Blizzard: Game designers aren't Shakespeare

Former World of Warcraft lead designer Jeffrey Kaplan told his fellow developers today to lay off the heavy text. Speaking at a presentation at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Kaplan - who's now helming Blizzard's next unannounced MMO - said game makers often suffer from "medium envy", where they try to …

[Paul Hoerner]

Worst Warcraft Quest!

I have to respectfully disagree with Green Hills of Stranglethorn being the worst quest in the game. It may be annoying but it you can survive quite well just skipping it. IMHO the absolutely worst quest is from Wrath of the Lich King; Battle for Undercity.

Here we have a quest that you are given with no warning whatsoever, must complete or you can never do business in Orgrimmar or Undercity again, or much else. Then, when you finally figure out what you need to do it takes at least half an hour, often more than an hour, and is utterly pointless. As long as you stay near Thrall and Lady Sylvanas you cannot die, you don't need to make a single attack to succeed and the outcome is never in doubt.

It's entire purpose is storyline and it's annoying as all hell, even moreso if you have to endure it more than once.

[mike panero]

I just scrolled to the bottom

And clicked the comment link, fucked if Im going to read all that waffle

[Anonymous Coward]

green hills ain't so bad...

... especially seeing as how you can buy most of the pages on the AH anyway.

However, "Dragonmaw Race: Captain Skyshatter" IS the most annoying quest, especially as they didn't 'build the engine around vehicles'.

[amanfromMars]

Violent Programming ..... a Blot on the Video Game Landscape.

"Speaking at a presentation at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Kaplan, -who's now helming Blizzard's next unannounced MMO - said game makers often suffer from "medium envy," where they try to deliver a compelling story by writing reams of dialog and narrative without keeping in mind it's a video game."

Sorry, Jeffrey, but you don't just get it, do you. To you it is just some dumb video game to sell whereas to others it is a Totally Immersive World in which they are Mentored and Guided because outside in the Real World, is it Equally as Bad and even Worse because somethings are not usually allowed to be graphically shown, or as as Good as they Seek it or as IT and Media and Video Games Presents it to them. IT presents to them the Image of a World which they have not experienced but which they can now expect and fear and mimic.

"Former World of Warcraft lead designer Jeffrey Kaplan told his fellow developers today to lay off the heavy text." ..... Does that make you proud of what you have done, with your mindless childish lead.

"We need to engage our players in sort of an inspiring experience, and the sooner we accept that we are not Shakespeare, Scorcerse, Tolstoy, or the Beatles, the better off we are." And whilst I would applaud the first sentiment and wonder why you would fail in it and dismiss the second sentiment and wonder why you would think us better off without such Aspirations to Greatness, I would have to conclude that you are playing as a bully and deeply disturbed too. Would you care to agree or would it be a battle for you to confront such demonisation?

[Pooka]

Dumbing down games for instant gratification....

I'm not sure I can bring myself to agree with him. I guess for online games, maybe he is right, but for pure, single players rpgs, hell no.

The way he's written it sounds like the next expansion is going to be written entirely in LOLCATZ. Personally, I don't mind the lots of text in games situation, which is why I prefer things like Neverwinter Nights over those silly powermarathons that are the MMORPGs...

[Anonymous Coward]

disagree... in a way

I do understand the desire of gamers who wish to be glorified as fast as possible without understanding why their aviator is being glorified (yes, the aviator is being glorified, not the idiot looking at the screen). But there are other gamers who do care about the story and are playing to know what happens next, please do NOT forget those gamers. Just give the play an option to know the full details or just to get a short version of the quest, that should satisfy both gamer types (I think).

There should be more to the game then just shooting everyone on site, with the only thing that set the current FPS from the other FPS is the environment (which the player ignore anyway) and the engine.

@mike panero: thanks, enjoyed you comment ;-)

[Anonymous Coward]

What is needed in this kind of mmo...

... is more randomly generated quests. City of Villains is a great example of this, it's a game where you never need to kill for xp.

