Today I want to talk about wow as a single player game. A friend of mine brought up some thoughts on quest design and his opinions about it. Our conversation resulted in a realization that this facet of the game is one that I hadn’t taken the time to explore deeply enough. I have multiple loremaster characters, and I’m positive I’ve done every quest available at least once, but had I really sat down and looked at the system? As the existence of this entry suggests, I decided to do exactly that. I’m not quite sure how to feel about my findings, sometimes overanalyzing something can make you hate it, other times it can make you appreciate it more. While I need some more time to decide how I feel about my opinions, I’ve decided to share the opinions themselves here with you all.
I hadn’t really noticed it before, but looking at WoW as a single player game really feels like it is on rails to me. What I mean here (for the not-into-hip-lingo folks) is that the game moves on a pre-defined path almost on its own. Think of a game where you ride in a car and someone else is driving. That is “on rails” the path is pre-defined, the car will get to its destination on its own, and you’ll get out at the end of the pretty trip. It’s a ride at that point, it’s on rails. Let’s take a look at what I mean here.
Let’s start up a new character together shall we?
From the get-go there are a few things I don’t like here. First the scroll bar on the quest, Is that needed? It feels like an instruction book for a quest here, should I really have that much text to tell me to go talk to someone? What if I don’t want to talk to this person? I can’t decline the quest, nor can I “X” out of the quest dialogue in the upper right corner of the quest window. OK, ok, so you really want me to take this quest, I’ll bite.
Being as this is the first quest in the game, I think it’s fair to be a bit forceful and keep the experience controlled and directed. So let’s move on to the quest itself “It’s time to begin ya trainin’ Ceejjay. Speak with Ortezza to the east” OK! That’s cool for a newbie. The quest tells me where to go and who to talk to. (I originally did this in the Orc starting zone, and they (brilliantly, I might add) made sure that the completion NPC is already on your screen and 15 yards behind the guy you’re talking to, further enforcing this act and behavior of questing to a new player. “Oh, that guy now has a gold question mark. OK, I get it!” But no such luck here in Sen’Jin.) A fitting way to start my character, to get me involved in the world, to make sure I understand what’s happening and what I should be doing. If you didn’t read the whole quest, then you’re also given an objectives area to make sure that it’s crystal clear. Additionally, the npc talks to you in a chat bubble, a quick three lines of chat that gives me an idea of what’s expected of me.
This is a great way to start out the game. I’m given a task or a purpose right off the bat. As a new player, or someone new to a zone, this helps me to make sure I’m getting off on the right foot. Early in someone’s game career or in a new area, the rails serve as a great way to get me involved. It’s a system designed to give guidance, which was a relatively new thing when WoW was released.
At the time that wow was originally released the majority of peoples’ experiences other MMO titles was HUGELY lacking in narrative driven play. In fact it often felt like the game was working against you most of the time! Questing in EQ was borderline torturous, not only did you not have clear indications where to get quests or turn them in, you had to hunt quests down by emoting guards. A quest was a hugely difficult mystery solving adventure that was far more difficulty than it was worth. In FFXI the questing aspect was reserved for very momentous occasions and often times put you into a situation of “You need to figure this out on your own” much like EQ did.
It was natural and brilliant for the designers of classic WoW to explore this system. They recognized that typical MMO play operated under the mentality of a sandbox style game “It’s an online persistent world, let people do what they want. Let them really make it their own!” as opposed to idea of a guided experience. The WoW designers saw that by building a quest system to guild the players through the world, they could make the game far less frustrating and make it open to a larger audience. Additionally, this continually gives people a sense of something to do, something to drive their behavior and something to keep people playing. For it’s time, the development of the quest system in WoW is one of the greatest advancements in MMO play to this date.
OK! Now we have a little back story, but here we are seven years later. WoW has been the long standing king of MMOs and has continued to raise the expectations of the genre. (Yes, seven years later, I’m still a huge WoW fan and play every day.) Undoubtedly, quests have grown over these past seven years. So let’s go check out one of the newer quests. Oh goodie, our little hunter is all grown up now, so let’s grab a level 85 (max level) daily quest!
