[2022] Live Chat with Developers -- Quest Design

We’ve just concluded a live chat among several WoW Community Council members and our three Lead Quest Designers for Dragonflight. The discussion went for 90 minutes and ranged across many quest design topics such as the balance between campaign quests and local-story quests, and the ways that player feedback have impacted how designers approach creating and implementing quests.

Please feel free to continue the discussion here.

One of the Lead Quest Designers ended the live chat with questions:

If you’re the sort of WoW player who typically skips quest content altogether, especially at the beginning of a patch when that content is first released, why do you do that, and what do you imagine could be changed about the game that might result in you becoming more interested in / likely to play quest content?

If you’re a player who feels that you must reach max level as quickly as possible at the start of an expansion, can you explain why that’s the case?

Of course, we’ve heard some reasons:

• To prepare for Raiding or Mythic+ dungeons on multiple characters.
• To keep up with your friends who are leveling as fast as possible.

But you may have another answer.

We’ve also long tracked the debate among players about whether episodic or time-gated quest content is a good thing that helps address the issues above. If you have thoughts, please let us know where you come down on that subject.

Thanks for your feedback and discussion!

I’d like to respond to that with a couple of thoughts I believe I heard from Quest Leads today:

1. Players don’t need to play questlines on alts at all if they don’t want to. One of our goals with Adventure Mode in Dragonflight to give your alts as much freedom as possible.

2. We put a lot of focus on making quests fun. “Kill 30 of something” is a quest type that, ideally, we’re implementing much less often, while we design more and more quests that we feel players might enjoy revisiting (or visiting for the first time on an alt if they didn’t do it at all when leveling their main).