In the last few years i’ve come to very much dislike the questhubbing part of WoWs expansions.
We went from vanilla huge zones with quests that could take up half an hour, to very compact zones where you pick up 3 to 5 quests from a hub you can finish all in 5 min flat.
What I like about huge zones is that they give you rest, a place to travel and take in the sights. I like that I need to cross 60 seconds of terrain where there are no mobs. There’s just me and the road, and a tune in the background.
I understand that some people are different. Some like things crammed, within hand-reach, multitasking 10 things while watching Netflix at the same time. It’s how the bulk of last generations are wired; instant access, instant rewards, instant dopamine kicks.
But somehow, I wonder, if you can truly ever feel satisfaction about something that cost you 2 minutes to do. I don’t think so, and that’s why after those 2 minutes, you’re forced to feed them another 2 minute crumb, and another, and another, to keep that impression of sustenance going.
It’s only after replaying Classic that I realized why questing was so much more interesting to me in vanilla. It actually engaged me with the world for a while. Say what you will about collecting 60 of some low drop chance crap, but in doing so, I learned every attack of the mobs, where they spawned, I knew every hill and pit of the zone I was in. I connected to the place. I connected to every place within a zone, and eventually I connected to the world as I knew almost every detail of all the zones by heart.
In retail, quests go so fast, I hardly know any of that stuff. I’m doing beta Dragonflight atm, and while again the graphic design team knocked it out of the park, I can’t help but feel that I’m on a train rushing me through this world.
I believe there’s a balance to be found somewhere in the quest design. I think, for a next expansion, you need to go back to huge barrens like zones, and rekindle the wanderlust you’ve lost in modern WoW. For those who would fidget the whole way, you need to find other ways to keep their short attention spans occupied (but seriously, I also believe this dopamine addiction needs to be addressed sometime), and have certain things people can do while on route, like scanning things, inspecting flora and fauna that would fill up certain achievements and possibly give boons. The world needs to be more engaging on its own (maybe through expanding professions even more, f.i. maybe a kind of surveying gameplay that improves yields when mining/herb, making exploration a lot more intricate than just arriving somewhere and having the ‘discovered x’ achievement popping, maybe we need an explorer’s journal with 100s of items to fill).
Have a lot less quests but more meaningful ones. A quest should take you about 15 minutes to complete, some could take up an hour. A quest should also not just be ‘kill 10 of this or fetch 10 of that’ and not ‘go there and click something and watch 10 minutes of exposition’.
When I “read” a quest in retail, I just scroll down to the reward. Doing the quest in itself is often a boring chore, which I don’t really enjoy, and all of them are almost identical. I run in, perform my combat rotation, everything dies within 10 seconds, and I rush back to complete the quest.
Quests should be a lot more elaborate, and that’s why you need a lot less of them (because I don’t expect you to design 200+ memorable quests). I would rather pick up a 'kill 1000 of this mob" which I would carry with me through an entire zone to complete, with a kickass reward at the end, than have 100 of these quests with crap I’m selling to a vendor on completion.
You need maybe 5 quests per zone. Why are we in that zone? What’s happening there? How can we help the (sub)plot forward? Other than that the world should just be an open playground. You investigate a subterranean 10 level down goblin den and at the end you find some stuff that you can turn in for some rep or certain items, and you can do stuff like that or other things all over the zone, wherever you are. You gain knowledge of the lore, the fauna and flora, if you want. You gain proficiencies in combat and exploration while doing so. You unlock or craft items that open up other parts of the zone to you (you make a diving bell and you can now explore the deep), etc.
A quest could be to make something, that requires 5 things, all scattered throughout the zone. One’s at the bottom of the ocean in shark infested waters, one’s in a dungeon, one takes you up the highest mountain in a dangerous climb, one’s in the stomach of a beast (1% drop chance of a certain animal), one’s in a maze that changes while you’re inside. At the end of this quest is again a significant reward.
I should be engaged with the world, not my quest tracker (or Questie).
On a side note, your reward structure is blatantly designed to maximize player engagement, just as bland as that sentence sounds. You’re still designing a dopamine trickle, instead of creating rewarding gameplay. The game needs to be the biggest reward in the first place.
But, this goes back to having too many uninteresting quests, and because you don’t know how to make hundreds of quests interesting, you just hope the rewards will entice the addict in us. It’s toxic quest design.
I hope this game will one day regain it former glory and even surpass it, but it’s not going to happen by modelling after Korean games, or any other current games for that matter (although you could learn something about exploration from Subnautica f.i.).
I just think you need to slow down. Combat should be fast paced and exciting, but the other parts of the game should let you breathe.
Let other companies make themselves crazy (Twitter, Tiktok,…) by trying to blow a days content though your brain in 10 second nuclear spikes. We can revisit that when posthumanism can provide us with the necessary cyberimplants, but as of yet, this is not the healthiest way to go about your life…