Blizzard: Game designers aren't Shakespeare

I just scrolled to the bottom

And clicked the comment link, fucked if Im going to read all that waffle

Violent Programming ..... a Blot on the Video Game Landscape.

"Speaking at a presentation at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Kaplan, -who's now helming Blizzard's next unannounced MMO - said game makers often suffer from "medium envy," where they try to deliver a compelling story by writing reams of dialog and narrative without keeping in mind it's a video game."

Sorry, Jeffrey, but you don't just get it, do you. To you it is just some dumb video game to sell whereas to others it is a Totally Immersive World in which they are Mentored and Guided because outside in the Real World, is it Equally as Bad and even Worse because somethings are not usually allowed to be graphically shown, or as as Good as they Seek it or as IT and Media and Video Games Presents it to them. IT presents to them the Image of a World which they have not experienced but which they can now expect and fear and mimic.

"Former World of Warcraft lead designer Jeffrey Kaplan told his fellow developers today to lay off the heavy text." ..... Does that make you proud of what you have done, with your mindless childish lead.

"We need to engage our players in sort of an inspiring experience, and the sooner we accept that we are not Shakespeare, Scorcerse, Tolstoy, or the Beatles, the better off we are." And whilst I would applaud the first sentiment and wonder why you would fail in it and dismiss the second sentiment and wonder why you would think us better off without such Aspirations to Greatness, I would have to conclude that you are playing as a bully and deeply disturbed too. Would you care to agree or would it be a battle for you to confront such demonisation?

Dumbing down games for instant gratification....

I'm not sure I can bring myself to agree with him. I guess for online games, maybe he is right, but for pure, single players rpgs, hell no.

The way he's written it sounds like the next expansion is going to be written entirely in LOLCATZ. Personally, I don't mind the lots of text in games situation, which is why I prefer things like Neverwinter Nights over those silly powermarathons that are the MMORPGs...

What is needed in this kind of mmo...

... is more randomly generated quests. City of Villains is a great example of this, it's a game where you never need to kill for xp.

"Just mashing the button"?

Oh, please tell me that's not the future of MMO quests.

I actuallt think WoW has fantastic lore which is helped by many extremely good quest lines. Reducing the text substantially would just turn quests into "Go and kill that mob" exercise. Pointless.

At the moment it feels like there is a good balance, IMHO.

Oh, and Green Hills of Stranglethorn is probably up there with locust plagues in the list of evil things to be subjected to. Battle for Undercity was awesome. Sent shivers down my spine. :)

World of Goo is poetry

Connect your Wii to the net, and buy it on Wiiware shopping..... it's a very very good game.

On the other hand, any game that can be summed up as "first person shoot em up" is a shlock novel.

Worst quest

I'd submit the intro quest to Shattrath - follow the guide in a tour of the city. You can't skip it, you just have to listen to stuff like "and here's a typical Shattrath inn..." for what seems forever, following a guide that moves at sub-walking speed. At least in Battle for Undercity you can fight something, just to break the boredom.

Well,

Whilst I agree that reams and reams and reams of dialog do not a good computer game experience make, reducing everything to 'kill this guy, fetch this crap' is not the answer.

A good *unobtrusive* story with well written dialog can be appreciated by anyone. Locking the player's controls and spewing minutes of exposition at them is infuriating; especially if you come to play the game a second time. Non-awful, non-intrusive background dialog like GLADoS or the Halo marines adds a lot to the game, for example.

Many of my favourite games (fallout 2, deus ex, system shock) could be boiled down to 'kill this guy, fetch this thing' but would be significantly less entertaining without the story that went along with them.

And as for funny-feeling floaty vehicles; one thing I will say about Halo was that the vehicles felt fun. Seriously; fuck realism. You could blast around and speed and shoot stuff up. I don't want vehicles which wallow and turn and accelerate realistically and are a total pig to drive. Where's the fun in that?

Green Hills Of Stranglethorn

I just read up on that quest to find out what's so bad about it.. Find 28 pages of a book and bring them to some guy. Pages are dropped (at a poor drop rate) by random enemies in the area.

I'm really struggling to see how this is any different to all the other "Bring me X items" quests that basically make up the entirety of all MMORPGs.

Green Hills of Stranglethorn?

Goblin AH in Booty bay. Pick up the pages for a few silve. Hand in. Not bad, just pointless.

Worst qusts? The travel to ones, where the places you have to find are difficult to get to and have not direct path, and your following a f**king riddle.

WoWank

In other words the zombies who pay for WoW are mere battery hens and there's no point in wasting any effort whatsoever on the saps because they'll pony up the cash regardless.

@Mike Panero

Fucking great!

I agree that there's too mcuh text in MMOs, considering we all know everyone else reads it it makes it far less personal, less worth reading. Plus, why read when you could grind?

MMOs are boiled down to leveling and hoarding. You can't give people more than that and complain that tehy ignore it, you need to draw them into the game itself. I have plenty of ideas, but I'm not giving it to those pricks without money :)

Jaded?

