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Lead Blizzard Dev Outlines 9 WoW Flaws
fmnch35
Member Posts: 79
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fmnch35
Member Posts: 79
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Hehe, i loved this one
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9. Why Am I Collecting This Shit?
Kaplan used an example of a quest where a captain asks you to kill eight gnolls.
"What the eff, the guy down at the hill asked me to kill bandits and I didn't need to bring anything back to him," mocked Kaplan. "So 'A' I'm asking why I need to bring the paws back. But then I get into this philosophical thing where I say, 'Shouldn't the gnoll have a paw every time I kill him?' Or am I so brutally massacring the gnoll every time that..?"
"And then I'm like, 'Shouldn't he have two paws?'"
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I always wondered the same, i go out to get the wings from some insect, and i can clearly se them flying in the air using wings, so i kill one and then when looting, ( surprise surprise ) there is no wings on it, WTF
Boooo! Kaplan made the Green Hills of Strangethorn quest??? Booo! Hiss
Good read otherwise and invaluable for developers of MMOs that have questing systems in general.
Back in EvE. Started with BatMUD. Main MMOs have been EvE and DAoC.
Blizzard could radically change 1-60 and even 60-70 to reflect newer philosophies and ideas about the direction of WoW they certainly have no excuse in terms of money or manpower. They could undo the mistales that they've made and learnt. Why not improve the Classic and TBC experience?
Mayvbe its just me, but this has gotten me even more excited about Blizz's new mmorpg and even their "secret 5th project".
I have mixed feelings about the speech personally. Some of the things I do agree with wholeheartedly. (Especially #9. What do you mean that Boar doesn't have any damn Organs?) Though I can't say I agree with the Christmas Tree Syndrome, or the quest text Size limit. I personally like having a lot to do at once, and I like having well written interesting reasons for doing so other than that "I don't like Gnolls... Kill em Dead!"
It's hard to imagine a new Blizzard MMO and the big question is what happens to WoW when it does come out.
Blizzard know that they made some mistakes with their first MMO, how can Blizzard be more cautious with their next MMO the patches whilst big do get a lot of testing and they are spaced out. I don't think they will do anything radical either they are known for playing safe which is unfortunate given they are obviously talented and have the financial clout to do what they want.
If it is a Starcraft MMO I'm going to let out a big sigh as it will just be WoW but in space with a different skin and parts of TBC almost play like a Starcraft MMO. Even some of the guns/draenei start zone wouldn't look out of place in a Starcraft Universe. The Silithid look like Zerg too.
its not a starcraft mmo... its a new ip...
The 5th game is, no-one knows what their 4th game will be.
Lots of these... quests, they're more fun for the designer than they are for the player.
I think this is the root of most of the problems right here. There's no way to completely make this go away, but Blizzard does a better job than anybody else at keeping the focus on the gamer. That seems obvious, but it's something you have to beat into the designers' heads every single day. Otherwise a bunch of unpublishable novelists, would-be movie makers and avant-garde artists will use millions of dollars worth of programmers' hard work to feed their own egos - rather than to produce a product that will make the customer feel like he is in charge.
Along those same lines, I like pretty much everything this guy said, but I wish someone out there would question the fundamental concept of quests themselves: a bunch of limited and largely unrelated simple tasks. The only real decision they offer is 'do it' or 'don't do it.' By around level 40 in WoW, I'm stuck with a hodge-podge of tasks spread over three or four zones. It feels like I'm sorting through a rolodex or going through my wife's 'to do' jar -- how heroic is that?
I wish that some quests - instead of giving you a few paragraphs of "backstory" - would give you CHOICES. For example, you might decide that you want to go to a specific zone, dungeon, etc., and you'd have a way to set that marker so that you'll be guided through that quest progression without your log getting filled up with stuff you'll never get around to.
Or maybe some open-ended quests that just sort of arc through the others. Like you "go to work" for the Venture mining company, or you "join" some military outfit, so you get extra credit for doing related quests. Or it could be as simple as kill as many of a certain type of MOBs as possible - say, double experience for killing undead, but you only get to switch your focus after five levels, etc.
Yeah, the only point I agree with is the last one.
Gimmick quests(if done well) break up the monotony of questing
Large quest strings are not hated and they pull the player in
Only power gamers dont read quest text, Ive read every quest Ive ever done
If Blizzard feels these things are problems then are designing even the questing to accommodate power gamers. The type of gamers that feel leveling is a needless chore.
Im actually more concerned about Blizzards next MMO now.
I think they would do well to dump 99% of quests (maybe keep some quests like epic class weapons and such). The simplest way to implement a reason for "killing goblins near the dwarf town" is simply to award faction along with experience. Hence, the more goblins you kill, the more the dwarves like you, and no reason to keep track of a quest log or anything like that.
It as a pretty good read.