That looks pretty familiar. I know it’s a quest simply by the interface, the exclamation mark, the accept / deny buttons (the scroll bar… ggrrrrr). These things all have stayed rightfully consistent through the game and leave me with no questions in my head that I’m getting a quest. Let’s look at the quest itself. I get a bit of background as to why I’m doing what I’m doing, and an objective that tells me exactly what I need to do for the quest.
At this point, as a max level character that has presumably done a fair number of quests in my day, I feel like the system is a tad insulting. OK, so insulting might be a bit extreme, but I definitely feel like at this point I’m capable of a little more than needing a step by step instructions to tell me what to do. Where is the play in this? Where do I get to get involved and make decisions? From this quest specifically I’m given a little bit of wiggle room as I can slay any 7 invaders, but I’m still given clear step by step as to where I am to go, and what I am to do. This system works great for leveling up, or going through a zone with the story in-mind, but I feel like it’s essentially taking a lot of “the play” away from us as max level characters.
The quest system in wow has great potential to grow, but that’s exactly what we need it to do. Grow. A quest feels far more enjoyable if I’m able to play an active role in deciding how to tackle the obstacle at hand. Instead of giving me, a level capped player, a step by step blueprint as to what to do tell me the end result you want and let me figure out the steps on my own. Giving me even a little bit of play makes the whole task feel far more unique and personal, even if my decisions or my choices are only impactful in appearance.
A great example of this would be the hunter quests “Steady Shot”. This quest gives a bit of background saying “You already know how to fire an arcane shot. Good. But doing so depletes your focus. To gain your focus back you will need to switch to a second type of ranged attack. I can teach it to you.” The explained functionality here is key to the quest itself. It’s attempting to give you a very basic knowledge of the mechanics of the hunter class and how focus works. But it does so in such a way where I’m practically reading an instruction manual. Why not let me figure it out a bit. Give me a debuff that reduces my focus by 10 a second, and tell me to not let my focus fall to zero over the next 10 seconds. That makes the situation feel a bit more pressing, and gives me the option to figure it out on my own. Being that this quest is immediately after getting a new ability the solution is pretty obvious. But the obviousness of the answer isn’t what makes it feel good, what makes it feel good is that I connected those two dots by myself. It’s a game, I want to play it. I want to be given the tools and the means then the freedom to work the issue out on my own terms.
I think this “hyper instructional play” is one of the bigger reasons why a lot of end game players feel that questing is tedious and dull. Nobody drops you in front of a barrier without telling you “HEY! You should jump over this!!!” I can figure that out for myself, thank you. If you give me a problem or a decision to make and I figure that out on my own, then suddenly things change from you delivering an experience to me into the game and I creating an experience together. Now to be clear, a lot of this isn’t exactly appropriate for starter zones, in the interest of making the barrier for entry to WoW as low as possible, asking people to figure out complex situations in the first 10 minutes of play is going to cost you more players than it gains. But at end game levels, where people have already put in a large amount of time and effort making the assumption that your players is intelligent and competent could allow the quest system to be much more robust.
I look back at so many of the quests from the past, and the quest “The Relic’s Emanation” stands out for me. Was this the most fun and entertaining quest ever created? Not a chance. But the quest did a lot of really important things in my opinion. It gave you a task that focused on the results first and foremost. The quest didn’t tell you the answer, It simply said “Become attuned to the relic”. It never said “go click blue, then blue red, then red yellow green, etc”. It asked you for a result and gave you a rough idea how to do that. What makes this shine for me was that the play itself allowed you to define how you were going to resolve the situation. It was a fairly simple Simon style game, but the pattern did not simply tack on a new color at the end, and they provided no in-game method for tracking the pattern being given. Some people created an addon, some people were able to memorize the patterns, some people sent themselves whispers, while others used a notepad next to their computer. The point was that the quest asked people to develop their own solution, and most people came to their own solution on their own terms. The quest asked for just a little more than simply following a play-by-numbers system that’s laid out in front of you clear as day.
