How Does The Quest Chains Help Make World of Warcraft

Jeff Kaplan, who's now known as the director and face of Overwatch, started his career as a quest designer on World of Warcraft. Speaking on a recent episode of the AIAS Game Maker's Notebook podcast, hosted by Insomniac boss Ted Price, Kaplan told a story of how he, his fellow quest designer Pat Nagle, and Blizzard co-founder Allen Adham pieced together the quest chains that helped make World of Warcraft such a sensation.

"We came up with a bunch of different templates," Kaplan said. "It really was a matter of trial-and-error. Early on, I remember sitting with Allen and trying to predict how many quests the game would need. We were sort of using EverQuest, and Asheron's Call, and Dark Age of Camelot, we were looking at other big world games and just making a gut call of how many quests we thought we would need.”

To start, Kaplan said, he and Nagle split up the first two prototype zones. He took the forest of Elwynn; Nagle took the farmland Westfall. Then, Kaplan said, he put around a dozen quests into Elwynn, thinking that players would fill in the blanks themselves.

"We came from this very EverQuest mindset which was, you'll have a few quests which will take you to an area, then once you're in that area, you'll be excited there are creatures to fight, then you'll fight the creatures for a few hours and eventually get bored and then look for a new quest after that," he said, "We were so wrong.”

It was those complaints that led World of Warcraft's team to come up with the quest chains that shipped with the game—seemingly never-ending sequences of missions that would guide you from location to location, giving you a stream of incentives to grind and level up. By peppering the game with tasks—even mundane tasks—Blizzard was able to hook even the players who had hated grinding mobs in previous multiplayer games.