Indeed. This is the legacy of the “massive single player game” that WoW is designed to be. Nothing can really change because it would wreck the ride for everyone else. It’s not a world, it’s a chase for bigger numbers, and the social aspects have been derived from that, including the click-through questlines. The stories just don’t matter to the gameplay, so why bother with them?

In my view (and I might totally off base here) design should respond to writing and not the other way around. Or rather, design should do in its design ways what the writing is calling for.

Example, the Northshire Abbey area in WoW. Starting area for Humans. There is an abbey there because the writing calls for one, and inside that abbey you’d expect to see abbey-related NPCs and not, say, sewer-related NPCs. With abbey-related quests to give perhaps. Design would build that in the world, but writing goes into it as well regarding how to build it. That’s one overarching level of writing.

WoW’s design, broadly speaking, calls for many groups of easy to kill enemies more or less bunched together so the starting player can begin to come to grips with the world, his skills and the questing mechanisms. Design doesn’t care if those bunches of enemies are rats, kobolds or orcs. Design doesn’t care if they live in a cave nearby or they’re out and about. Design doesn’t care what the quests are telling players; doesn’t care ‘why’ players have to do what they’re called to do.

So that’s another level of writing over simple quest text, and probably the one that is causing the most problems. Because from day one the quality of this level of writing has been junk. Of course it has improved. If you compare Northshire Abbey with Bloodmyst Isle, in terms of writing, the Draenei starting area is much tighter. There’s a prevalent common theme and thematically it just flows better. But it’s still hit and miss.

All design cares about, more or less, is to have enough quests/xp around so by the time players move from Northshire to Goldshire they are (x) level. Doesn’t matter how. Yeah, many level 1′s just race to Goldshire but that’s player prerogative and not the point. The writing is at fault, not the design, in Northshire because it gives utter junk to the players. It’s borderline irrelevant. Kobolds, wolves and Defias with very little reason to kill them other than “they’re there and nearby”. Yes, there’s that guy that wants wolf parts for something, but for no reason other than the want itself. Yes, there’s that lady that owns the vineyard the Defias are occupying, but that’s mentioned in itself with no connection to anything else of note.

One of the greatest triumphs and pitfalls of WoW’s design, at the same time, is how a level one can race to Stormwind perfectly fine and it doesn’t matter one bit. When you suggest to your players how it’s the same if they’re there or not, and those quests get done or not, and there’s no impact on the world then (a) your world starts becoming irrelevant and (b) you start conditioning your players to expect irrelevancy.

No wonder they click through.

I find it disingenuous to complain about the limited quest activity palette. The only substantive way in which MMO quests differ from, say, KOTOR is that you don’t get dialogue trees. I’m not personally all that convinced that dialogue trees are a great solution either — BioWare can make them jump up and roll over, but you still are left with that same feeling that you’re doing things on rails.

I think there’s a confusion here between game design — the limited palette of tools that are used to direct the player without confusing them — and storytelling. Braid has a limited palette of actions; the “quests” all boil down to learning how to use the five or six actions to build into greater things. Same with Wow — there’s a limited palette of things you can ask people to do, so it’s about building that up into something more. Saying that killing ten rats is the storytelling instead of the gameplay makes no sense to me.

Agreed completely, and I think this works with what Kaplan is saying. An MMO is not a novel nor a play, it’s an MMO, and has its own toolset for storytelling. That toolset involves the ability to interact, to make choices that shape the narrative as it progresses. “We need to stop writing a fucking book in our game, because nobody wants to read it” — because a wall of text boiling down to “kill ten foozles” doesn’t fly.

I suppose it’s a pity Kaplan doesn’t elaborate on how we can expand narrative within an MMO. Your list of five quest goals is a good distillation, I think. Let’s suppose we’re ultimately limited to those: at the end of the day, your quest will still be “go get (x) of (y), return.” Some potential wrinkles:

** There are multiple ways to get X of Y, some easier than others. Kill all who stand in your way, bribe them with something else they want more, convince them that you’re their pal, complete another quest to open up a passage to bypass most of the opposition, etc. The quest still remains “go get (x)”, it’s just that how becomes more open.

** Once you get X, you realize that maybe you don’t want to give X away to the questgiver. In fact, you may be better off giving it to someone else. In both cases you’ll get a reward, but in both cases you’ll earn the ire of someone and have enemies. Or you could just destroy X, which may have it’s own set of repercussions…

In both cases you would convey the options/hints within the block o’ text/cutscene/whatever, thus giving them a bit more import than the simple blather of why Questgiver really has an emotional attachment to X. Import until someone writes up the quest walkthrough, that is…. but hey, it’s a start.

I’m curious if he’ll figure out a better way to “deliver [the] story in a way that is uniquely video game” in his upcoming project. We’ll see.

21 words, baby.

Yes, it’s correct to say that most players just want to kill stuff and not bother. But, follow me here for a second, on November 2004, and largely through the following times of WoW’s expansion -when it was still ‘new’- most players went into it with with few preconceptions. If come 2009 and all your players want to do is kill stuff without paying attention to what you’re saying it’s because (a) you’ve bred that trait over years of limited and uninspiring questing and (b) that is your own fault.

