The original World of Warcraft—no bells, no frills, no expansions—was a very special videogame. It was also occasionally insufferably annoying. Part of the reason it was so successful is because it was less annoying than the competition at the time, sure, but it also had some real stinkers when it came to quest design.
One of those stinkers is The Green Hills of Stranglethorn, a quest that tasks you to find a bunch of randomly-dropped pages at the behest of one Hemet Nesingwary. It is a major pain in the ass. Jeff Kaplan, who designed the thing during his stint at Blizzard, explains why to Lex Fridman in an interview this week.
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“[The quest] holds a lot of emotional value for me because amongst WoW players back in the day it was unanimously hated as one of the sh*ttiest, most annoying quests,” Kaplan explains. “But it holds a really special place in my heart, because first of all it was one of the few times I just wrote a short story that’s actually in the game. It’s me paying homage to Hemingway.”
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It was also, as he colourfully puts it, “the typical hubris of a junior game designer who thinks he’s clever but is actually a dipsh*t. That’s The Green Hills of Stranglethorn summed up.”
The problem was, per Kaplan, that it was an “ant farm” quest—which is a conceptual term used to describe a designer playing god: “You’re the game designer who’s playing god and players are the ants in your ant farm and you want to see what they’re gonna do (which is not the correct way to be a good multiplayer designer), but I hadn’t learnt that yet.
“[It] was an ant farm design of ‘I’m gonna write this (honestly probably pretty sh*tty story, I haven’t read it since 2003 so god only knows if it’s any good) … I wrote the story, and then I divided it up into all these different pages.” Out of curiosity, I read it—it’s a fun little Hemingway send up, nothing wrong with it. Probably not worth the quest, though.
See, there were a lot of problems with the mechanics of the quest itself—the pages didn’t stack, and you could find multiple of the same ones, leading to a ton of inventory bloat and, if you were trying to do the quest on your own, complete and utter surrender to the RNG gods.
There were four pages per chapter, and you needed to collect all four chapters, leading to a total of 16 individual items that could clutter up your inventory even if you didn’t have duplicates. Sure, you could compress the pages into chapters once you got all four of them, but—it sucked, is what I’m saying.
“It was kind of like that McDonalds Monopoly game where you have to have all the pieces or else you’re not gonna win … I don’t think that idea in a vacuum is horrible, but where this really fell apart was that the interface of World of Warcraft wasn’t really set up [for it].”
“Players had very limited bag space. And as they’re fighting in Stranglethorn Vale, I’m just sh*tting up their inventory with all these pages. They only needed so many! You might be unlucky and get like, three page fives, that’re just junk in your inventory.
“That was my fantasy as a designer of like—and then they’re gonna be social and meet each other and players are gonna be appreciative of each other! Eventually no-one did the quest, they just were super annoyed and went to the Auction House.”
On the plus side, Kaplan says that “it not only became a way from me to learn from my mistakes—but because I was very open with the fact that I didn’t think it was good, and that the quest had failed, it opened the door for us at Blizzard to be critical of our own work.” Hey! Swings and roundabouts. At least it’s not a 19-quest long chain about bees.
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