Someone should compile these into a game design book, great insights, some could be expanded upon. Game designers are frequently the most clueles bunch of people in the world, and gamers have to set them straight.

I kind of think more MMO quest designers should look at the way Gravity handled quests in Ragnarok Online. Now, to be clear their quest system is HORRIBLY unintuitive, and most players don't go on those quests because of it. Yet, Ragnarok does quest chains and flow admirably well, and has engaging and original storylines that go along with them to boot. Probably the best thing to take away from RO quests is their expanding nature.

Most quests in RO start off as simple "fetch me items X, Y and Z to help me bake these cookies", and then slowly turn into "what those girls don't know is they're all apart of an experiment in robotology. If any of the kids at the academy KNEW they were robots we might have a fiasco on our hands!" WoW sort of does this, and is the king of quest originality as far as mechanics are concerned, however rarely do I feel like I'm stumbling upon a greater conspiracy in WoW quests, as they are usually "That pirate is a bad dude. Help me collect zebra diamonds to build a laser to kill him."

I also think more interaction between myself and the NPCs would be a good thing. It's always the NPC telling me what to do, but what about dialogue trees? Sure, it's not as flexible as being able to type out my own thoughts to the NPC, but it's a step in the right direction.

I also think City of Heroe's quest mod they've recently added is a brilliant idea as well. Though, perhaps instead of complete creative control like in CoH, you give players the ability to post simple quests in-game. An example: Joe wants some high level armor, but he'd have to kill 200 orc kittens to get it. Instead of farming the item he could post a quest on the player quest board asking for 200 orc kitten heads and he then posts how much money or what items he's willing to give out to the people who donate to his quest.

WoW has always seemed like a game, not much immersion at all. The quests are a huge reason for it feeling that way for me. There are way too many small quests where the purpose is to guide the player and gain experience. There are so many of these quests that doing them is the game. Getting quest, heading to the location to finish it, then dropping it back off, no immersion, I'm just following dots.

Quests should be meaningful, lore should be plentiful, and rewards should be something the player can really feel good about getting. In the game that WoW has turned into, due to the sheer number of quests I can absolutely agree that lore is meaningless and people don't want to read a book when they know there are thousands more books waiting to be read. The problem is maybe 1 in 10 quests are actually worth reading so a person may decide to try and read and get immersed in the world to find that nearly all the quests are juvenile. Then by the time they finally do get to a good quest with some interesting lore they have stopped reading due to how bad the build up quest lore was.

So basically all I'm saying is, lots of quests = no immersion. Smaller number of quality quests = immersion.

"So basically all I'm saying is, lots of quests = no immersion. Smaller number of quality quests = immersion. "

I disagree, not because I think WoW does anything particularly well, but the fact that it's not about the quest's, it's about the experience. Call of Duty 4 and 5, and god of war, are games all game designers should look at. The great thing about more linear games is that they can tailor the experience and bring in movie-like elements without going overboard and ruining the core gameplay. The truth is we want the excitement of the movies in our games for 'quests' but doing so costs more money then any developer can hope to spend on a game. So games that get chastized for linearity are often better experiences then games like wow with quest farms, that are used primiarly for XP, no one REALLY cares about the quests in WoW, the grind leveling up gameplay mechanic, despite detractors, works for a reason - it's time tested and true. Blizzard had a whole talk about how they tailured the perception leveling up by making the experience bar the size of the horizontal width of the screen, so you're always seeing that 'progress' the feedback loop that occurs that keeps players addicted.

Now WoW on the whole is an example of catering to the lowest common denominator. Gaming has significantly backslidden, since flash and over the top movie-esqueness has replaced genuine gameplay, but you can still learn from stale MMO gameplay in terms of design.

There were a number of quests in WotLK that told stories that I was personally interested in and were significant to the story of the world as a whole.

I think that Warhammer's Tome of Knowledge is an excellent way to provide more substantial stories for a very simple reason: it saves them you can look at them later.
The way the ToK works as a whole is very evocative of, and just as compelling as, the audio diaries from the System Shock and its progeny. You will stumble upon an unlock, receive a bit of XP and a paragraph or two in your ToK which serve windows into the history of places or the lives of those who live there.

