Highlights from Interview With Jeff Kaplan

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Highlights from Interview With Jeff Kaplan : Blizzard Insider Exclusive

As far as what other games have done in the past, I don't want to point anybody out specifically, but we found that other games made questing too cryptic. Often, in other MMOs, when you wanted to engage in quests you spent the majority of your time on the spoiler sites. You never knew which NPC to talk to, and when you finally found that out, you seldom understood what he wanted exactly. It was such a difficult and arcane process, that in certain MMOs, only the 'hardcore' were actually questing. These players prided themselves on discovering new quests and completing them. The problem with this hardcore approach to questing, though, is:if you make it all a mystery that someone has to solve and then put on a spoiler site, you are designing a tremendous amount of content in the game for only a small group of people. It creates a cycle where the majority of players that want to finish quests are just following a series of steps exactly as they appear on the spoiler site without having any real idea of what they are doing or why.

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Insider: Since quests are such an important part of playing World of Warcraft, will players get most of their experience from quests or from camping out and killing creatures?

Jeff Kaplan: Quests are definitely the path of least resistance for gaining levels. Right now the majority of our quests are non-repeatable. The reason we decided to do this is because we want to move people through the world and not have bottlenecks where the majority of players hang around while there are vast stretches of empty areas open to exploration.

We noticed in other MMOs, the quickest way to level up would be to find an area with an easy-to-kill monster with a fast respawn time. You find a good camp and you just farm it until the experience greens out [meaning you no longer get experience from the monsters]. We didn't want to do that.

Also, part of the way we want to entice people to accomplish quests in our game is through an experience reward. In an MMO, where everything boils down to time, the best reward you can give players is experience. Because the quests are non-repeatable, we can make the experience reward a very nice one. We don't have to worry about someone farming it over and over again and exploiting the quest. It's a one-time deal, so we can give that huge chunk of experience. It keeps people moving and it also makes it easier to level.

If you never want to play a quest and level up to level 60, you can do that, but you are not going to be most efficient by taking that route. The fastest method [to level] is to engage in questing.

This system is good for a number of reasons: it keeps people moving, it keeps players out of each other's hair, and it also keeps directing them toward areas that they might not have discovered otherwise and that might be level appropriate for them. So it is a win-win scenario in our opinion.

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Another interesting way we are bringing a personal experience to players in World of Warcraft is life quests. We have not started to implement these yet. We're going to completely fill the world with the standard quests we have planned first, and then we'll create the life quests. Each of these special missions tells the story of its respective race and what their purpose in the world is. We set a lot of this up in the smaller quests. The Undead, for instance, are trying to develop a new plague, an important effort for their ultimate survival. Lady Sylvanus is seeking the formula to create a different version of the horrible disease from Warcraft III to combat Arthas, as well as destroy the humans. On the other hand, players get a taste during the Orc life quest of the demonic influence from their past - and must combat it.

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Insider: Are there going to be special event quests or quests that only occur once a month?

Jeff Kaplan: I don't think we will have quests that only show up once a month, but we will definitely have world events. There is one that will actually occur in the Barrens. The Alliance armies roll up onto the beach on Northwatch Keep,

and they will attack the Tauren outpost, the Orc outpost, and the Crossroads. These are all small cities in the Barrens, which is a zone in-between the Orc and Tauren lands. If you decide to band together with the Horde and defend those towns, you will have certain quests and quest items available to you that otherwise would not be. You might have to get the head of the Alliance raiding party leader, and take that to the lieutenant in the Crossroads. This would yield a quest reward that you would only get if you took part in the world event.

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Insider: Will there be guild-specific quests?

Jeff Kaplan: There will definitely be content that requires large raiding parties. Party size is limited to five right now, which we think is a solid number because it makes each individual's role within the group critical. Having said this, we are working on the possibility of implementing 'supergroups' - large raig parties formed from smaller fellowships - so that several parties of five can get together to tackle larger quests.

You won't have to belong to a guild to embark on large raiding party quests. These scenarios are not restricted to guilds, but are designed so that they can only be accomplished if you have say 30 people or so. I tend to think of that as a guild quest in a way, but it is perfectly possible that 30 people, non-guilded, could do it as well.

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Insider: Is there anything else interesting about quests that we haven't talked about yet?

Jeff Kaplan: Nothing really high level, but I'd like to talk about an example of a quest that I think is a lot of fun in the game. In this scene, there is a race about to occur between the goblins and the gnomes. In Warcraft, the goblins and gnomes are the two races that are known for their skills in technology and engineering.

So both the goblins and gnomes are trying to make rocket cars to race each other. There is a whole host of quest givers, both on the gnome side and the goblin side. You can accept quests from the gnomes that require you to sabotage the goblins or quests for the goblins to sabotage the gnomes. You can engage in quests for the gnomes to buff up their cars to make them better, or quests for the goblins to make their car superior. At the same time, you can also bet on the races through the quest system. The way this whole scenario is designed, you can bet on the race, then try to fix it. If the race starts without any interference whatsoever, there is a 50-50 chance every time that one or the other will win. With this setup, there are quite a few ways that things could pan out differently. All the players in the area could jump on a bandwagon, fix the race significantly for one side or the other, and then bet on that side to win. If a competitive situation results, though, and players are taking different sides, it could become a complex affair where every quest might swing the race in one group's favor or the other's. Finally, watching these little rascals race one another is just hilarious all by itself.

Insider: Does the race just occur periodically?

Jeff Kaplan: Yes, the race starts at set times. I forget exactly how often, but I believe it is approximately every 30 minutes or so. Also, because of the nature of this scenario - the fact that you can do various quests and fix the outcome of the race - players will not receive spectacular rewards in terms of experience or powerful items. The rewards are more fun in nature. One of the items you can potentially receive is the party grenade, which when thrown into a group of players will cause them to randomly start emoting - dance, do the chicken, cheer, that sort of stuff.