will put together the data they've been provided before they grow irritated and simply look up the answer.  Of course, that's a very variable point depending on the individual, but a general average can probably be reached where a lot of players will figure it out themselves, before they get to the point where they'd rather just look up the answer.

I definitely agree with point #9, where he notes that having to collect shit from some monsters and not others, and the absurdity of monsters not dropping their body parts is an irritation to the player (or at least it seems like that's his point).

I don't like his point #2, 'too long, didn't read', since I'm one of the people who DOES want to read the quests, but I do see where it's coming from.  Too many people don't read the quests, so presenting the information in a way that people will be more interested in would go a long way toward getting them more involved in the story.  In this case I'd look to FFXI and it's remarkable and excellent cutscene storytelling, where the player is taken into their own cutscene where their character moves and interacts with other characters.  In order to prevent them from being annoying to players who've seen them before, the cutscenes could set an account-wide flag, allowing the player to skip them the second time through, even if it's on a different character.  WoW inched in this direction with the Wrathgate cinematic (which everyone I know loved, and was an excellent way of communicating that part of the story), but the client is probably not set up to and never will be able to do cutscenes anywhere on the level of FFXI.  Most of my friends who played FFXI with me also agreed that the cutscenes, especially major story ones, were one of the highest points of the game.

[Fordel]

Blizzard regularly admits when they fuck things up. Probably 90-95% of the time even. It's their ability to diagnose their own failings that creates the infamous Blizzard shine and all that jazz.



Koyasha, I disagree with your interpretation of number four. I didn't take it to mean "go to X, collect Y" forever. I read it as the mystery should be "Who killed Roger Rabbit?", not "Is there even a murder to solve?". You can have difficult problems that take a little figuring to solve, but you have to actually tell them what the problem is, is what he is getting at.

You can't demand the answer to a question you haven't asked yet. (well you can, but your either an asshole and/or crazy.)

[K9]

I don't like his point #2, 'too long, didn't read', since I'm one of the people who DOES want to read the quests, but I do see where it's coming from.  Too many people don't read the quests, so presenting the information in a way that people will be more interested in would go a long way toward getting them more involved in the story.  In this case I'd look to FFXI and it's remarkable and excellent cutscene storytelling, where the player is taken into their own cutscene where their character moves and interacts with other characters.  In order to prevent them from being annoying to players who've seen them before, the cutscenes could set an account-wide flag, allowing the player to skip them the second time through, even if it's on a different character.  WoW inched in this direction with the Wrathgate cinematic (which everyone I know loved, and was an excellent way of communicating that part of the story), but the client is probably not set up to and never will be able to do cutscenes anywhere on the level of FFXI.  Most of my friends who played FFXI with me also agreed that the cutscenes, especially major story ones, were one of the highest points of the game.

I think you missed his point, what I got from that was the notion that people want immersion through in-game experience, not through reading paragraphs of text. I don't think he's saying he want's to do away with lore, rather than he would rather present it through a more interactive experience (cutscenes and the like) rather than giving people pages of text to read. I think Wrath began to exemplify this with events such as the Wrathgate cinematic, the CoT:Strat introduction and numerous other minor quests where progression within the quest is presented through NPC talk and action, rather than static screens of text.

[WindupAtheist]

Point #4, the "mystery" point particularly irks me because he's basically saying players must be led by the nose at all times and told exactly what to go do.  I see that there should be an ample number of quests like that, but it shouldn't exclude quests existing where the player actually has to do a little thinking.  On the other hand, it's a fine line, due to quest sites and such.

[Party]Koyasha:  Okay guys, we're supposed to discover which person in town is actually a spy. Now I've compiled a list of clues, and I think if we put our heads together...
[Party]Beefmeat:  QuestMod says it's the baker.
[Party]Stelthkilla:  lol clues! dl qm, fagass
[Party]Koyasha:  Ahem, well anyway, there are probably more quests here. Since Blizzard removed those exclamation points to give a more immersive experience, we should spread out and...
[Party]Stelthkilla: WTF is this ur first day?
[Party]Beefmeat:  Yeah, there's a mod that puts all the exclamation points back. I already got all the quests in this zone. Here, I'll just share them.

[Hindenburg]

So much condensed win.

[Nevermore]

I disagree with his points 2 and 3.  I read all the text.  I like the story.  Don't skimp on storytelling just because Johnny Pothead has ADD.


