Research (WOW) - Part 1

Hello. Long time to talk!… The last couple months have been busy with family, friends and home projects. Now, it’s time to get back into game development. Last month, I embarked on a research project playing World of Warcraft (aka WOW) to get a better idea for the good and bad of MMORPG game play. I’m not going to go into the crazy details of how WOW has evolved and the releases overtime, but suffice it to say, there are a lot of opinions on the good and bad changes that have been made to the game over the years. In this post, I’ll hit on a few key ares that stood out that I believe are most applicable to a tabletop RPG style game. This week, let’s start with Quests.

Questing in World of Warcraft

While playing, I am actively taking notes and observations of how my opinions of the game change as I level up my character and explore new worlds. The first day, I played one quest, completed it, and turned it in for another. Occasionally, I’d have 2-3 quests running at the same time. By the end of the first week, I reached level 20 and I wanted to explore a bit more. The next thing I knew, I had what felt like 20+ quests running and started getting an error message that my “Quest Log Is Full”. With every quest I finished, I would get 2-3 more to start. With every new area I entered, I discovered tons of new quests in a single place.

Part of the benefit of running more than one quest at a time was that a single geographic area may have 5 or more quests that apply to it. If I only accepted one quest at a time, I found myself running back and forth to the same areas and wasting valuable travel time just to get the next quest. When I picked up a bunch of quests, I could complete them all in the same area at the same time. The down side of this bundling of quests is that I found myself loosing track of what story line I was following. Eventually, the number of quests were so overwhelming that I deleted them all and moved on to another area.

I also noticed a lot of quests were small, simple requests such as: “Go and talk to someone standing across the lobby or in the other end of the village.” When you click on that person, you get the quest completed. This was done seemingly to help you move to new areas, meet new people, and provide a linear narrative that players could follow. This may have worked all right, but it made the “Quest Log Full” issue a lot worse and created an almost never-ending cycle of picking up a quest that just kept leading to another one with no end in sight. I will note that later in the game, at higher levels, different tacts were used that I think helped remedy some of this with Step 1, Step 2, Step 3 story lines with a narrator telling the story as you moved along.

Learnings

I’ve learned a lot about what works and doesn’t work from WOW that I think can easily be applied to Game X. First, I think quests that focus on a particular area should contain a bundle of tasks when multiple objectives are necessary to achieve, rather than several individual quests. This way you get to check each objective off still as a feeling of accomplishment, but you don’t get confused on story lines, and you simplify the overall number of quests in the game and number of quests you may be working on at any one time.

Next, very small quests, such as: “Go and talk to person X”, should be avoided. Those can be easily replaced with flavor text and reference stories in a story book rather than making a step by step detail of how someone has to move through the world in a scripted fashion.

Third, I believe a max number of quests is necessary. Although it was a bit annoying in WOW, it prevents you from ending up with literally hundreds of unmanageable quests that lose all their meaning once you’ve had them for so long. It should be made easy for players to know where to go back and pick up quests they didn’t choose to take on in the past, but by having only a small handful of open quests, you focus the player on diving deeper into a given story line. Each quest should be as distinct as possible and try to minimize overlap and all the quests should tie into an overall theme of the game.

Lastly, categorization and other details that tell you where to go and what to do are a huge help in such a massive open world game. While my table top game will have world, region, and tile specific quests, additional tips may be necessary to keep players from getting completely lost, especially in the event that a player picks up a few quests and forgets about one for a while before coming back to it. Having some context to get them back into the story line and back on track for the quest is important; WOW does a good job of this by highlighting pertinent areas on the map.

Conclusion

So far, I have really enjoyed the experience playing WOW. There have been frustrating moments but overall, it has kept me entertained. Over the next few weeks, I will continue to play a bit longer and share my observations. If any of you have played WOW or other RPG style games and have thoughts on what works and doesn’t work with Quests, I’d love to hear it. Thanks for taking the time to read this post and I hope to hear from you.