Jeff Kaplan: recommendation

Transcript context

…Sure. Yeah, there were actually a lot of people involved in it, and they all kind of contributed in their own unique ways. Alan Adham was the lead designer on WoW. When we first sort of decided we were gonna have a quest-based game, we used to joke that, like, EverQuest barely had any quests in it. It did have quests, they just… They weren’t really in front of the player in an obvious way. You kind of had to seek them out on a website. And Alan knew that he wanted quests to be a big part of World of Warcraft. And so he hired me. That was my entry level position at Blizzard. And on the same day, he hired a guy named Pat Nagle, which was hilarious to me, because Pat was the… He had this funny title of HR and Facilities at Blizzard, because it was such a small company. So, like, if you sent an application in, Pat would deal with the application, or if the toilet overflowed, Pat would have to deal with it. And so the whole time I was applying at Blizzard, I was going through Pat, and then on my first day, they put Pat and I in an office together, and he’s like, “Yeah, they hired me also as the quest designer.” And so Pat… And he was the most wonderful guy. We had so much fun. So Pat and I kind of designed the quest system. It was Alan’s idea to have it in the first place. And then there was that great designer I mentioned, Eric Dodds, who helped a lot with the interface of it all. And the idea was… At first, we actually on a whiteboard in Alan’s office, we estimated how many quests we thought EverQuest had to date. And EverQuest had had, you know, I think four or three expansions at that point in time, and we’re like, “Wow, we have to make all of these quests like EverQuest has.” It’s gonna be a lot of quests, and it’s kind of up to me and Pat to do it all. And we believed all we had to do was match that EverQuest number. And Pat and I started working on, like, the design of the system and how it would interact, and Eric Dodds was really involved in how the interface… You know, like how you were going to interact with the NPCs and all of that. And we split up the world into like two zones. He was gonna take Elwynn Forest, which was the starting area for the humans, and I was gonna take Westfall, which was the sophomore zone after Elwynn for the humans. Pat and I would meet with Chris Metzen, and those were the funnest meetings ever because Chris just has stories in his head and visions. Chris is, like, artist, storyteller, world builder extraordinaire, and he sort of described what he wanted going on in those zones. You know, you want the gameplay to follow the flow of what was going on with the stories of those areas. So we finished Elwynn and Westfall, and we did, like, a team play test. And our assumption was because the way EverQuest worked, players just wanted to level up. It was a level based game. hose areas. So we finished Elwynn and Westfall, and we did, like, a team play test. And our assumption was because the way EverQuest worked, players just wanted to level up. It was a level based game. You go out. You kill a creature. You get experience points. You level up a little bit. And so the way people played EverQuest is they’d find these areas where there were lots of creatures, and you’d usually find the best experience efficiency cycle you could find, so, like, fast respawn kind of easy things to kill, and that’s how you would progress through EverQuest. And I remember Alan kind of telling us, like, “Hey, the quests… When Pat and Jeff write quests, they’ll aim us to where the creatures are.” You’ll do a quest, and then you’ll spend a few hours killing creatures in that area afterwards, and that’s how he imagined it would work. So we kind of set up the world that way. You know, Pat probably did a dozen, maybe 20 quests in Elwynn. I’d do a dozen, 20 quests in Westfall, and we’d do this team play test. And we had a bunch of people on the team who never played MMOs, like guys with shooter background, you know, StarCraft fans, et cetera. And they’d play World of Warcraft. I think we played for, like, an hour or two, and we only did Elwynn Forest. And the overwhelming feedback from our team… And these are people who really didn’t play EverQuest, they’re like—My God, Pat, that was horrible. I ran out of quests, like, right away. And we’re like, wait a second. You expect to just have quests just keep going? And they’re like, yeah, we expect to have quests just keep going the whole way. And we kinda had an oh shit moment right after that Elwynn Forest play test, where we realized, like, we had vastly underestimated the number of quests we were gonna need. And we changed, we developed this philosophy that’s kind of a shared philosophy across Blizzard games in general at this point. And I’ve heard it outside of Blizzard, other people in the industry, which is you design along the path of least resistance. So, basically what that means, like, in EverQuest, the path of least resistance if you wanted your character to hit max level is to find the easiest creatures and kill them over and over again in place, which to some people think is very boring. To me, I would do that for eight hours ’cause I think that’s fun. But we decided in World of Warcraft, we said, why don’t we make the path of least resistance, so in this case, the way to get the best experience the fastest not to be killing creatures in one place, but will overload the experience into the quests themselves, and then that will move you through the world, which will get you to see everything. It will enable us to tell these awesome storylines. It sort of did a lot for the game, and I think it was like a fundamental change in the genre. Like, if you look at the things that… EverQuest was very popular and very successful, and it was hitting like hundreds of thousands of players. And WoW blew the doors open and was tens of millions of players. you look at the things that… EverQuest was very popular and very successful, and it was hitting like hundreds of thousands of players. And WoW blew the doors open and was tens of millions of players. And I think the fundamental difference there was that WoW allowed you to play as a single player. And what makes an MMO, massively multiplayer online game, massive is having the other people there. And they’re so important or else the world feels kind of wrong and dead. But the concept that we have to force you to interact with them to do anything is very off-putting to a lot of people. And the fact that people could come into WoW and just kind of the game design, the game design way of des- describing it is directed gameplay. And some games have extremely tight directed gameplay. Like, for example, if you were to play a single player game like Last of Us, you know, you’ll have those moments where they’ll be like, you’ll come up to a log and then press triangle to duck or else, or whatever the duck button is- … left stick to duck to go under. And that’s like the ultimate in directed gameplay. Like, they’re telling you exactly what to do. On the other end of the spectrum is a game like Minecraft, like vanilla Minecraft, where you’ll find it’s very divisive amongst gamers who love Minecraft or hate it. The ones who hate it are like, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.” Like, “You drop me in this world. I’m supposed to dig or something.” And that’s the type of player that needs directed gameplay or they’re gonna cycle out. Not all players need it. And what WoW did, that it doesn’t seem like an innovation, it doesn’t seem like revolutionary, but it sort of created this directed gameplay that felt optional, but really wasn’t.…

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