World of Warcraft has many more quests than comparable MMOs of the time. However, Jeff Kaplan had planned it quite differently back then…
In the first internal alpha of World of Warcraft, each area was supposed to have only around twelve quests and leave a large part of the zones untouched. Jeff Kaplan revealed this in a podcast. He also talked about the ideas and plans that were originally used for WoW and why this approach had to be abandoned.
Quests as Incentives, Mobs as Long-term Goals: The original idea was that there would only be about a dozen quests per zone in World of Warcraft. After that, players were expected to explore the areas further and just kill monsters until they leveled up a few times.
Old Games as Role Models: Jeff Kaplan, Pat Nagle, and Allen Adham (the quest designers of Classic WoW) were inspired by other games, such as EverQuest, Asheron’s Call, and Dark Age of Camelot. They looked at these game worlds and tried to implement something similar for World of Warcraft in terms of quest density.
Employees Thought the Game Was Broken: The disillusionment came quickly during an internal test. Blizzard employees were hanging out in the forest of Elwynn and quickly went to Kaplan’s office – they thought something was broken. When they learned that the developers expected players to just keep killing monsters, they were disappointed.
“I’m not doing that, it’s so boring. That’s why I don’t play these games. I need more quests,” was one response Kaplan received.
After that, Kaplan realized what kind of project and how much work he had actually gotten himself into. With around 20-40 quests per zone, the workload multiplied many times over.
It’s likely that World of Warcraft has gained so many followers precisely because of these many quests. Because for a very long time, there was no feeling of emptiness, and there was always another exclamation mark somewhere to send players back on a monster hunt.
Do you think a World of Warcraft could have worked with fewer quests and more “grinding” without a clear objective? Or was it precisely this world, filled with quests at every turn, that made it appealing?