[Andre Carneiro]

"Just mashing the button"?

Oh, please tell me that's not the future of MMO quests.

I actuallt think WoW has fantastic lore which is helped by many extremely good quest lines. Reducing the text substantially would just turn quests into "Go and kill that mob" exercise. Pointless.

At the moment it feels like there is a good balance, IMHO.

Oh, and Green Hills of Stranglethorn is probably up there with locust plagues in the list of evil things to be subjected to. Battle for Undercity was awesome. Sent shivers down my spine. :)

[Anonymous Coward]

World of Goo is poetry

Connect your Wii to the net, and buy it on Wiiware shopping..... it's a very very good game.

On the other hand, any game that can be summed up as "first person shoot em up" is a shlock novel.

[Dave Bell]

So words don't matter?

Our culture, good and ill, on words is built.

They are the glue which binds us to our peers.

Love, joy, and rage, our penalties of guilt,

All seal'd in words, which ev'ry human hears.

One to many, that's what makes our kind.

No more than thirty, group the speechless apes.

"I have a dream!" "Der Sieg Wird Unser Sein!"

Millions hear: these words are more than japes.

Why have we made a world where words are lost?

Have teachers fail'd? What can these children know?

Quick-passing light and sound: what is the cost?

Fools follow demagogues--to Hell they go!

Our world is dead: some claim 'tis for the best,

Let choirs of angels guide us to our rest.

[Pascal Monett]

@mike panero

Are you happy with your quest now ?

[Filippo]

Worst quest

I'd submit the intro quest to Shattrath - follow the guide in a tour of the city. You can't skip it, you just have to listen to stuff like "and here's a typical Shattrath inn..." for what seems forever, following a guide that moves at sub-walking speed. At least in Battle for Undercity you can fight something, just to break the boredom.

[Ash]

@mike panero

Thanks for your informative and pertinent comments. We shall all take to heart the message you leave us: You're an ignorrant troll.

GHoS was a GREAT quest! Constantly grinding mobs until you've completed the quest was the easiest xp ever. It was like grinding, but with bonus xp at the end. Nothing wrong with it.

I do agree with the sentiment, though. I never read the quest description; I took the quest, loaded up MonkeyQuest and Cartographer, and did what it told me to do. Levelling takes TOO LONG to spend an hour each session reading about how Gork lost his shoe which his wife had made in a scuffle with a Murloc tribe, and his daughter went to go look for it. I want "Go get shoe and daughter from (here) and (here)." and you can tell me the story on the way.

[Alex Trenchard]

Planescape: Torment - best game ever

Text can be worth reading, if it's well written and well delivered. PS:T is a stand-out example, with over 6 million lines of text and a massively compelling story behind it.

Interaction between characters doesn't have to be limited to violence. Conversation - whether for information, persuasion or simple entertainment - remains hugely important, and it's simply not practical to record every line with a voice actor, except for the largest projects. Not to say that high levels of VA can't work well - the Kingdom Hearts series, for example, features voices like Christopher Lee, John Di Maggio and Dan Castellanata. But even read out, rather than written down, dialogue is still key to developing depth and character.

That's not what everyone wants. Lots of people just want to blow stuff up. But I like depth.

[Ru]

Well,

Whilst I agree that reams and reams and reams of dialog do not a good computer game experience make, reducing everything to 'kill this guy, fetch this crap' is not the answer.

A good *unobtrusive* story with well written dialog can be appreciated by anyone. Locking the player's controls and spewing minutes of exposition at them is infuriating; especially if you come to play the game a second time. Non-awful, non-intrusive background dialog like GLADoS or the Halo marines adds a lot to the game, for example.

Many of my favourite games (fallout 2, deus ex, system shock) could be boiled down to 'kill this guy, fetch this thing' but would be significantly less entertaining without the story that went along with them.

And as for funny-feeling floaty vehicles; one thing I will say about Halo was that the vehicles felt fun. Seriously; fuck realism. You could blast around and speed and shoot stuff up. I don't want vehicles which wallow and turn and accelerate realistically and are a total pig to drive. Where's the fun in that?