Edit:

I think you missed his point, what I got from that was the notion that people want immersion through in-game experience, not through reading paragraphs of text. I don't think he's saying he want's to do away with lore, rather than he would rather present it through a more interactive experience (cutscenes and the like) rather than giving people pages of text to read. I think Wrath began to exemplify this with events such as the Wrathgate cinematic, the CoT:Strat introduction and numerous other minor quests where progression within the quest is presented through NPC talk and action, rather than static screens of text.

The problem with that is if you start to rely TOO much on cutscenes and the like, you start to run into people complaining about being forced to watch them all.  Text is easy to skip for those not interested.  Cutscenes and animations, not quite as easy plus you can't go back to review it later.

[K9]

True, too many cutscenes would be almost as bad. I think the general idea is to find ways to present lore in a more immersive way. Other genres manage to tell their stories without requiring players to read reams of text, so why should MMOGs?

I think phasing is another technology that allows this to move on; I would see the Icecrown quest chains as the next iteration in WoW quest evolution where increasing amounts of the lore experience is shifted off the quest text and onto the actual content of the quests.

[WindupAtheist]

Mythic giving a presentation called "Creating a Great MMO" while Blizzard delivers one on "mistakes made" is some hilarious irony.

[Merusk]

True, too many cutscenes would be almost as bad. I think the general idea is to find ways to present lore in a more immersive way. Other genres manage to tell their stories without requiring players to read reams of text, so why should MMOGs?

I think phasing is another technology that allows this to move on; I would see the Icecrown quest chains as the next iteration in WoW quest evolution where increasing amounts of the lore experience is shifted off the quest text and onto the actual content of the quests.

If you haven't done Icecrown, then you've missed a whole bunch of what I think he's talking about with lore interaction.  You get the back-story on Arthas by being him in several quests, and seeing scripted scenes instead of just reading paragraphs of text about slaughtering the army to raise them as the first scourge, raising the first frostwyrm and fighting Illidan.  You also get a lot of this in Dragonblight with your quest to put the spirits of the betrayed to rest and the bit where you hunt down the cave where Frostmourne was kept.

[Modern Angel]

Mythic giving a presentation called "Creating a Great MMO" while Blizzard delivers one on "mistakes made" is some hilarious irony.

We have a winner!

Introspection? What's that? I'm sorry, I'm too busy being a bald, braying jackoff clown to do all that...

[Khaldun]

Interesting.

I think some of what he's saying is too categorical: don't do this, don't do that, when what he really should say is, "Don't do this POORLY".

So take "mystery quest". Why don't those work? They don't work because WoW isn't a dynamic environment. So you get frustrated when you know there's something you're supposed to do and you can't figure out where or what it is, but that's because you know it *will* be something like "fetch me the gnoll paws" or "find the corpse". So you say, "Cut the fucking coyness, tell me which levers I press to get the cheese". But if WoW was a more dynamic world where mysteries actually existed *because* the world changed in response to player activities, I think a lot of us would enjoy a "mystery quest". If a quest-giver said, "Something's wrong in Elwynn Forest", and the answer to that was honestly shifting all the time, it would be fine.

Take the "don't write a long quest, don't write a book". I agree. But that doesn't mean, "Just write a short two sentences that say, 'Get me 17 gnoll paws, kthnx". What's the most popular quest in WotLK so far? Wrathgate. That has a shitload of storyline connected with it. If you wrote it out, it would be a chapter of a book, at least. Why do people like it? *Because it's delivered in the form of the GAME, not as text or some other form that is exterior to the game.* Do your storytelling *in* the medium, but don't fail to tell stories and have atmosphere.

[Hindenburg]

Haha. No.
People like Wrathgate because there's a machinima linked to it. That's it. If the events displayed in that movie were presented in a few paragraphs by a quest giver, most wouldn't even know that Bolvar had died.

[WindupAtheist]

I think some of what he's saying is too categorical: don't do this, don't do that, when what he really should say is, "Don't do this POORLY".

Yeah, that would have been insightful. Please. If he had gone up there and said some wishy-washy "Don't do stuff badly!" bullshit I'd have hoped someone threw a tomato at him. What's more, it's worth noting that the topic was "things we did wrong making WoW" and not "holy commandments for all MMO developers who shall ever exist".

