Jeff Kaplan Does GDC, Explains How Not To Write Quests

I hate kaplan. A lot. The kind of hate that warrants lipstick and a shotgun.

12 Million people, minus me. Loved the game on release, but the more the game went in Kaplan’s directions, the more I lost interest. In almost typical fashion I stuck around longer than I should have. He watered down all of the parts that were great, that I enjoyed.

Maybe I’m naive, but I think with such a great core game they could have done even better. This man IMHO was not responsible for WoW’s success, he’s just ridden it while others have been happy to have the spotlight directed elsewhere.

His last point is an interesting one, and one which I believe is not exclusive to Warcraft. I cant speak for everybody, but I’m going to assume most of us when playing any given MMO with quests usually shoot right past the fluff (story) in the beginning and go right for the small paragraph detailing what to do, and where to go. Then we complain about a lack of story driven content. Sure, I read some quests, and I usually find myself enjoying them, but for some reason most of the time I just dont care why I’m killing 10 rats, I just want to kill the 10 rats and get out.

I thought Age of Conan solved this incredibly well with the first 20 levels. Nearly every quest had voice overs and even for the small, “go kill these pirates” quests you still felt drawn to listen to the npc speak, instead of mashing next and getting on with your life.

Obviously retro-fitting Warcraft with voice would be a mammoth undertaking, and would realistically make the game a bit too big, but its something I would love to see blizzard do. Perhaps they could include for only certain quests, that way you get to direct players to “fun content” while at the same time offering them a myriad of choices in any particular quest hub.

@Montague
“World of Warcraft has 12 million more subscribers than you do.”

Some other things he had to say in a different part of his talk were a lot more positive.

I’m a pretty vehement vehicle-hater, but I’m surprised by his comment, because most folks I talk to seem to like them, and especially seem to like Wintergrasp. My main complaints with them are technical though, so that’s something that will hopefully be ironed out with time.

To be fair, he’s talking about vehicle quests, which are pretty gimmicky since you have to learn several new abilities for something you’re only going to be doing for two minutes. Wintergrasp is pretty popular.

But he’s pretty much spot-on with these complaints. I’ve watched eight-year-olds up to high schoolers play, and they virtually all skip the entirety of the quest text and just look for the line that tells them what to kill/collect. Green Hills and the Princess line were pretty poorly implemented. It seems like most of these problems were largely fixed in WoLK.

Also, someone help me out with this: “World of Warcraft quest designers are limited to 511 characters,” he said. “That’s all that will fit into the data entry. And all you programmers know why it’s not 512.” I know 512 is a power of 2, but what about the data structure makes you leave one free?

Adam :
Also, someone help me out with this: “World of Warcraft quest designers are limited to 511 characters,” he said. “That’s all that will fit into the data entry. And all you programmers know why it’s not 512.” I know 512 is a power of 2, but what about the data structure makes you leave one free?

I would imagine they are stored as 512 byte C style strings, the 512th byte being the null terminator.

Did he really swear that much? Quite the vulgarian.

They have definitely learned from their mistakes, as the questing content in BC was a big upgrade from launch. And the quests in Wrath are a big upgrade from BC, minus the gimmicky vehicles… and those are largely easy enough that you don’t suffer greatly from failing to learn the vehicle’s abilities.

No matter how successful a game is, a game designer who pays attention will see room for improvement.

Besides, there’s always the perpetual question of just how much of Blizzard’s 12 million are on World of Warcraft’s merits, as opposed to simply having had the opportunity/ability to entice that many players to try to play it while being merely passably good enough not to drive them away.

Hes wrong about quest hubs.

Players like quest hubs because they dont want “guided” through a fun experience. They want open ended success.
Quest hubs mean that no matter what or where you go kill, something good happens as a result- players love that.

EDIT: Hes right about everything else.

Story is only fun the first time when you don’t know what is going to happen, and that’s only for people that appreciate it.

When you are an altaholic (a behavior encouraged by MMOs), you need to be able to skip as much of the story as possible. For some people, that’s the first time, because their priority isn’t story. Different strokes. But I wonder how they feel about non-quest text story developments such as flavor events and (as mentioned) Age of Conan-esque VO’d developments.

I’m fine with good story in an MMO, but if there isn’t a button that isn’t the MMO equivalent of “Get On With It!”, players are going to be annoyed. That’s one obstacle Bioware will have to tackle.

I wonder what texters think if they have to produce a myriad of different flavors of short quest text snippets for thousands of quest that involve collecting poo/crap/shit, that Kaplan likes to place every other zone. WoW at times feels like a little farm…^^

And I guess this is one reason why people really do not bother to read the quest texts – in the end the quest is nothing more than a “go there, kill that” order.

I read all the quest text the first time through. So does one of the two people I play with.

Among other things, this let me learn who casually reads faster.

I’m a big fan of the vehicle quests. There are a couple of quests where you control something that can jump that were a real blast for me, even in a game where you can fly. Some of the turret/rail shooter ones were pretty neat too.

Of course, quite a few of the quests are bad. And then you have the pirate hat quests(named for the one in Tanaris) that just slam you into a wall when you hit them in a group, because not only do you need to kill 3x as many for 3 people, but since the drop rate isn’t 100%, you probably have to travel between spawn groups. The worst examples are just like the one in Tanaris, where there really isn’t anywhere else to go.