[Anonymous Coward]

Green Hills Of Stranglethorn

I just read up on that quest to find out what's so bad about it.. Find 28 pages of a book and bring them to some guy. Pages are dropped (at a poor drop rate) by random enemies in the area.

I'm really struggling to see how this is any different to all the other "Bring me X items" quests that basically make up the entirety of all MMORPGs.

[Paul]

Green Hills of Stranglethorn?

Goblin AH in Booty bay. Pick up the pages for a few silve. Hand in. Not bad, just pointless.

Worst qusts? The travel to ones, where the places you have to find are difficult to get to and have not direct path, and your following a f**king riddle.

[Seán]

WoWank

In other words the zombies who pay for WoW are mere battery hens and there's no point in wasting any effort whatsoever on the saps because they'll pony up the cash regardless.

[Martin Lyne]

@Mike Panero

Fucking great!

I agree that there's too mcuh text in MMOs, considering we all know everyone else reads it it makes it far less personal, less worth reading. Plus, why read when you could grind?

MMOs are boiled down to leveling and hoarding. You can't give people more than that and complain that tehy ignore it, you need to draw them into the game itself. I have plenty of ideas, but I'm not giving it to those pricks without money :)

[Kane]

Re: Worst Warcraft Quest!

"...must complete or you can never do business in Orgrimmar or Undercity again, or much else."

That's what you get for picking Horde. /spit

Alliance FTW!

"Then, when you finally figure out what you need to do it takes at least half an hour, often more than an hour"

First - read the quest text (although I suppose that is the problem that Jeffrey Kaplan is describing in the article - never been a problem for me personally), then you will know what to do; it's a basic escort quest ffs!

Secondly - half an hour to an hour? Seriously? Took me about 12 minutes with my DK, and about 18 minutes with my Hunter, once the main battle started at the entrance to the sewers.

"...and is utterly pointless"

I disagree, I gained 2 weapon skill points (2 handed swords) and 2 defense skill points while doing that quest on the DK.

Mines the one with the [Medallion of the Alliance] in the back pocket...

[Anonymous Coward]

Jaded?

What a jaded asshat. If he hates the way WoW is going that much, maybe he should just quit. With credentials like "I made the Green Hills quest" I'm sure he can get a job anywhere.

[Narlaquin]

Boon or Bane?

>> Another was sloppy collection quests — something that's too often the boon of gamers.

Surely that should be the bane of gamers?

I recently completed the Green Hills of Stranglethorn quest. At level 80. It's a level 30 quest: to collect a dozen or so pages of a book. The pages come from dead humanoids all over the area. It's not uncommon for a player to have stacks and stacks of pages and have one missing.

I bought all mine from the Auction Houses, figuring that spending 10 gold to collect the pages was a better investment of my time and money than slaughtering every single NPC I came across.

It was quite a fun read though. And I bet there aren't more than 100 people on any given server who've taken the time to read the damn thing.

Pirate flag for the Bloodsail Admiral.

[Fozzy]

Perhaps

they should take lessons from the porno script writers everything should fit neatly onto a single page.

Scene #1

Girl sitting on couch, guy walks in, guy does girl (random close ups)

Scene$2

guy sitting on couch. Girl walks in, girl does guy (eandom close ups)

Scene#3

Girl sitting on couch. Girl walks in, girl does girl ( random close ups)

It would make for some interesting quests at least

Paris: Do you really need to be told!

[Anonymous Coward]

Green Hills of Stranglethorn

There's nothing wrong with this quest.

Buy them from AH .. complete quest.

Your in Strangkethorn for 30 levels or something, any you pick up in that time you put on AH and make your money back.

Simples

[Anonymous Coward]

Getting anywhere takes ages in the game

For me personally the biggest problems aren't the quests, it's the time it takes to get from A to B even if you're flying by gryphon.