But if WoW was a more dynamic world...

Then it would have been a completely different game, and the material of this presentation would have been much different in that alternate universe, yes. Not to be TOO snarky, but come on. The guy's giving a speech, not traveling back in time.

But if WoW was a more dynamic world where mysteries actually existed *because* the world changed in response to player activities...

Come on man, you're chasing pie in the sky. I know you really want someone to build a medieval version of the Matrix in which to have infinite adventures, but you're way the hell off into Raph Koster Dreamland right now.

[Montague]

Mythic giving a presentation called "Creating a Great MMO" while Blizzard delivers one on "mistakes made" is some hilarious irony.

Seriously. This should just be stickied in the Warhammer forum in the Graveyard, because it explains everything.

I am not a big Tigole fan by any stretch, but the massive chasm of competence between Blizzard and Mythic has never been more starkly illustrated than these two presentations.

[Khaldun]

I'm just saying that it's not the idea of a "mystery quest" that sucks intrinsically, it's that it is ill-suited to a DIKU MMOG, that's all. Which means, yes, for now, they suck. This is kind of his point about vehicles: it's not that they suck intrinsically, it's that they are very ill-suited to the actual engine and gameplay of WoW. Though even there: I hate the WoW vehicle quests *mostly*, but I'd agree that now and again, I do one that's kind of fun or ok, so part of it is bad implementation of a kind of bad idea and part of it is just massive fucking overuse of the idea.

[Azuredream]

I'm just saying that it's not the idea of a "mystery quest" that sucks intrinsically, it's that it is ill-suited to a DIKU MMOG, that's all. Which means, yes, for now, they suck. This is kind of his point about vehicles: it's not that they suck intrinsically, it's that they are very ill-suited to the actual engine and gameplay of WoW. Though even there: I hate the WoW vehicle quests *mostly*, but I'd agree that now and again, I do one that's kind of fun or ok, so part of it is bad implementation of a kind of bad idea and part of it is just massive fucking overuse of the idea.

The presentation was about mistakes they made with WoW, not 'the 9 laws of MMO design'.

[WindupAtheist]

I'll say this about his comment on vehicles:  Getting up there and saying "You know that major feature of the hugely-hyped expansion we just released a few months ago? Yeah, it was pretty much shit!" was fairly ballsy. Even if you want to argue that WoW is so successful that he could have taken a shit on the podium and it wouldn't have mattered, which is most likely the case, it was still a hell of a lot more candor than I expected.

Most MMO companies, whether they're on top or not, won't admit that anything they do is less than awesome unless it totally fucking explodes in their face, NGE-style.

[Dren]

True, too many cutscenes would be almost as bad. I think the general idea is to find ways to present lore in a more immersive way. Other genres manage to tell their stories without requiring players to read reams of text, so why should MMOGs?

I think phasing is another technology that allows this to move on; I would see the Icecrown quest chains as the next iteration in WoW quest evolution where increasing amounts of the lore experience is shifted off the quest text and onto the actual content of the quests.

If you haven't done Icecrown, then you've missed a whole bunch of what I think he's talking about with lore interaction.  You get the back-story on Arthas by being him in several quests, and seeing scripted scenes instead of just reading paragraphs of text about slaughtering the army to raise them as the first scourge, raising the first frostwyrm and fighting Illidan.  You also get a lot of this in Dragonblight with your quest to put the spirits of the betrayed to rest and the bit where you hunt down the cave where Frostmourne was kept.

I've done all of the quests and those are the ones that really stand out.  They really need to concentrate on doing much more of that in comparison to normal "get x and I'll give you Y" quests.  They have stumbled onto a really nice mechanism.   They need to ride that horse hard.

[Ingmar]

Guild Wars does a really good job with cutscenes, IMO, particularly in later expansions - in particular because the cutscenes put *your* character in the center of the story, even to the point of having voice acting. I think they could get a lot of mileage out of doing something similar for their core storyline quests like they did with Wrathgate (but actually using your character instead of having you basically just a spectator), and leave the normal quests basically alone at that low word count.

[Khaldun]

I agree that this shows you one of the reasons why WoW is successful. Basically, because the people who design and maintain it are restlessly self-critical, think a lot about what they can do better, and they're not afraid to say, "That was a mistake".

Every other MMOG designer except maybe Cryptic gets more and more hysterical and overwrought as player criticism hones in on their product's major weaknesses or mistakes.

