World of Warcraft has drawn on well-known ideas. The most famous symbol comes from a stealth game.
In large MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, there are plenty of symbols that have clear meanings for fans. A purple lettering stands for an epic item, a shield symbol for a character in tank specialization, and a green ground effect for healing, where you ideally shouldn’t stand too close to not annoy the healer.
However, some of these symbols were not “invented” by World of Warcraft or even have their origins in entirely different games. One of them is the quest marker that NPCs are equipped with.
What symbol is being referred to? We are talking about the well-known “exclamation points” that mark in World of Warcraft that you can accept a quest from various NPCs and objects. The symbol has been in use since the vanilla version of the game and has – apart from a small graphical enhancement – still been used in exactly the same way as back then.
Where does the symbol actually come from? One of the former lead animators at Blizzard, Kevin Beardslee, explained where he actually knew the symbol from – namely from Metal Gear Solid. He said about it to GamesRadar magazine:
I believe I was playing Metal Gear Solid at the time, and when that “Brrrrrnk!” exclamation point alarm appeared over someone’s head, then I knew A) I was scared and B) I knew that guy hated me. I thought: What if we put that over the heads of our quest givers? Then you instantly know that you should talk to that guy […].
If you are not familiar with Metal Gear Solid anymore: In the early installments of the game series, the exclamation point was a symbol that you had been discovered – typically it meant that panic would break out in the next moment and Snake would be found out. The meaning was thus completely different than later in World of Warcraft. Nonetheless, it apparently was enough to attract people’s attention.
In the meantime, the exclamation point symbol is more than just a fixed part of World of Warcraft. When entering a new area, WoW fans almost automatically scan their surroundings for the yellow symbol that promises a quest. It would surely take a long time to get used to a new symbol.
Other things have remained the same in World of Warcraft over 20 years – for example, the price for a service that you have certainly also been using since the launch of World of Warcraft.
