World of Warcraft GDC Panel
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Former World of Warcraft lead designer and current next-gen Blizzard MMO director Jeffrey Kaplan today detailed a behind-the-scenes system of drop percentages secretly added in the WoW expansion Wrath of the Lich King.Edge transfer the list of flaws in WoW Kaplan discussed.
The system, called "progressive percentages," was cribbed directly from Blizzard's own Warcraft 3, which used it for critical hit mechanics. It relates to how and when quest items drop from creatures--an important issue to all WoW players.
"Too Long, Didn't Read": That quote comes from a WoW forum post referring to quests that are too lengthy in their descriptions. (It's great to limit people on how much pure text that they can force on the player," Kaplan says. Blizzard's quest editor limits the amount of characters to 511.And finally back to Shacknews for WoW by the numbers.
On a related note is what Kaplan calls "Medium Envy," which describes when long-winded videogame writing appears to want to be like books or films. (We need to stop writing fucking books in our games because there are lots of better books out there," he finds. He's not against story in games, though. (We need to deliver our story that is uniquely videogame.)
The jam-packed presentation also saw the release of many World of Warcraft statistics, including the average number of quests completed daily, and the circumstances that led to the extremely popular MMO sporting, at last count, some 7650 different quests.
* Between 6/30/2007 and 3/5/2009, some 8,570,222,436 quests were completed in the World of Warcraft.
* Daily average of quests completed: 16,641,209
Kaplan, now working on Blizzard's next MMO, talked about designing the original release of World of Warcraft, saying that the first total quest target was 600. This number was a result of needing to compete with EverQuest's estimated 1200 quests--a total that he and others estimated by looking at EverQuest "spoiler sites."