This was the endlessly repeated cycle on the SWG forums pre-NGE.

1. "No, that's EXACTLY AS INTENDED and it's GREAT, it's AWESOME, and only you small group of fourm whiners don't like it. WE are GREAT."
2. "We're looking into that."
3. "We believe in listening to our customers. We're really interested in your views".
4. "We've made the following GREAT, FANTASTIC CHANGE to our game because we ARE GREAT and our game is GREAT and all of our players are very satisfied and nobody is quitting."
5. "John Smedley will be posting tomorrow to apologize in vague terms to you for unspecified things."
6. "No, that's EXACTLY AS INTENDED and it's GREAT".

Seriously, who else has been able to carry out live, continuing postmortems of design decisions besides Blizzard, where that didn't come off as a shifty exercise in public relations?

[Lantyssa]

Most MMO companies, whether they're on top or not, won't admit that anything they do is less than awesome unless it totally fucking explodes in their face, NGE-style.

And it still took a year for SOE to fess up and admit it was a disaster.

Guild Wars does a really good job with cutscenes, IMO, particularly in later expansions - in particular because the cutscenes put *your* character in the center of the story, even to the point of having voice acting. I think they could get a lot of mileage out of doing something similar for their core storyline quests like they did with Wrathgate (but actually using your character instead of having you basically just a spectator), and leave the normal quests basically alone at that low word count.

Guild Wars did a lot of things right.  I wish more people paid attention to their design.

[pxib]

I think that 2. tl;dr and 3. Medium Envy are more explicitly linked than the list makes them. The point isn't that quest designers need to minimize lore, it's more: "Nice story-arc Robert Jordan, now fit it into 500 character chunks so the player feels like she's PART of it." Evoking plot, background, and characterization in fewer words makes it more powerful, not less. Stretching it into multiple parts keeps the player interacting with the world and deepens the experience. Text is so 1986.

[Lakov_Sanite]

I think that 2. tl;dr and 3. Medium Envy are more explicitly linked than the list makes them. The point isn't that quest designers need to minimize lore, it's more: "Nice story-arc Robert Jordan, now fit it into 500 character chunks so the player feels like she's PART of it." Evoking plot, background, and characterization in fewer words makes it more powerful, not less. Stretching it into multiple parts keeps the player interacting with the world and deepens the experience. Text is so 1986.

You are in a dark room. On the floor you see a pile of hay. There are exits to your left and right.

[Rendakor]

It is dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

[Arinon]

The quote they have for the first point about losing all control to guide people into a fun experience struck a cord with me.  It’s a nice sentiment but I see a lot of what hes talking about circling around this notion of homogenizing the WoW experience. Or whatever the hell you want to call it.   Seen it a lot in Wrath.  I’m not a big fan.

My experience getting from 1 to 80 should be about as different as possible from the next guy.  I realize this is hard to do but I think it should be the goal.  He seems to be talking about writing a script rather then a game.  Maybe because it’s easier to design.

You are in a dark room. On the floor you see a pile of hay. There are exits to your left and right.

I was thinking more choose-your-own-adventure books.

[pxib]

You are in a dark room. On the floor you see a pile of hay. There are exits to your left and right.

Infocom grew to be masters of character-cheap narrative, though. To steal an example from Graham Nelson, look how much tone and exposition Brian Moriarty squeezed into the first 500 characters of 'Trinity':

Sharp words between the superpowers. Tanks in East Berlin. And now, reports the BBC, rumors of a satellite blackout. It's enough to spoil your continental breakfast.

But the world will have to wait. This is the last day of your $599 London Getaway Package, and you're determined to soak up as much of that authentic English ambience as you can. So you've left the tour bus behind, ditched the camera and escaped to Hyde Park for a contemplative stroll through the Kensington Gardens.

Also: Kaplan's commentary on collection quests leaves out my most frustrated critique of them, and one which I hope Blizzard has done away with in the new expansion: They discourage grouping. When everyone can pick up their own copy of the unblemished wallaby appendix from the corpse that finally drops it that's typically okay, but when EACH must collect nine despite the 5% drop rate? That not only spreads the madness around, it magnifies it by the square of the number of players.

