[MUD-Dev] DESIGN: WoW quests and content

[Michael Hartman]

Johan A wrote:

> WoW is so quest dependent that if you want to run around and just
> explore and kill whatever you happen to come across you will be
> penalised for it. Quests give very good XP. As refreshing as WoW's
> quest oriented gameplay is, I feel my path is very controlled,
> just like a single player game. It is however nice to have things
> to do while soloing but it is almost too set in stone. Questing is
> not an option, it is as much forced as teaming is in games like
> EQ2 if you want to make decent progress.

Well said. This is the devil in the details of the WoW questing
system. The end result is that exploring for its own sake is
relatively pointless. If you find a cool area, or an impressive,
imposing named mob, so what? If you don't have the quest to go there
or to kill that mob, you won't get jack for your time or effort.

This happened last night when some friends and I were in a zone
called Felwood. We were exploring and came upon a huge town-like
area for Jadefire satyrs. We proceded to exteriminate them and also
found a named boss in the camp. Upon killing him we got a few
silver. Yippee.

20 minutes later we find a quest to kill a bunch of the exact same
mobs and that same boss. Somehow the game should have just recorded
that we'd killed him and then if we ran into the NPC, we could just
get credit.

It gets to the point where all I look for is those little yellow !
to try and find quests. I know that doing ANYTHING else first will
end up being counterproductive.

That's not a good design.

--
Michael Hartman
President and CEO, Threshold Virtual Environments, Inc.
http://www.thresholdrpg.com
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