A game is supposed to be fun, and whilst some scenes that can be seen during a flight may or may not be interesting to see I would prefer to be actually playing the game than just sitting at the PC doing nothing whilst my character takes forever to actually get anywhere.

How can that be considered fun?

[Law]

huh??

""We didn't build the engine around vehicles," said Kaplan. He added that other games like to tack on vehicle combat (while describing, but not naming Halo) where "you can tell they didn't know what they were doing with vehicles, and it felt all floaty and things didn't shot right. The same mistake happened in World of Warcraft," he said."

If he is talking about Halo 3 then he obviously hasn't played it properly - the engine for getting in/out of vehicles and using them is fiddly at first, but it quickly becomes instictive and in online battles (with 3 anyway) they are an essential part of the combat and the game is better for it... I'm not a Halo fanatic, but to claim their vehicle system is crap is a little rich... if he's talking about the previous ones I don't remember problems with 2 either, can barely remember anything from 1 though... so I guess he could mean that, but comparing a game from almost 10 years ago to his latest creations is just daft.

Played WoW for about a month last year... found it fairly confusing early on, far to many random names that all sounded the same and therefore found it hard to follow any story-pattern, not real character development either - maybe they should be writing/plotting out the game play more, not less... then again, I'm not really a MMO fan, so it could be I just didn't "get it"... which is fine, each to their own...

[storng.bare.durid]

Who reads the Quest flavour text anyways?

Find Mankrik's wife and then return to him in the Crossroads.

Beaten Corpse: 0/1

We battled in a small tauren camp when we were separated--she held three of the Bristlebacks off by herself. But the odds began to overwhelm us. I led some away only to see her overwhelmed by newcomers. In my rage, I turned to face my enemies, but they brought me down easily with their vast numbers.

I awoke to a tauren druid tending my wounds--he had come across me on the Gold Road as I fell.

Please, noob, find some sign of my wife.

Have you found any sign of her at all? The pain in my chest tells me that the worst has happened, but I have hope you will find her safe and sound.

[Anonymous Coward]

Text limits

City of Heroes currently has its next big feature, a mission creator for players, in open beta.

The number of people whining on the boards because of the text limits is hilarious. I don't understand what makes them think that if they can't tell a good story in 100kB *1 they'll be able to tell one in twice that.

*1 Admittedly making custom enemies eats up a huge amount of that space, but necessity, invention etc.

[davefb]

battle for undercity

err , that might be the 'worst'.. though I wouldnt' agree.

But the cinematic just before it is absolutely fantastic!

Finally did green hills, for an achievement. Even being able to kill mobs really easily it took soo lonnng, though at least the pages aren't soulbound so you can just get them from the AH.. ( supposedly)..

Still, whilst it's nice to not have long quest dialogues that need to be skipped through. I do like the speeches that some givers give. Having a sensible backdrop to plot makes the quests *far* more worthwhile. I suppose it goes back to wether you like to 'just go raiding' or enjoy leaping about in time in order to ensure Frosthoof ( or whoever) really did manage to kill the Northwind..

[Ash]

@mike panero

Apologies; My dry humour alarm seems to need more batteries (I need more coffee).

[Matthew Morrison]

"just watch kids play it, and they're just mashing the button. They don't want to read anything"

And this is your justification for not bothering to write flavour text?

[RobMc]

Not as bad as made out...

i actually thought Green hills was a handy 1... kinda got them all done solo handy enough and i didnt have to leave that map!

There's many more i didn't like that have you going all over the place just to give a note... pick up a parcel and then travel half way around the game world to drop it off... then you get another note and back and forward again....

[Juillen]

Less text?

Hmm.. I'd have to disagree with the chap about less text. Maybe bringing back conversation trees would be a plus, rather than click, and get a 2 line "Do this". Put back a feel of interaction.

One thing I used to really enjoy playing games way back was following the back story in a quest, having a real tale unfold. Though you only want to see it once; it's always good to have options into the full text, or just choose the 'go straight there' text.

Long live storytelling..

