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Challenging the Sacred Cash Cow of Quest Based MMOs
by Wolfshead on March 26, 2009
It's been a good 5 years since the release of World of Warcraft - the first MMO to focus on entirely on quests as the prime vehicle for it's gameplay and storyline. As with any aging successful MMO, eventually long time subscribers start to ask existential questions about *why* things are they way they are. Thankfully the WoW community is starting to realize that maybe the Emperor has no clothes. Could it be that players are finally realizing that this quest based MMO has been a mirage all along?
Lately I've started to notice that long time MMO gamers who were initially mesmerized by the allure of quests are growing weary of being led around like horses and chasing after NPCs with yellow exclamation marks. There's a feeling out there in the MMO community that quests are no longer special. Instead they have become very pedestrian and commonplace fare in MMOs. Even the meaning of the word "quest" has been lost and denigrated as any old task or job is labeled as such.
In August of 2008 I wrote an article that challenged the quest centric paradigm of current MMO design as popularized by Blizzard's World of Warcraft. Recently Muckbeast at Bright Hub's MMO Channel and commenters on his personal blog have picked up the torch and have dared to challenge this sacred cow with some superb insight.
While I feel I adequately covered this subject and all of it's ramifications it's refreshing to see Muckbeast amplifying specific areas of concern that demonstrate the negative side effects of basing the entirety of an MMO on quests. So I've decided to revisit this topic with another look at this subject.
In the Beginning there were Quests
It's helpful to understand what Blizzard's objective has been from the start with WoW: a very accessible, easy to understand and play casual game. From the first moment a player steps into Azeroth they are facing an NPC with an irresistible yellow exclamation mark. There is no escape from the questgiver in WoW and according to a very revealing 2004 GameSpy interview with Blizzard VP Rob Pardo it's all by design:
Rob Pardo: ...the main message that we always try to talk about with World of Warcraft is how accessible we are trying to make it.
David Lawrence: Uh huh.
Rob Pardo: Its very quest driven so we try really hard from the moment someone plays the game that they don't really need to be a veteran MMORG player. They don't need to know the lingo; they don't need to know how things work. We are going to teach them all of that.
The interview continues with many references to Blizzard's intention on providing a WoW player with a "single-player" game experience:
Fargo: The interface looks very much like a single-player game. It's really streamlined.
Rob Pardo: Yes, and when you first start playing it, you can play it like a single-player game. We try to make character creation pretty easy, to get you right into the game. And, when you get right into the game we lifted the Diablo motif with the exclamation points (!) over non-player character heads. And you start right next to somebody that has something to give you and something to say. And you are right into the game. You go and right click on him, which is another kind very subtle of innovation, but something that just seems like when you go into a lot of common MMORGs you have to pull out the reference card and figure out, okay - how do I move, how do I interact, what do I have to do like slash commands?
In World of Warcraft we really try to make it as intuitive as we can. When you go into the game, there is a guy next to you that's got a little exclamation point above him so you go, "Hey what's that?" You just right click on him and suddenly it pops up what he has to say and gives you buttons and says, "Hey do you want to accept this quest?" And, it will kinda tell you what to do and you are off and running. It feels very single-player like. And as you kinda go through the quest chains you start seeing all kinds of other players doing it and you are introduced to the whole concept of this massively multiplayer community. But we try to package it in such a way so that it's really accessible and easy to get used to that.
It's evident that WoW was designed to attract non-MMO gamers all along. Here are a few points that demonstrate this:
- the simplicity of the interface (as noted by one of the interviewers)
- the focus of quests for herding the player into new areas
- the lack of challenge in the enemy encounters
- the story revealed to players via the quests
In retrospect it's almost as if WoW was designed to be one big tutorial for gamers new to MMOs. A MMO so easy and attractive that it's greatest strength would always be in attracting new players (defined in industry parlance as "churn").
Yet here we are 5 years later and all is not well. Eventually new MMO gamers become veteran gamers. Veteran gamers need to be placated which bring us to the next evolution of MMO quests: daily quests.