@ Jonathan:

But you are not the average MMO player, game designers have to 'design for the crowd a lot of the times but they won't put it like that.

Look at the above from the article:

"Too long, didn't read

Writing is an issue for quest design -- Blizzard limits quest text to 511 characters. Describing the writing aspirations of game designers as "a huge mistake we all get caught up in, any of us who have written for video games. We're so effin' brilliant and once it gets out there, everyone's going to realize..." says Kaplan. Don't be precious about your writing; consider the way players actually play the game. "

Kids and people are easily bored when reading long tracts of text, not everyone will of course, but we are the minority. In a fast paced world people value their time. I agree that there can be other things that are engrossing or entertaining - planescape torment comes to mind as an intriuging more text heavy game, but it also flopped financially, despite it's excellent production values.

I would argue that some wow servers already provide a very immersive experience, on servers labeled "Role Playing" that is. Here you can join guilds who speak in-character and "/ooc" out of character. Off course you get PvP and PvE players stumbling in from other servers and bringing that culture in, but they won't be integrated into the guilds who value strong role-playing.

Contrasting the RP-players is crowd of players who aren't there for that "RP high-fantasy experience", and their goal is mostly "get really good with imba equipment and beat people in the battlegrounds." Take away 90% of the story and those people would still be playing, fueled by that social satisfaction.

Pirated custom servers exist where players automatically start at max level. Some custom vendors provide good items for a cheap buck right after character creation, but players will have to fight for the PvP equipment doing battlegrounds the normal way. It's a very interesting situation because it takes all those PvE quests right out of the loop, and there's still quite the crowd because what they're there for is competitive play based on skill.

It seems Blizzard first went for a not-so-heavy RP experience, but later discovered the huge market for an even lighter & broader experience. Catering to the casual & not-so-hardcore crowd, that's where the biggest market is, which warrants a tradeoff between immersion and being "light" enough.

I don't think the answer should be less quests to increase their value, the problem B N seems to be describing is not with the number of quests, but the fact that it really is just reading text and doing "X,Y,Z". The experience could be made a lot more compelling by engaging the player as much as possible I think. Furthermore, some people actually like questing, I certainly enjoy it, and personally, unless an MMORPG has a good number of solid quests I won't even pick it up.

To Bob, adding linearity or a more movie-like experience to an MMORPG is not a very good idea. It's that "massive" part, lots of people playing the game at the same time. Linearity works for single player and multiplayer games because the number of players is so small that we can get behind playing as Kratos or Raz or Earthworm Jim instead of an MMORPG environment where it's put upon the player to create his or her own story. You'd wind up with a conflict between the immersiveness that MMORPGs are built around, and the more story-driven action that single player games provide.

This is some great insight! I started playing WoW back in 2004, and have seen considerable gameplay changes/improvements with each update. Many developers would see the runaway success of WoW with an "if it ain't broke don't fix it" kind of an attitude, but this article is a reminder of what really makes this game stand out, and gives a reason why people are still playing.

To be honest, I have to comment on that a bit different.
It's not quests what driver senior WoW players to play, it's not the lore that is interesting.
What really matters is a type of OCD syndrome we all get on collecting stuff; being that items, gold or experience bar, people just *love* to collect stuff, love to get more of those little numbers.
Another thing is prestige: WoW (and other MMO players) are in there for their ego.

Lore, quests... all that is there just to shed some light on the whole process and make it less tiresome and boring.

@Tonci

That's true, but it wasn't always true about the genre. MMORPGs can never be what they once were because people's ideas of them have changed to be like that. So no matter what you do for your game as a developer if there is as much progression/gear based stuff as MMORPGs are supposed to deliver then that will always be how players play your game from now on. An entire genre has died off, literally, and I don't see any way to resurrect it like it once was where the game is more about exploration, lore, and survival than how much gold and gear your character has.

@B N

The issue here is numbers. MMORPGs are much more "least common denominator" nowadays because that's how you appeal to the largest possible number of people. Time was when a game with 100,000 subscribers was considered a "major"; now that would be considered an abject failure (and would also guarantee that you wouldn't recoup your development costs or pay off your investors). When people see the billion-in-cash-a-year machine that WoW is become, the first thought is "I wanna billion too! So I gotta be as big as WoW, and gotta kill WoW!"