[Onionman]

Worst Warcraft Quest

The worst one has to be starting the damned thing. Get a (real) life.

O

[Steven]

This is kind of ironic for NCSoft

Given that City Of Heroes next expansion is a Mission Creator which gives the player the ability to write reams of text (to a 100k with other things limit).

Now, according to one of the writers of the only MMO worth listening to, that means we'll not just be able to ignore what paid developers have written, we'll be able to ignore the twaddle that other players have written too!

I'm fairly sure NCSoft will be issuing a written apology immediately and forget about trumpeting this rather unique feature (no, wait, NCSoft never market COH anyway).

[Adam]

Their biggest mistake

4 years + of content.

Increase your levelling speed significantly.

Most dungeons you don't even go into when levelling no.

So you hit 80 and none of the 55 old instances/raids are of any use to you.

It would be nice, post patch 3.1, to focus on making the old content relevant to all those level 80s.

Give me Heroic Shadow Fang Keep. Update all the TBC heroics to be a challenge for level 80s.

Basically Blizzard are not keeping their old content relevant to their player base when they have mechanisms in place to make it happen.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't want to read all of this

I JUST WANNA KILL THINGS!

[Anonymous Coward]

Translation for the article:

Warcrack users don't need no stinkin' story, they're just hooked on mashing buttons.

[John]

The STV pages quest wasn't so bad.

The pages could be traded which creates some player interaction, it gave me a chance to make a packet buying/reselling them on the AH.

Heck worst STV quest has to be the Ackris Reed quest, the drop rate was utterly abysmal, it was improved 10 fold last year or so, its not bad now at all though.

[David]

I don't read the comments either

Dave

[Peter Kay]

Rubbish

It may not be what's wanted in an MMORPG, but to put out the blanket statement that reams of text is always a bad idea is utterly wrong. What should be avoided is irrelevant exposition.

Planescape:Torment has repeatedly proved that an old RPG with vast amounts of text and very little fighting can consistently fit into the top ten RPGs ever made, even if it's not a mass market title in the way say Oblivion (also excellent, and also featuring dialog that's somewhat more than 511 characters) was.

Fallout? Fallout 2? Baldurs Gate 1 and 2? Morrowind? All need a degree of attention to engage with the game characters and extract the quests.

'Do Forest, come back at level 60' my arse. If you think mashing buttons is the only way to create gameplay then go for it. Some of the rest of us want a slightly more indepth gaming experience sometimes.

[Charles King]

Praise tha Lawd!

Good to know that at least one person gets it!

I'm sick of people (<cough>Ars</cough>) writing that fancy narratives are the way to turn boring games into artistic masterpieces. Any game that relies on a 'compelling narrative' for its raison d'etre is irredeemably flawed. Games are there to be played, if I want a novel, I'll pick up a book.

[Anonymous Coward]

Teeheehee

' "You bet!" the PFY says. "First off, reject all the women."

"Why?"

"Because they're blokes pretending to be women." '

'tis true.

[Richard Gadsden]

"Show, don't Tell"

TV and film took years to learn that basic principle; I'm impressed that MMOs have got that far already.

Having a limit on how much text you can put in helps to prevent it getting too exposition-heavy.

In a written medium, it doesn't matter whether an event is presented directly (through third-person narrative) or indirectly (as a narrative told to one character by another or through a flashback) but in a visual medium, there is a difference between one character telling you what happened and seeing it directly - and in an interactive medium, you're even more constrained as you can't change the narrator.

Take, for example, Lord of the Rings. There's a whole narrative about Gandalf being captured by Saruman that you only pick up on in the book after the arrival at Rivendell, when Gandalf tells it to Frodo. Because written narrative is written narrative, that's equally immersive as presenting it in the usual third-person omniscient. But in the film, you really wouldn't want 20 minutes of exposition from Ian McKellen. So the films show the events in their proper time-sequence, and that's a scene you get to watch directly. In a game, you would have to either change the POV character to Gandalf, or skip that scene altogether. And MMOs don't let you change POV.