What a jaded asshat. If he hates the way WoW is going that much, maybe he should just quit. With credentials like "I made the Green Hills quest" I'm sure he can get a job anywhere.

Green Hills of Stranglethorn

There's nothing wrong with this quest.

Buy them from AH .. complete quest.

Your in Strangkethorn for 30 levels or something, any you pick up in that time you put on AH and make your money back.

Simples

Getting anywhere takes ages in the game

For me personally the biggest problems aren't the quests, it's the time it takes to get from A to B even if you're flying by gryphon.

A game is supposed to be fun, and whilst some scenes that can be seen during a flight may or may not be interesting to see I would prefer to be actually playing the game than just sitting at the PC doing nothing whilst my character takes forever to actually get anywhere.

How can that be considered fun?

battle for undercity

err , that might be the 'worst'.. though I wouldnt' agree.

But the cinematic just before it is absolutely fantastic!

Finally did green hills, for an achievement. Even being able to kill mobs really easily it took soo lonnng, though at least the pages aren't soulbound so you can just get them from the AH.. ( supposedly)..

Still, whilst it's nice to not have long quest dialogues that need to be skipped through. I do like the speeches that some givers give. Having a sensible backdrop to plot makes the quests *far* more worthwhile. I suppose it goes back to wether you like to 'just go raiding' or enjoy leaping about in time in order to ensure Frosthoof ( or whoever) really did manage to kill the Northwind..

Not as bad as made out...

i actually thought Green hills was a handy 1... kinda got them all done solo handy enough and i didnt have to leave that map!

There's many more i didn't like that have you going all over the place just to give a note... pick up a parcel and then travel half way around the game world to drop it off... then you get another note and back and forward again....

Less text?

Hmm.. I'd have to disagree with the chap about less text. Maybe bringing back conversation trees would be a plus, rather than click, and get a 2 line "Do this". Put back a feel of interaction.

One thing I used to really enjoy playing games way back was following the back story in a quest, having a real tale unfold. Though you only want to see it once; it's always good to have options into the full text, or just choose the 'go straight there' text.

Long live storytelling..

Worst Warcraft Quest

The worst one has to be starting the damned thing. Get a (real) life.

O

Translation for the article:

Warcrack users don't need no stinkin' story, they're just hooked on mashing buttons.

The STV pages quest wasn't so bad.

The pages could be traded which creates some player interaction, it gave me a chance to make a packet buying/reselling them on the AH.

Heck worst STV quest has to be the Ackris Reed quest, the drop rate was utterly abysmal, it was improved 10 fold last year or so, its not bad now at all though.

I don't read the comments either

Dave

Rubbish

It may not be what's wanted in an MMORPG, but to put out the blanket statement that reams of text is always a bad idea is utterly wrong. What should be avoided is irrelevant exposition.

Planescape:Torment has repeatedly proved that an old RPG with vast amounts of text and very little fighting can consistently fit into the top ten RPGs ever made, even if it's not a mass market title in the way say Oblivion (also excellent, and also featuring dialog that's somewhat more than 511 characters) was.

Fallout? Fallout 2? Baldurs Gate 1 and 2? Morrowind? All need a degree of attention to engage with the game characters and extract the quests.

'Do Forest, come back at level 60' my arse. If you think mashing buttons is the only way to create gameplay then go for it. Some of the rest of us want a slightly more indepth gaming experience sometimes.

Teeheehee

' "You bet!" the PFY says. "First off, reject all the women."

"Why?"

"Because they're blokes pretending to be women." '

'tis true.

What's wrong with Green Hills Of Stranglethorn

"I just read up on that quest to find out what's so bad about it.. Find 28 pages of a book and bring them to some guy. Pages are dropped (at a poor drop rate) by random enemies in the area.

I'm really struggling to see how this is any different to all the other "Bring me X items" quests that basically make up the entirety of all MMORPGs."

The difference is: inventory space.

In a normal "bring me 20 tiger skins" quest, those skins stack and thus take up a single slot in your limited inventory. In the "Green Hills Of Stranglethorn" idiocy, you need 28 different slots. Because a Page 1 stacks only with other Page 1's, but doesn't stack with a Page 5.

To get an idea, as a newbie hunter who just made it to level 30 or so, you might have 1 bag of 16 slots (which you started with) and 3 other bags, say, 12 slots each. Yes, if you have an army of level 80 alts or your friends managed to convince you to take mining and skinning, you'll have money for slightly bigger bags. But if you're a newbie and was retarded enough to insist on taking, say, enchanting, you'll be dirt poor until you're level 70.

At any rate that's 3*12 + 16 = 36 + 16 = 52 inventory spaces _total_.

Asking you to dedicate _more_ _than_ _half_ of them to just one single quest, is freaking retarded.

Bear in mind that you'll also need inventory slots for other quest items, food for the hunter's pet, materials you harvested for your crafting profession, loot, etc.

The second problem is that the damned things drop even if you didn't take the quest, or dropped it. Doing _anything_ in Stranglethorn resulted in gazillions of pages that I didn't need, didn't want, and had to manually keep throwing away so they don't clog my bags.