I got a little distracted there. I think they’ve made great progress and I think a lot of the quests in WotLK are fun. Introducing new quest mechanics DOES keep it from feeling like it’s the same stuff over and over again. If they do a good job in the future, they will probably come up with one or two more interesting mechanics for the next expansion. Then that will be that much better.

That is my opinion as a player, anyway. I’ll let you all know when my MMO has 12 million subscribers, or even 12 lines of code written.

Honestly, I think everything but the dungeons (and by extension, the raids) suck about the WoW formula. BRD, and to a lesser extent, Deadmines, sold the game for me in the original beta when I otherwise would have just passed the game up and stuck with DAoC.

It’s just awesome to contrast Kaplan and Barnett.

Incidentally, Kaplan is in charge of the super secret next generation MMO at Blizzard.

I think Kaplan is right also. I’m a writer. I love a good story. But I don’t like to read quest text. When I’m playing a game, I want to play a game, not read a book. Give me cinematics or scripted events.

I like quests, too. I’ve leveled in other games without quests and I don’t want to do that again. If you’re going to make me level, give me quests. And I want my hand held because I don’t want to think too much. I hate it when I can’t figure out where to go to complete a quest.

Great comments. Kneepads and kleenexes FTW.

I remember when I applied for a content designer position at Blizzard. This was back in 2004, before I started at BioWare. In the phone interview, they asked me where I might like to go in my career if got the job. I mentioned that on Asheron’s Call, I’d been deeply involved in the story and writing, and I enjoyed that a great deal.

There was a awkward pause, then one of the Blizzard guys said, “Well, that’s great, but we already have a writer.”

I know I am probably the exception to the rule, but I always read text quest. I love going to a new zone and digging into the story of that particular area, why things are happening, etc.

I’ll admit, sometimes at a quest hub I’ll just click and accept on all the available quests, but I’ll always read the text before tackling each individual quest.

In the text are the stories. In the stories are the lore. If you want to truly experience the world you are playing in, reading the text essential IMO.

Angelworks :
@Rog

It has to do with the way computers index numbers vs. the way humans deal with letters 0-511 is the same as 1-512 in other words .

It’s because you need 1 character as a string terminator.

Mark Asher :
I like the gratification I get from completing a quest. I like being given a task I can complete quickly. These things make the leveling process more rewarding by breaking it down into lots of small goals I can achieve.

That’s cool as your preference, but that’s anecdotal evidence to back up saying he’s right.

He’s not right or wrong, he’s just got an approach. It works for you, it works for a lot of people, but it still leaves others cold. This is not one of those game design elements where there’s just one right way to do it, but that’s the way he’s presenting it and that’s the way you agreed to it.

I actually prefer much of the older content (Stranglethorn pages aside, yuck) Kaplan worked on than where he’s ‘progressed’ to today.

I happen to like questing, but unlike yourself I don’t like to be led down a path so much. And I’m not alone: Players that identify themselves as explorers rather than achievers– there’s quite a lot of them.

Those sneaky devils didn’t read Raph Koster’s book, and now they’re learning through experience.

Actually, this post made me appreciate Barnett’s comments all the more. Coincidence does not equal causation. If the Blizzard game designers think that they are the reason for WoW’s success, they are fooling themselves. Seriously deluded. Like all true cultural phenomenon that transcend their own little corner of the world (e.g, ABBA) the reasons for the success are a unique confluence of events that are not repeatable. Not repeatable. I have said it before elsewhere and I will say it here. The next “WoW” will look nothing like WoW and will not be designed anything like WoW. As climbers well know, mountains create their own weather. WoW is that mountain. And you cannot duplicate the weather and dream you are going to duplicate the mountain. That’s insanity.

Mist :
I think his point is not to try to tell stories in video games through text OR movies or in-engine cinematics or whatever. Tell the story by actually having the player DO it.

This. Or at least have the player experience it in the game.

One of my favorite quests in WoW was an otherwise boring little delivery quest chain in the dwarf starting lands. The final turn-in though resulted in a scripted out little play that literally had me laughing myself out of my chair, where a bunch of drunken redneck dwarves are playing with their mortar at the firing range, trash talking each other, using various emotes, etc.

It was all done in-game, no yanking your context around with loading cut-scenes, no dry text scrolling by, or anything. Just the world actually seeming to come alive for a couple of minutes, and you got to witness it in character even if not actually participate in it.

I’ll bet at least half the people who did that quest ran off after the turn in and missed the whole thing because Blizzard foolishly put in a little delay, just a few seconds, between completing the quest and having the action start. Which is really too bad, because that’s still my favorite part of my entire WoW experience and I wish there were lots more vignettes like that in these games. At least to tide us over until the computing power and agent-AI technologies advance sufficiently to provide us with more spontaneous behaviors that can replace human creative design. Which is going to be a LONG time coming!

I think one of the keys to implementing story well in the context of an MMO (or any context for that matter) is that it has to strum some emotional chord in us. In this case it was humor, which is probably the easiest to do. From what I heard AoC seemed to be exploring this kind of emotional strumming a little more broadly, deliberately plucking at emotions like greed, lust, and outrage, at least in the Tortage part of the game. I still hope to have the chance to play that part of the game some day.