When you're creating an original narrative in a game, as is the case for MMOs, then the writer is totally tied to a single POV, and to events, not internal thoughts. That removes so many narrative modes - no flashbacks, no switching POV, no epistolatory, no internal narrative, no narrating exposition from character to character - that it presents a great challenge to the writer.

Since you also have "Show, don't Tell", you end up with great plot simplifications - but you don't get to write the principal characterisations, either, so that's another great lump of text that disappears.

[Hans Mustermann]

What's wrong with Green Hills Of Stranglethorn

"I just read up on that quest to find out what's so bad about it.. Find 28 pages of a book and bring them to some guy. Pages are dropped (at a poor drop rate) by random enemies in the area.

I'm really struggling to see how this is any different to all the other "Bring me X items" quests that basically make up the entirety of all MMORPGs."

The difference is: inventory space.

In a normal "bring me 20 tiger skins" quest, those skins stack and thus take up a single slot in your limited inventory. In the "Green Hills Of Stranglethorn" idiocy, you need 28 different slots. Because a Page 1 stacks only with other Page 1's, but doesn't stack with a Page 5.

To get an idea, as a newbie hunter who just made it to level 30 or so, you might have 1 bag of 16 slots (which you started with) and 3 other bags, say, 12 slots each. Yes, if you have an army of level 80 alts or your friends managed to convince you to take mining and skinning, you'll have money for slightly bigger bags. But if you're a newbie and was retarded enough to insist on taking, say, enchanting, you'll be dirt poor until you're level 70.

At any rate that's 3*12 + 16 = 36 + 16 = 52 inventory spaces _total_.

Asking you to dedicate _more_ _than_ _half_ of them to just one single quest, is freaking retarded.

Bear in mind that you'll also need inventory slots for other quest items, food for the hunter's pet, materials you harvested for your crafting profession, loot, etc.

The second problem is that the damned things drop even if you didn't take the quest, or dropped it. Doing _anything_ in Stranglethorn resulted in gazillions of pages that I didn't need, didn't want, and had to manually keep throwing away so they don't clog my bags.

[Anonymous Coward]

Green Hills

It's not a simple grind x mob quest as any humanoid in STV can drop any of the pages. Most others, you have one group of things to kill and loot one named quest item. Here, since each item has a separate name, you are forced to find each one. You can end up with a stack of Page 1 and 8 other random pages, but are nowhere near the completion of the quest.

That being said, I always do a few quests and collect pages along the way. Whatever is missing, pick up on the AH to finish it off early. Any other pages that drop during the 15 level questing time here can go back on the AH.

I have never read it, will never read it and just mash buttons and ask QuestHelper what I need to grind next.

[Kajiki]

GHoS is fine...

GHoS is easy and no where near the worst.

There are 4 quests to complete chapters 1 - 4 (4, 4, 4 and 3 pages required, 15 pages in total to collect) and a final hand in all completed chapters together quest to make 5 easy quests.

Any pages you collect should be mailed to your level1 banker who will eventually collect (several times over) a complete set of pages. Mail a set back to your toon, run to quest giver, hand in. Easy XP.

Now it's the feckers in Shimmering Flats and Booty Bay I hate. There is a chain of quests that send you back and forth several times. Before they added the additional flight points and allowed mounts at 30, as an Alliance on a PVP server it was a nightmare. Run to Gadgetzan, fly to Theramore, run up the coast (probably about 10 minutes), get ganked in Ratchet by bored horde players, res, get ganked again, res, sneak on to boat and hope you don't get ganked again while it sails to Booty Bay. Drop in quest, get quest to travel back to Shimmering Flats, boat, gank, res, 10 minute run, fly, run to Shimmering Flats, drop quest, pick up another quest to go back to Booty Bay. FUCKERS!!!!!