Green Hills

It's not a simple grind x mob quest as any humanoid in STV can drop any of the pages. Most others, you have one group of things to kill and loot one named quest item. Here, since each item has a separate name, you are forced to find each one. You can end up with a stack of Page 1 and 8 other random pages, but are nowhere near the completion of the quest.

That being said, I always do a few quests and collect pages along the way. Whatever is missing, pick up on the AH to finish it off early. Any other pages that drop during the 15 level questing time here can go back on the AH.

I have never read it, will never read it and just mash buttons and ask QuestHelper what I need to grind next.

GHoS is fine...

GHoS is easy and no where near the worst.

There are 4 quests to complete chapters 1 - 4 (4, 4, 4 and 3 pages required, 15 pages in total to collect) and a final hand in all completed chapters together quest to make 5 easy quests.

Any pages you collect should be mailed to your level1 banker who will eventually collect (several times over) a complete set of pages. Mail a set back to your toon, run to quest giver, hand in. Easy XP.

Now it's the feckers in Shimmering Flats and Booty Bay I hate. There is a chain of quests that send you back and forth several times. Before they added the additional flight points and allowed mounts at 30, as an Alliance on a PVP server it was a nightmare. Run to Gadgetzan, fly to Theramore, run up the coast (probably about 10 minutes), get ganked in Ratchet by bored horde players, res, get ganked again, res, sneak on to boat and hope you don't get ganked again while it sails to Booty Bay. Drop in quest, get quest to travel back to Shimmering Flats, boat, gank, res, 10 minute run, fly, run to Shimmering Flats, drop quest, pick up another quest to go back to Booty Bay. FUCKERS!!!!!

@Richard Gadsden 'MMOs don't let you change POV'

I don't play MMO games, precisely because of all the button mashing, grinding and dumbed down plot that is illustrated in these comments, plus the fact you have to be stupid enough to pay for it every month. If I want to play simple games, I've got plenty of those.

Still, there is no reason why it shouldn't be possible to change POV. None of the situations you describe are impossible in MMO, although it may be necessary to make discrete single player/single party sections of the world (so that multiple players are simultaneously able to have a suitably lengthy exposition with their own individual instance of the NPC, and whilst their viewpoint is switched they can be protected from a rabid wolf gnawing their leg off. This must already happen, surely?).

I don't agree with 'show, don't tell'. TV, literature and interactive media are different media. It can be boring having to listen to someone tell you a complex story at length - this is why non interactive video media acts out the exposition. Books aren't necessarily graphic novels, so they use the power of the written word to achieve emotional impact.

On the other hand, interactive media (i.e. computers) are often neither wholly visual or textual. If the exposition relies on showing the prior situation, then show it. If, on the other hand, it doesn't lend itself to visualisation - use text, as that can be interpreted somewhat faster than listening.

eat it

MUDs FTW keep your skanky mmorpgs

Green hills?

...Isn't that a JTAG tool?

/Friday

hmm

I used to read the quests. Normally you had a chance to when you're flying somewhere or something. That said, if I was ever actually playing with someone else, I probably didn't have the time to read out the whole quest. My attention was elsewhere.

@ storng.bare.durid

Seriously, that is some of the best flavor text I have ever read.

------ON TOPIC------

I don't play WoW. However, I have seen what happens when translations cause the text to exceed hard-coded limits... I couldn't read more than half of the quest text in Granado Espada because of such limits. The same thing with in-game "broadcasts". The Koreans (Granado Espada is originally a Korean game) can say a LOT more in 80 characters than an english-speaker could.

that having been said, WoW did help set the standard for modern MMORPGs. I guess they know what they're doing.

Greenhills of Stranglethorn

Takes 5 minutes to complete. Go to AH, buy the entire quest, fly back to Stranglethorn Vale, hand it in.

One of the worst things about WoW is the way drops are handled. Relevant to the fucking quest, player, party or raid please. Yes I know why this isn't done, they want to force you to do the same thing over and over and over and over and over and over again until you get the bastard thing you wanted, but if something as simplistic as Warhammer can do it, so can WoW.

The pointlessness of repetitive questing is only outdone by the pointlessness of creating player levels. As if leveling was somehow worthwhile in of itself. Yes, repeating the same quests with different coloured monsters for slightly better items for 1-60, 60-70, 70-80 levels is awesome. When a designer comes along that realises most of us just want to get into the real game - the part that isn't the mindless grind of leveling, and also realises that leveling teaches you absolutely nothing worthwhile about the character type you are playing, then perhaps a real challenger to WoW will be created.

Most people don't realises when they first pickup an MMO that the real game starts when you're done with leveling your character. The best quests, dungeons and experiences are finally offered with character that have full sets of spells, weapons and skills. Each of these dungeons (raids) take normal people months to learn and then complete. The group play they require forces you to actually interact with other people, and isn't that what MMOs are supposed to be about? Not completing kill, fetch and carry quests for 30 days at a time. If you wanted that you could play one of the countless hack and slash games like diablo.