A lot of talk has been happening about World of Warcraft, and what they did so right to enjoy such success. The general consensus amongst most observers is that, well, there just isn’t a lot new there. And so, unsatisfied with the response that people came because the game was simpler and dumbed down from standard RPG fare, people have been asking what is it about WoW that the hardcore gamers have decided is better? The same answers keeping coming up: the quests and the lack of a grind.

Which is interesting, of course. EQ and SWG certainly has quests. WoW’s quests have more charm and humor than most, and their GUI is nice, but their quest engine isn’t any more advanced than the competitions. And WoW certainly isn’t the first to try to speed up the grind either – Shadowbane’s advancement is much faster, and City of Heroes beat WoW to the ‘quests can be most of your grind’ punch. Yet both SB and CoH are seen as being somewhat grindalicious. In the meantime, in WoW, you still have to kill 400 murlocs to get 20 murloc spleens, but people don’t see it as grinding. What’s the deal here?

In my opinion, what WoW did so right is what I call ‘pattern-breaking’. Which is to say, it’s not a function of what the quest engine can do, but rather how they use it to break people out of patterns.

By way of explanation, it bears pointing out that most MMOs, rather inadvertently, end up shrinking their own content down in some way. Players are incredibly efficient at finding the fastest way to advance, and designers sometimes accidentally make design and balance decisions that help this along. Some ways that designers end up shrinking their own content:

  • Bonuses: If your paladin has more spells that do more damage against undead, what do you think he’s going to kill a lot of?
  • Special Attacks and Penalties: Gee, that monster gives almost the same rewards as this monster, but there’s a chance it might poison me. Guess what I’m gonna fight?
  • Location. I don’t want to go to the middle of nowhere, and then have to run all the way back to town to train when I level. Might as well stay close to home.
  • PVP Considerations: If I go over there and grind, I’m a gonna risk getting ganked, just as grinding has put me in a hypnotic haze. Better stay over here.

Many games have screwed this up, in small and subtle ways. In Star Wars Galaxies, I remember, the rewards for killing the flying bat things were better than for everything else (probably had something to do with me being a Master Armorsmith). So because I could choose my own randomly generated quests, I chose the flying bat thing quests every time. Man, I got so sick of killing those, but all of the other content may as well not have existed.

City of Heroes has the quest tracks that have you killing a lot of the same monsters to complete one story. In my case, it was zombies. So I killed a lot of zombies as a newbie. To the point of being sick of them.

As for the game I work on, Shadowbane, we have a ton of different monsters and zones, but due to the PVP/siege system, there are clearly defined areas of ‘turf’ on the map. As such, people are likely to only want to kill stuff in the zones right next to them, for fear of starting an International Incident that’ll plunge their nation into chaos. As such, even though we’ve got the fastest levelling in the industry, you’re killing one thing over and over again. (Thankfully, PvE isn’t the core of our experience)

What the WoW quest engine does right is that it convinces you that quests are the best way to advance in the game, and then lets you have 20 of them at a time. Thus, once you kill 400 murlocs and get 20 murloc spleens, you’re done with them. There’s a sense of closure , and there’s a finger prodding you to go in a different direction. You’re DONE with murlocs, go somewhere else. This is a far from from my EQ experience, where I gained 5 straight levels killing lizardmen in the same spot over the course of… days or weeks. The difference? A quest, telling me “Okay, you’re done here. Move along.”

The other thing is that, in WoW, a quest is a valuable commodity. It’s the fast way to bypass the grind, and everyone’s natural inclination is to do every one that they can get their hands on (especially if you’re a completionist like myself). Once you’re out of quests, you can’t get another from a handy quest-o-matic like you can in some games. So you’re going to do even the tough ones: the elite ones that require full parties, the wretched underwater ones that require you to suddenly maneuver in 3D space, and the ones against the monsters with vicious poisons or other special attacks you’d normally bypass.

Why is this important? Because not only is the straight grind boring, it’s also not particularly healthy. Repetitive activity can be downright soul sucking. Killing only unchallenging monsters results in a bored playerbase. And all of the above serves to shrink your game. By simply breaking people out of these unhealthy patterns, and giving them good reasons to go see all of the content, WoW has managed to change all of the perceptions about grinding in their game. And in MMOs in general.

Original comments thread is here.