[Peter Kay]

@Richard Gadsden 'MMOs don't let you change POV'

I don't play MMO games, precisely because of all the button mashing, grinding and dumbed down plot that is illustrated in these comments, plus the fact you have to be stupid enough to pay for it every month. If I want to play simple games, I've got plenty of those.

Still, there is no reason why it shouldn't be possible to change POV. None of the situations you describe are impossible in MMO, although it may be necessary to make discrete single player/single party sections of the world (so that multiple players are simultaneously able to have a suitably lengthy exposition with their own individual instance of the NPC, and whilst their viewpoint is switched they can be protected from a rabid wolf gnawing their leg off. This must already happen, surely?).

I don't agree with 'show, don't tell'. TV, literature and interactive media are different media. It can be boring having to listen to someone tell you a complex story at length - this is why non interactive video media acts out the exposition. Books aren't necessarily graphic novels, so they use the power of the written word to achieve emotional impact.

On the other hand, interactive media (i.e. computers) are often neither wholly visual or textual. If the exposition relies on showing the prior situation, then show it. If, on the other hand, it doesn't lend itself to visualisation - use text, as that can be interpreted somewhat faster than listening.

[Anonymous Coward]

Show don't tell

H'es not saying, "Don't tell stories" he's saying, "tell stories that make use of the medium."

Frex, using CoH's new mission writter, I could write a text box that lovingly describes your guy (possibly accompanied by my ever so amazing character) going to a warehouse, beating up a bunch of Skulls, finding the next link in their drug supply chain and so on.

Or, I make a mission where you go through the warehouse, meet up with an NPC hero (who promptly runs off and gets killed thanks to the Fusionette *1 stye AI), beating up the Skulls, searching for their stash, and when you beat the final boss you get a clue with the info about the next link in the chain.

Same plot effect, but the latter is far more immersive for the player.

*1 An NPC helper who is notorious for running off and getting killed, sometimes not before dragging half the map back to you.

[Anonymous Coward]

P.S. re: City of Heroes' mission writer

Interestingly enough, in the hints and tips they tell you to make the important bits of the mission brief text a different colour so that the people who are just going to scan it see at least the key info and plot points.

(They also tell you not to make defeat all missions on large maps. Here's hoping they go back and apply that bit of info to the pre-existing missions)

[Anonymous Coward]

eat it

MUDs FTW keep your skanky mmorpgs

[YumDogfood]

Green hills?

...Isn't that a JTAG tool?

/Friday

[Eponymous Howard]

Worst quest?

Skipped GHoSt, but the big problem were the so-called epic quests that were actual just deeply tedious.

F'rinstance: the Warlock Infernal quest.

Pick up quest in Tanaris.

Fly to Felwood. Flight time: ages - (if memory serves, The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again" had started and finished during the the flight)

Combat time: 15 secs or so.

Fly back to Tanaris (hearthstone first time).

Repeat, but with hearthstone on cooldown (three or four times can't remember, Elapsed time soemthing over an hour; actual playing time maybe 2 mins.

That is knowing in enlightened circles as "Taking the piss".

And the Infernal was fucking useless.

[James O'Brien]

@Author

"Odds are they won't anyway, but anything that prevents them from doing it is a bad thing."

@What is needed in this kind of mmo...

"... is more randomly generated quests. City of Villains is a great example of this, it's a game where you never need to kill for xp."

Like hell you dont. And I love the game. Played it for 4 years now and still keep my account alive. Not to mention there are very limited quest types as is the case in *ALL* MMOs. Lets see theres Go kill this person or rescue this person, Go find this or plant this item, oh and kill this many of this type of enemy to finish this quest because I cant be bothered to do it myself seeing that I am a SuperHero/Villain. About the only things great about such games (and still only a few who do this so far) are character creation and the "Raids" or SFs (like in CoX).

Having said that I have played enough characters to cap level (not counting the ones I played around with to see if I would like them) in CoX that I can tell you damn near every story arc and exactly who to talk to and what mission you will get when and what reward you get for them after you complete them. Randomly generated my ass.

So umm go play CoX some more and tell me again how it has randomly generated quests.