I find myself really wanting to give Blizzard's new MMORPG a try, but they suffered a major design mistake that was really late in WoW's life a second time in a row. So I'll let others jump out and try their new game on launch and play "wait and see".
The major design mistake? The PVP portion in two critical areas of the game.
PvP - leveling up phase of playing. This means battlegrounds. Pretend you're brand new to the game. Maybe you were suckered into it by friends, whatever. In your teens or mid twenties level range of your character, you find out about battlegrounds and decide to give them a try. You quickly discover the wonderful world of Twinks, where you as a casual first time player are NOT WELCOME to try out the game's organized PvP.
No level limits on many enchantments / leather armor kits was an incredibly stupid design flaw. The devs admitted it, claimed more than once that they would fix it, and never did. It just didn't matter to them.
PvP - Endgame phase of playing upon release of Burning Crusade and AGAIN with Wrath of the Lich King Expansions. The Devs tell the players " Are you a DPS class? Good. Rush to max level, gear up in PvE blues and maybe a purple or two. Congratulations. You're ready to PvP. Are you a Healing or Support Class? Oh, we're sorry. You are not allowed to succeed in PvP until you gain Resilience Gear... which you gain from being successful in PvP. Just ask a DPS friend or friends to help carry you in points so you can earn the gear to have fun in PvP."
An incredibly stupid game design that they WERE AWARE OF with the launch of WoTLK, but left it intact 'cause... I dunno. I guess they figured no one would want to PvP upon reaching max level in the expansion. 'Cause the players would never get bored with endgame instances?
Diablo III on the other hand has my interest.
Seriously Zorn, the guy actually has a point. You refer to a 'normal' PvP cycle. In both vanilla and TBC healers were very strong early on to loose ground as the gear progressed. Casters were quite good in the beginning of each cycle and ended up quite bad. Melee DPS started bad and ended up godly due to endless DPS and DPS/weapon scaling.
In WotLK the PvP balance was plain sucky at release (melee/hybrid DPS was for the first time completely out of wack - so not even close to the 'normal' cycle if there is such). Blizzard is trying to tweak it but WotLK probably introduced the most unbalanced and odd PvP yet in WoW. Once again - it is fixable with patches but to claim that everything was fine is the same as putting the head in the sand.
And twinking is bad phenomena for new players since it gives a very weird view of PvP (if you are new to the game).
Zorn - I never claimed a 3vs3 team would not have a healer. Furthermore, I was talking at WotLK release and not the patches 5months after release. Just read before replying.
There is another thread about balance and arena and what that clearly showed (even though you never admitted it) was how wacky the balance was with the release of WotLK (but much better now but not fully there yet).
Not one single mention of PVP? If you're making a list of 9 wow flaws, at least 6 of them should center around PVP. Broken PVP is why I left the game. LOL. Kaplan fails.
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Only 9?
I think he's off by a factor of 100 or so.
Oh, and the fact that Kaplan wants quest text to be even shorter than 511 character (max) is indicitive of the type of people who play this game. It's also an indication that the quest text are usually terribly written and give me zero sense of story telling. I also admit that I rarely read the quests in WoW because there was no reason to. There was not story, and no story linking quests together.
I think some of the best writing adheres to an "economy with words", so I do not mind the 511 character limit. I really mind quests with endless dialogue boxes that a player is forced to click through in order to secure the task.
EQ2 had one in its tutorial island; the gnome on the beach that wants you to collect sprockets and parts. That quest had (it seemed) 8 or more boxes of annoying text to click through. Sony even mixed it up during a patch so you no longer could breeze through it by clicking the bottom choice; they made you endure it. (Only way they could get some folks to read that stuff.)
Its so true about the brick wall. A quest that strings along for 14 levels and then ends in a brick wall you cant do for another 5 or 10 levels.
And its so funny about the collecting quests mentioned in #9
I think he's right with his comments on quest text. I don;t play WoW for lore or background story. I get a quest and accept it striaght away, only looking at the rewards pretty much. I use quest helper and cartographer to give me the low down on it. I play LOTRO for story and they do it very well. WoW isn't about reading lengthy dialogues and walls of text. (neither is LOTRO really as it's done with cut scenes and epic book quests in instances).
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You can walk the walk but can you talk the talk?
Funny how most game devs always say there's nothing wrong with their game, it's normally the players playing it wrong (lol WAR)
And here we have the dev from the game with the highest subs, actually saying that their game is not perfect and that there is a lot of stuff that can be improved. No wonder people have trust in Blizzard and expect their games to be top notch.
Like a fish, you got taken in hook, line, and sinker. For one thing, WOW can afford to make these kinds of comments because it's a behemoth. Kaplan is merely defending his point of view on where he thinks WOW should go. It's OK though. Since there's no PVP changes in WOW's future, there is no WOW in my future. I'm pretty sure we won't miss each other.
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The only thing this article proves is that Blizzard's next MMO won't be featuring any revolutionary new game ideas either, just a more play tested version of what we already have.