How WoW's quest design made leveling a path of least resistance

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 1:51:07

   Sure, yeah. There were actually a lot of people involved in it and they all kind of contributed in their own unique ways. Alan Adham was the lead designer on WoW when we first sort of decided we were going to have a quest-based game. We used to joke that like EverQuest barely had any quests in it. It did have quests. They just, they weren't really in front of the player in an obvious way. You kind of had to seek them out on a website.

2. 1:51:36

   And Alan knew that he wanted quests to be a big part of, of World of Warcraft. And so he hired me. That was my entry level position at Blizzard. And on the same day, he hired a guy named Pat Nagel, which was hilarious to me because Pat was the he had this funny title of HR and facilities at Blizzard because it was such a small company so like if you sent an application in Pat would deal with the application or if the toilet overflowed Pat would have to deal with it and so the whole time I was applying at Blizzard I was going through Pat and then on my first day they put Pat and I in an office together and he's like yeah they hired me also as the quest designer and so pat and he was the most wonderful guy we had so much fun so pat and i kind of designed the quest system it was alan's idea to have it in the first place and then there was that great designer i mentioned eric dodds

3. 1:52:43

   who helped a lot with the interface of it all and the idea was at first we actually on a whiteboard in alan's office we estimated how many quests we thought everquest had to date and everquest that had you know i think four or three expansions at that point in time and we're like wow we have to make all of these quests like ever quest has uh it's going to be a lot of quests and it's kind of up to me and pat to do it all And we believed all we had to do was match that EverQuest number.

4. 1:53:23

   And Pat and I started working on like the design of the system and how it would interact. And Eric Dodds was really involved in how the interface, you know, like how you're going to interact with the NPCs and all of that. And we split up the world into like two zones. He was going to take Elwynn Forest, which was the starting area for the humans. And I was going to take Westfall, which was the sophomore zone after Elwyn for the humans. Pat and I would meet with Chris Metzen, and those were the funnest meetings ever because Chris just has stories in his head and visions.

5. 1:54:02

   Chris is like artist, storyteller, world builder extraordinaire, and he sort of described what he wanted going on in those zones. You know, you want the gameplay to follow the flow of what was going on with the stories of those areas. So we finished Elwynn and Westfall, and we did like a team playtest. And our assumption was, because of the way EverQuest worked, players just wanted to level up. It was a level-based game.

6. 1:54:35

   You go out, you kill a creature, you get experience points, you level up a little bit. And so the way people played EverQuest is they'd find these areas where there were lots of creatures, and you'd usually find the best experience efficiency cycle you could find. So like fast respawn, kind of easy things to kill. And that's how you would progress through EverQuest. And I remember Alan kind of telling us like, hey, the quests, when Pat and Jeff write quests, they'll aim us to where the creatures are.

7. 1:55:12

   You'll do a quest and then you'll spend a few hours killing creatures in that area afterwards and that's how he imagined it would work so we kind of set up the world that way you know pat probably did a dozen maybe 20 quests in elwyn i do a dozen 20 quests in westfall and we do this team play test and we had a bunch of people on the team who never played mmos like guys with shooter background you know starcraft fans etc and they play world of warcraft i think we played for like an hour or two and we only did elwyn forest and the overwhelming feedback from our team these are people who really didn't play everquest they're like my god pat that was horrible i ran out of quests like right away and we're like wait a second you expect to just have quests just keep going and they're like yeah we expect to have

8. 1:56:12

   quests just keep going the whole way and we kind of had an oh shit moment right after that elwyn forest play test where we realized like we had vastly underestimated the number of quests we were going to need and we changed we developed this philosophy that's kind of a shared philosophy across blizzard games in general at this point i've heard it outside of blizzard other people in the industry, which is you design it along the path of least resistance. So basically what that means, like in EverQuest, the path of least resistance, if you wanted your character to hit max level, is to find the easiest creatures and kill them over and over again in place, which to some people think is very boring. To me, I would do that for eight hours because I think that's fun. But we decided in World of Warcraft, we said, why don't we make the path of least

9. 1:57:11

   resistance? So in this case, the way to get the best experience. It's the fastest not to be killing creatures in one place, but we'll overload the experience into the quests themselves, and then that will move you through the world, which will get you to see everything. It will enable us to tell these awesome storylines. it sort of did a lot for the game and i think it was like a fundamental change in the genre like if you look at the things that everquest was very popular and very successful and it was hitting like hundreds of thousands of players and wow blew the doors open and was tens of millions of players and i think the fundamental difference there was that wow allowed you to play as a single player and what makes an mmo massively multiplayer online game massive is having the other people there and they're so important or else the world feels

10. 1:58:15

    kind of wrong and dead but the concept that we have to force you to interact with them to do anything is very off-putting to a lot of people and the fact that people could come into wow And just kind of the game design, the game design way of describing it as directed gameplay. And some games have extremely tight directed gameplay. Like, for example, if you were to play a single player game like Last of Us, you know, you'll have those moments where they'll be like, you'll come up to a log and press triangle to duck or else or whatever the duck button is.

11. 1:58:57

    left stick to duck to go under and that's like the ultimate in directed gameplay like they're telling you exactly what to do on the other end of the spectrum is a game like minecraft like vanilla minecraft where you'll find it's very divisive amongst gamers who love minecraft or hate it the ones who hate it are like i don't know what i'm supposed to do like you drop me