/Im going to go play some Left 4 Dead seeing as it may be only 2 versus maps right now but I have yet to see the same play through twice DUE TO TRULY RANDOMLY GENERATED GAMEPLAY

[Anonymous Coward]

hmm

I used to read the quests. Normally you had a chance to when you're flying somewhere or something. That said, if I was ever actually playing with someone else, I probably didn't have the time to read out the whole quest. My attention was elsewhere.

[Dynamatrix]

Blizzard is Evil

You know, over the years I have grown to despise Blizzard. Their games are based upon brainwashing the user into the most boring and repetitive tasks, no doubt designed by some psychologist. Its all based upon all your buddies playing, which in turn breeds continual play. The gameplay is far from challenging and relies upon gaining in-game items, which they continually make redundant in order to continue the grind.

While I dont deny a company is in business to make a profit, this one has grown arrogant and very greedy. To add insult to injury this dracula company is taking part in a law suit with MYD that could change the very landscape of software consumer rights, in the guise of an infringement of copyright law.

And the way they operate is best described best in the words of JK Rowling. ' To a goblin, the rightful and true master of any object is the maker, not the purchaser. All goblin-made objects are, in goblin eyes, rightfully theirs... They consider our habit of keeping goblin-made objects, passing them from wizard to wizard without further payment, little more than theft'.

Replace the words goblin and wizard, with Blizzard and Customer respectively and it defines pretty much all the way their online games work. Of course, its common knowledge what nasty creatures goblins are.

And most of the 'lead designers' are truly despised by gamers worldwide. I believe references to Kaplan and his understudy Kalgan have had wikipedia reference editing disabled due to vast numbers of people writing nasty stuff about them.

[Max Sherman]

Quests, not just for kiddies anymore

There are 9 specific mistakes that Blizzacs cop to. Let's be honest though, no matter what sort of foolishness they put up, well keep taking it in and doling our our cash. Go crack! This link makes for an interesting read. You will know exactly what they mean.

http://whatthefaq.com/2009/03/29/too-much-story-lin/

[Ceiling Cat]

@ storng.bare.durid

Seriously, that is some of the best flavor text I have ever read.

------ON TOPIC------

I don't play WoW. However, I have seen what happens when translations cause the text to exceed hard-coded limits... I couldn't read more than half of the quest text in Granado Espada because of such limits. The same thing with in-game "broadcasts". The Koreans (Granado Espada is originally a Korean game) can say a LOT more in 80 characters than an english-speaker could.

that having been said, WoW did help set the standard for modern MMORPGs. I guess they know what they're doing.

[Andy Bright]

Greenhills of Stranglethorn

Takes 5 minutes to complete. Go to AH, buy the entire quest, fly back to Stranglethorn Vale, hand it in.

One of the worst things about WoW is the way drops are handled. Relevant to the fucking quest, player, party or raid please. Yes I know why this isn't done, they want to force you to do the same thing over and over and over and over and over and over again until you get the bastard thing you wanted, but if something as simplistic as Warhammer can do it, so can WoW.

The pointlessness of repetitive questing is only outdone by the pointlessness of creating player levels. As if leveling was somehow worthwhile in of itself. Yes, repeating the same quests with different coloured monsters for slightly better items for 1-60, 60-70, 70-80 levels is awesome. When a designer comes along that realises most of us just want to get into the real game - the part that isn't the mindless grind of leveling, and also realises that leveling teaches you absolutely nothing worthwhile about the character type you are playing, then perhaps a real challenger to WoW will be created.

Most people don't realises when they first pickup an MMO that the real game starts when you're done with leveling your character. The best quests, dungeons and experiences are finally offered with character that have full sets of spells, weapons and skills. Each of these dungeons (raids) take normal people months to learn and then complete. The group play they require forces you to actually interact with other people, and isn't that what MMOs are supposed to be about? Not completing kill, fetch and carry quests for 30 days at a time. If you wanted that you could play one of the countless hack and slash games like diablo.