Everybody is swinging for the fences. It ain't gonna happen.

What IS possible is a more targeted audience. WoW is leaving a vapor-trail of niche markets in its wake. As people "use up" WoW, they are going to be looking for something else... but whatever that "something else" is will be defined by something WoW isn't doing or could do better. When someone leaves WoW, they will want a little more X and a little less Y. If someone is willing to build a company and a game that would be financially viable at, say, 50,000 subscribers and sharply focused upon being *exactly* what those 50,000 people want... they would get those 50,000 and they would stick like glue. Yes, that means no $100 million development budget. I cannot accept that you *need* $100 million to make a good MMORPG... we've just gotten into the habit of believing that.

If someone wanted to go old-school with a new MMORPG, they could. They just need to be willing to operate within the boundaries that a 50k subscriber base can pay for. Middleware to the rescue!

Like Mr. Kaplan says, it's all about gameplay and flow. After you've paid for your engine and art, there comes a point where throwing more money at the problem isn't going to buy you anything. It all comes back to a design philosophy, asking the question "what do players DO when they're logged in, and why in the world would they want to do it?".

And you certainly don't need Blizzard's bankroll to come up with a strong design philosophy.

Which brings up back to quest design.

Basic question: what's the difference in player experience between a quest and grinding?

You can certainly design your loot tables (and the feature Mr. Kaplan mentioned about increasing-to-certainty certain drop rates which I have long suspected existed in WoW, thanks for validating that belief!) to give a predicable rate of equipment and gold inflow to a player, comparable to a quest. You can certainly design for "I want the player to take about 45 minutes to accomplish this, and the reward is Boots of Butt Booting, and the player ends up in the City Of Shoe Stores" with both quests and grinds. So both methods should be completely interchangeable and the player will like 'em equally, yes?

But as Mr. Kaplan noted, it's about the feeling of accomplishment, of granularity, of advancement. The moment of completion provides the boost that grinding does not. WotLK has that in huge quantities.

I do think that Blizzard has gone a bit too far down the "microgranularity path" though. There are so many quests so frequently that the moment of completion has been cheapened. It's not that the quest arcs have gotten shorter... what they've done is take a large quest arc that used to be 2 or 3 steps and broken it down into 10-12 steps, but which covers the same "distance". The result is that more of your experience comes from quest completion than monster-whacking, but the "highs" come so frequently that the player becomes numbed.

This brings up another complaint. With so many more "microquests", it gets harder and harder for each quest to have any original feel. So they become cut-and-paste, file off the serial numbers and drop in new strings (and you can even see places where the cut-and-paste was literal, since they missed some of the strings in NPC chat and quest text. Oops! Argent Stand, anyone?). There is also a lot of just plain repetition (vehicle quests! We got vehicle quests! Here, have a metric ton of vehicle quests that all look the same!). I'm an ardent quest-text-reader... or WAS, until WotLK. Believe me, if I could quantify the "turning point" I would be selling it to every MMORPG provider. But it's there.

Blizzard has tried to address this with punchy "cutscenes". The battle of the Wrathgate and subsequent action which places you directly at the side of the "big names" has an off-the-scales positive impact. Cool Factor Infinity! But even that rings a little hollow. Quests like that in which YOU THE PLAYER have shaped the entire outcome of the Northrend war don't ring true. This is for two reasons, both of which assault the sensibilities of even the least-immersed player: first, there are just too many occasions in which the world-shaking events are shaped by YOU THE PLAYER. One or two, maybe. But dozens? The second is that players are keenly aware that YOU THE PLAYER is in a world awash with others, each doing the same thing. It just doesn't feel like that much of an accomplishment. The overall quest writing in WotLK feels a whole lot more like a single-player game than an MMORPG... more "Fallout 3" than "WoW". Good writing, but out of place.

A thank-you to Gamasutra and Mr. Kaplan for providing a place for me to get these thoughts off my chest. It's something I've been thinking about for a long while with regards to WoW, and this is a great venue to get it off my chest.

See you in Azeroth.