Thinking about this, there are a near infinite number of tools that could be added to the quest system to make it more robust:
- Decisions - Why not give me more decisions to make while questing? How about a quest that says “Our troops are hungry, give us some food.” And that’s it? Have any item that a player can eat be an eligible turn in for the quest. If someone is hungry and I’ve got 200 roasted chicken in my inventory that seems like a reasonable solution to me. It also let’s me to inject a little bit of my personality into the situations my character is participating in. Let’s say I play a Tauren, I’m not so sure I am comfortable with slaughtering an animal that could a distant cousin simply to feed you. But hey, I’ve got some berries!
- Bonuses – All quests that have a baseline expectation. Why not give bonuses for going above and beyond? The quest above would work great “My troops are hungry, anything will do, but roasted quail has the most nutrients!” if I turn in berries, awesome the quest is completed and I am rewarded. If I bring the guy roasted quail, then I get a slight boost in my reward. The players leveling or questing for profit could use the bonus if they find that valuable, while those seeking achievements or in a hurry could just completed and move along.
- Timers – We see a little of this in quests today, but I think more timers could add some urgency to play. Again, using the example above “My troops are starving to death! Get us some food asap. Quail is the most nutritious, but anything you can get us will help!” A situation of people starving to death is most assuredly one that I would think is time sensitive.
- Stop making me read – So much can be explained through play and behavior. Let’s stick with the starving army theme. How about I have to pass by a large number of “starving grunt” npcs as I approach a quest giver. These grunts die and respawn fairly quickly, they mutter as I walk by “I haven’t eaten in a week” or similar phrases. Give me enough queues that I’m guaranteed to see enough to paint the picture. This could change the quest description into something short and sweet like “Bob sent you to help? Look around, my men are dying. Get me some food! That will help.” More importantly, it would tell me the story and potentially make me WANT to help, without having to completely stop my play to sit and read for a minute. After 3000 quests, that can add up to a huge amount of time spent just reading and not actually playing the game.
The quest system could be taken even further. How about decisions in quests lead to branching questing paths within a zone or narrative? Anyone remember the quest in Mount Hyjal “A Bird in Hand”? This quest gave you some options on how you wanted to interrogate the harpy. These were fun and made me feel like I had a little control over my characters disposition. But the big moment came at the end of the quest, I was given a choice as to if I wanted to kill the harpy or let her go. This was an exciting decision! I thought to myself “oooh, what will this choice change?! Does this impact my follow up quests?!” I remember asking my friends later “did you kill her?! What happened? I let her live!” Sadly, I came to find out that it only changed the follow up flavor text. Why couldn’t there have been two different follow up quests? If I killed her, give me a quest to dispose of the body. If I saved her, give me a quest to put her into witness protection and ship her to barrens where nobody would be the wiser. Then the split paths could reconvene into a quest that basically told me “Well, now that we’ve taken care of that situation, let’s move on.” This could result in multiple branching paths and develop into a system where people genuinely feel that their experience was somewhat unique. As long as the number of completed quests and the rewards remain consistent, things like achievements stay consistent and nobody gets any form of in-game advantage. On top of that, think about the replayability this could potentially add to people who love to play alts, or people who are super interested in the lore.
I want to see max level characters talking to each other at end-game about their paths to max level. I want to see the surprise as they say “Wait, a quest to kill the demon guy? I befriended him and got all sorts of info on the demonic inner working from him, you killed them all?!” Even with the extremely limited options presented in front of us now, I still see people get excited when talking about quests after the fact. I can personal vouch that I’ve had at least 5 hilarious conversations based around choosing your admirer on “The Day that Deathwing Came: What Really Happened”. This very simple choice, even being purely cosmetic has created situations where the majority of people I’ve talked to about it felt that they were in control of the narrative.
