WoW players rack up an incredible 16.6 million completed quests every single day, lead designer Jeff Kaplan has revealed. That means the 11 million story army of international World of Warcraft players is farming 11,520 quests each minute or 192 per second. Even after five years at the top of the MMO hit list, WoW is showing absolutely no signs of giving up its top spot.
True; most of the millions of quests turned in each day will simply involve looting useless trinkets from perfectly innocent Murloc tribes who never did anything but wander around in some dingy Azeroth backwater waiting to be robbed, but it’s still an impressive figure.
More impressive is the fact that there are now 7,650 available quests in WoW’s massively multiplayer online universe, which includes two expansions, The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King. Back when the game first launched, there were a mere 2600 quests to undertake. And incredibly, the bulk of these missions were dreamed up by a core team of just five designers.
“We actually feel like we can’t let that team get too big without endangering quality,” Kaplan told GDC attendees. “We feel like we’ve got a lot of quest-making gurus at this point, and we like the energy that they have and the way that they work together.”
Kaplan also shared some interesting thoughts on the problems that other MMOs face when taking on the mighty WoW. He encouraged rival developers not be afraid of imitating WoW’s design decisions. For example, when it comes to highlighting quest NPCs, he said “Just put the exclamation point, why come up with a unique crazy icon? Everyone knows what it is.”
Yeah, you say that Jeff, but when Fallout 3 does it everyone says the DLC is broken…
Out now | £7.99 (expansion packs sold seperately) plus subscription | WoW (via Eurogamer) (Available from HMV)