The raptor problem in the Barrens wasn't that raptors were less common and easily located than other mobs, it's that they were already dead because some other jackass had already killed them. Grouping up with two friends to find them only meant you were monopolizing everybody's time for THREE TIMES as long as it might take you alone. Maybe. The sense of "How long will this take? Who knows!" is never productive.

The bit where he talks about trouble with having to kill other creatures to get to the ones you want is more obvious with the Horde quests for Raptors in the Arathi Highlands. Not only was the drop rate low, but the raptors were surrounded by wandering aggressive spiders and long-rage roaming aggressive vultures. See also: Hellfire Peninsula.

[Rendakor]

Hellfire it was less of a problem because almost every mob in the zone is used for a quest at some point. The trick is just knowing (read: using an addon or a quest walkthrough) what order to do the quests so you're killing all useful mobs at the same time.

[pxib]

(read: using an addon or a quest walkthrough)

[Kail]

Also: Kaplan's commentary on collection quests leaves out my most frustrated critique of them, and one which I hope Blizzard has done away with in the new expansion: They discourage grouping. When everyone can pick up their own copy of the unblemished wallaby appendix from the corpse that finally drops it that's typically okay, but when EACH must collect nine despite the 5% drop rate? That not only spreads the madness around, it magnifies it by the square of the number of players.

I always assumed that was by design.  One player killing one mob gets roughly the same XP as a group of five players killing five mobs, so if you need to kill X number of pikachus, then the solo player is getting roughly five times the kill XP for completing that quest (though they may well be doing it slower).  So you'd either need to come up with enough quests that the solo player will never see eighty percent of them, or your group of five players is going to run out of quests before they level and have to stand around farming emus.  The "collect X bits" quests, I thought, were there to balance out the difference.

[Rendakor]

(read: using an addon or a quest walkthrough)

Yea, yea. I know everyone is ranting about the lorelol in here, but I'm just saying. The raptors in Arathi are quest mobs surrounded by trash. The mobs in Hellfire are all useful at some point. It's not exactly the same situation. And you could learn optimal quest circuits just by "legitimately" leveling through the content enough times, if you were so inclined.

[Tarami]

Yea, yea. I know everyone is ranting about the lorelol in here, but I'm just saying. The raptors in Arathi are quest mobs surrounded by trash. The mobs in Hellfire are all useful at some point. It's not exactly the same situation. And you could learn optimal quest circuits just by "legitimately" leveling through the content enough times, if you were so inclined.

"It's not their fault the game is tedious, if you learn to be efficient you won't have to suffer it for as long."

[Lantyssa]

It's pretty simple.  There isn't much difference between Kill X and Bring Me X except for when the drop rate isn't 100% it means Bring Me X > Kill X.  Just tell me how many you want me to kill.  If I want to stay out there and harvest more I will.

Also share the credit with group members.  Yes, a raptor only has one head, but give us both credit.  I'm pretty sure I can tell the dude Bob helped, so we collectively gathered the nine he wanted.  (Since Kill X is shared, Gather X can be, too.)

[Koyasha]

The aforementioned points about exp from kills are valid ones, though.  Remember in original WoW there were barely enough quests to get you to 60.  Some people had to grind anyway because they couldn't find enough quests.

A 'kill X' quest can be said to give Y exp, which is the total for the quest and the total exp that X monsters give, since you had to kill X number of monsters to complete the quest.  However, when such a quest is split among 2-5 people, the exp portion from the monsters goes down anywhere between about 50% to 80%.  Total quest exp goes way down.

A 'gather X' quest that requires each party member to gather their own X's, on the other hand, scales.  Two people need to kill twice the number of mobs, therefore getting the same total amount of exp.  Three to five people actually get a little more exp out of the quest due to the group bonus.  But in general, they're not going to get less than the average amount of exp that quest usually provides.

Obviously the correct solution, which seems to be more common these days, is to provide far more quests than you need in order to hit max level, or not take into account kill exp when calculating how far to max level.  But, in the context of the way it was done in original WoW, unsharable collect quests rather than everyone-gets-credit kill quests make sense in that regard.

[bhodi]

I am STILL waiting for a toontown-like system where if you automatically join a group that's beating on a monster, or one that's on the same quest as you and is nearby, it parties you up.

THAT is the way to encourage grouping. Not some convoluted looking-for-group system that everyone hates and goes out of their way to avoid (Hint: Design FAIL when people still spam LFG in trade)