I keep going back to the very limited actual quest actions, a.k.a. what you actually need to do once you get to the quest spot, and it all boils down to those four or five things and nothing more:

- Get to quest location and kill (x) of (y), return.
- Get to quest location and gather (x) of (y), return.
- Get to quest location and activate (z)
- Escort (p) from (a) to (b)
- Get to quest location.

That’s about it. That right there comprehends… I’m gonna go out on a limb and say 80? 90%? of WoW’s quest actions. And other MMOs as well, be fair. And, saving technical limitations (“our game just can’t do that”), this is at its core a problem of writing and design as well.

If WoW has told its players to do the same darn five or six things quest-wise for almost five years, and to top it off the game’s writing is sub-par, that’s when Kaplan mentioning text length and the medium itself becomes a pill that’s a bit too large for me to swallow.

Writing is not just quest text. It also has a lot to say in what we want our players to do, what we’re going to allow or forbid them to do, and how they’re gonna go around doing or not doing it. Again, saving technical limitations (which I don’t know), there’s no reason why the writing in terms of quest design, not text, has to be so limited and uninspiring.

Or am I supposed to believe that in 2009, when the engines driving our games are approaching photorealism, game assets are measured in gigs and successful MMOs make good money… all we’re able to design are five or six quest types? I flat out refuse to believe that.

I don’t know if the blame (if there’s such a thing to assign) lies on Kaplan, all the former EQ alums that came on board WoW’s development or what. But I refuse to believe or accept the biggest MMO in (western) history, with a subscriber base larger than many countries and a game that has been piling up money with a bulldozer for at least four years uninterruptedly apparently can’t do better than this.

“But Kaplan blames the fact that the text is too long.”

No, he doesn’t. He’s saying that expanding the text won’t help matters. Give the writers 511 characters, 51 characters, or 50,111 characters, the problem is the same: most players don’t give a rat’s a** about the story. As long as your text boils down to “Kill Noo’Nah and you’ll get some XP and a shiny,” the majority or players will skip all the buildup, all the emotional impact, all the tie-ins to the background of the game, because all that matters to most players is what they need to do to get more phat lewtz.

The quote about increasing the text length is because his quest writers want more space to tell a background story about why the character needs to go kill 10 foozles. His point is that the existing space is perhaps too much, because all most players want to know is “go kill 10 foozles.” Apart from what directly gives them game-mechanic benefits, it doesn’t matter if the 511 character space is written by Neil Gaiman or Hack McHackersen — when it boils down to “kill 10 foozles, get XP and a nice hat”, that’s all most players want to know. Which is, I think, what you’re getting at here:

“While trying to find a different, better medium is nice, people click through because they’ve learned they can do it and not miss anything (thematically or gameplay-wise). It has nothing to do with the length of said texts. A text empty of meaning or value is still a text empty of meaning or value regardless of length.”

This is where I think you and Kaplan part company. He’s saying, “screw the background, just tell people ‘Kill 10 foozles and you get a cookie’ since that’s all that matters.” You’re (apparently) saying: “Leave the story in, just make it have weight and meaning.” I don’t think that has anything to do with the quality of the writing, but rather the import of the writing: if killing 10 foozles gets you a shiny… but foozle-friendly merchants will charge you higher prices, and you may get randomly attacked by vengeful foozle herders, you may want to think twice about taking the quest.

Presuming there is no fallout for killing the foozles — as is the case with the majority of WoW’s quests — then there’s no point in switching to cutscenes, or increasing the text length, or increasing the writing quality. Most people are going to try and glean “where are the foozles, and how many do I need to kill?” and everything else you throw at them is merely noise to that signal.

I think he has it backward, hence the “right premise, wrong conclusion” bit. There’s a difference between “text is at fault” and “your text is at fault”. So that’s why I think that, while expanding the medium and finding a better way to convey story/quest/objective is very good, what matters most is what you’re doing with that medium.

Kaplan has the wrong approach. For example, the natural conclusion to the “kids just click through” premise to anyone who paid attention to players would be, possibly, that the prevalence of “quest helper” mods + the little variety in intrinsic quest goals (it’s all either kill, fetch, get there and use or get there, basically) is responsible for this fast click away – kids don’t need to read because by level 15 pretty much they realized they didn’t have to; get to the point marked on the map and do the one of three or four possible quest actions was enough. Kids click through because you’ve bred them all through the game (and all through many games, to be fair) not to pay attention to what you were saying. Because you didn’t make it necessary.

But Kaplan blames the fact that the text is too long. He’s missing the forest for the trees, just as he did when he designed Green Hills of Stranglethorn.

So it’s not the text length, it’s not that you have to deliver it through cutscenes, cinematics, a hybrid system super lovey and talkey NPCs or whathaveyou. It’s -what you’re doing- with the prevalent medium.

Garbage in, garbage out; if what you put in sucks, in terms of writing, it’s gonna suck no matter what medium you deliver it through. If this was cinematics, and Kaplan said “people are just clicking the cinematic away”, his (wrong) reaction would be “let’s make it glitzier and better looking”, instead of “let’s make the writing for those better.”

I might be wrong, but I don’t think I’m misinterpreting him much. While trying to find a different, better medium is nice, people click through because they’ve learned they can do it and not miss anything (thematically or gameplay-wise). It has nothing to do with the length of said texts. A text empty of meaning or value is still a text empty of meaning or value regardless of length.

What others should strive for..