By its nature, questing is a process that is most commonly equated to leveling. Quests are designed around the progressions through zones and through levels. This leaves us in a position where, as one-time experiences, we eventually run out of quests. Introduce the daily quest. This is a system that allows for specific quests to be repeated once per day. Initially, I was extremely excited at the possibilities of this system. I love the idea of being able to go back and do things that I enjoyed again! Quests like “Vigilance on Wings” or “The Restless Brood” are great examples of this. These were really high-profile quests that broke my normal questing routines and gave me a tweaked experience that was different and unique, being able to relive these experiences felt great!
Dailies though, have taken on a different purpose. I feel like it’s not about “re-experiencing awesome situations” as much as it’s now the questing experience for max level characters. Dailies have become the premier way to farm a reputation at a controlled pace, or to give high level characters reasons to go back into areas that they haven’t been in a while.
The most recent Max Level daily questing hub is The Molten Front. This area, as a whole, I felt was pretty disappointing. It felt like so much of a grind. On some level this was undoubtedly intended, as this content needs to stay relevant until the next content is released. But the act of obtaining 150 marks of the world tree when I’m only capable of obtaining 12 a day feels like a cheap and transparent way to artificially extend that life cycle. Additionally, it makes the idea of doing this on alts or two years down the road on a max level character who’s going back to see what they missed a painfully dull experience. I'm all for having content with replayability and that is fun to play again and again, but the key to this is that the content is FUN to play again, not that I'm forced to play it over and over.
Nearly every person I’ve talked to who completed the Molten Front fully has said “Ugh, never again.” I’m not attempting to say that dailies do not have a place in end-game here. But personally I felt the systems used in Isle of Quel’Danas felt a lot more future proof. Experiencing the event and dailies during progression was exciting and rewarding, opening the island up yielded new things to do and kept people motivated to see what’s next. But going back and doing that rep grind again on an alt is nowhere near as time consuming as it was when the content was relevant. The island as a whole is now fully opened up and ripe for a new character to come in and experience all of these quests immediately. While potentially unintentional, this also helps to reinforce the growth of a character. As a character becomes more powerful, they should be able to complete old content more easily. It makes sense for a level 80 character to be able to blow through level 70 quests easily.
While I didn’t care for the gating or the repetitive quests, The Molten Front has some amazing storytelling and lore going on. The feeling of a constant battle back and forth was well executed, and being able to see progression in the environment as you play is something I hope to see a lot more of! But having to put out the fires or destroy the temple every single day only to unveil the exact same 5 quests got to be pretty frustrating. If the system included a few of the bullet points above, I feel it could have felt a lot more dynamic. Additionally, while I’m happy to get you the marks you need Mr. Malfurion, didn’t I just kill Rangaros the other day? I seem to recall some of the older raid instances dropping items that could be turned in for reputation gain and helping to expedite the grind a little bit. It’s not that any of these quests on their poorly designed on their own, quite the contrary, most of them are quite enjoyable as singular quests. But even a great quest loses its luster after doing it 30 days in a row.
I’m not saying that every single quest in the whole game should be an epic and grand undertaking, that would make simply playing the game exhausting, especially for someone who plays only casually. I want a certain amount of heavily guided questing. There are times where we all just want to relax and not be forced to figure out how to play a game, or be asked to have the manual dexterity of a teenager to button mash through some horrible gauntlet that makes a mockery of my nowhere-what-they-used-to-be reflexes. But I do feel like the system itself has become somewhat self-defeating. People are so accustomed to questing on rails that they stopped putting any mental effort or thought into a system. Now, after years of “play by numbers” the system requires so little from us that any effort put into the system feels frustrating and defiant.
I suppose the heart of the issue is summarized well by Shepard Book from Firefly “The journey is the worthier part.” I’m all for rewards, and helping me get to my destination. It feels great to finally get to your destination. But in doing so, let *ME* make that journey worthy. After all, the destination is nothing but an excuse to take the journey. Give me opportunities to actually play the game, and to work some things out. Let me feel like what I’m doing is personal and unique. If I’m sharing the same experience as everyone else, at what point does the game become nothing more than an interactive movie? Give me the tools and the opportunity to make my own personal story.
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