Burning Crusade: Questing Restrospective

The other day I was enjoying the nostalgia trip of leveling an alt through Burning Crusade content, and as I did so many, many long forgotten memories came to the surface. While I could spend this entire post reminiscing about the first time I saw Outland's breathtaking sky, was obliterated by a Fel Reaver while running in terror, or flew free from the tyranny of flight masters, I'd rather analyze Burning Crusade from a game design perspective.

There are number of aspects of Burning Crusade's design which were significant improvements over Vanilla, one of which was quest design. Quests changed in a couple of ways.

• Quests increased slightly in number while decreasing slightly in grind.
• Quests were split between several hubs in a given zone, rather than tied to a single large hub with a smattering of random quest-givers elsewhere.

While not as obvious as improvements that would come with later expansions, these changes had an extremely noticeable impact at the time. Both dramatically improved the questing experience even if most players weren't analytical enough to explain why questing was better. Less grind is rarely unappreciated, and not having to trudge across the entire length of a zone to find or turn in quests over and over again is a dramatic quality of life improvement.

Burning Crusade questing still had flaws. Quests were designed with the assumption that a player would pick up all the quests at a hub, complete them, and return. Players failing to complete all the quests at once often ended up going back to the same areas of the zone over and over again as quest chains became desynced. Moreover, the area covered by hubs was still extremely elastic to the point where multiple hubs would have quests in the same areas, requiring players to create complicated roadmaps for optimal leveling. This was a mess that Wrath of the Lich King would clean up, but at the time was still a marvelous step up from what came before.

Sometimes you only need slight changes to make vast improvements. It's unfortunate that this lesson wasn't one Blizzard applied in other areas followed Burning Crusade.

Game Design: Choice, Options

Choice is an important concept in game design. I would go so far to say that choice is the essential difference between movies and games; choice puts the audience in control.

There is a lot I could say philosophically about choice, its impact on gameplay, and how developers both use and abuse it. However, today I'm going to zero my focus on a very specific and limited aspect of choice, options.

Options are generally overlooked as an aspect of game design. Who cares about the player's ability to tweak graphical, audio, and controller settings when there's a game to be made? Yet, options define the player's experience almost as much as any other aspect of the game.

For example, a bad mapping of actions to the buttons/analog sticks on a controller can make a game unplayable. Despite this, with surprising frequency many games only implement the bare minimum for controller settings. In such cases you might find one or two preset button layouts with a single toggle for inverted look on the analog sticks. If a player does not find these preset layouts comfortable, intuitive, or enjoyable the game is ruined.

It is therefore critical to allow players to customize these types of user interface issues to their specifications. Just as a movie must be in focus, and a book must be printed legibly, a game needs to have a user interface that does not separate the audience from the medium. Options go a long way in attending to the huge diversity that exists in personal preferences.

So, let's examine a few examples of options whose presence or lack thereof added to or detracted from a game.

Case 1: Tetris

An interesting aspect of Tetris is the options it had available. At the time very few games had options, and those that did were fairly limited. Tetris, however, had options for changing music, adding a handicap, and even starting at a more difficult level. All of these helped the replayability of the game immensely. As spiffy as the music was, being able to turn it off helped preserve sanity after several hours of play. Once you got very good, being able to up the ante early on erased the slow, early part of the game. Tetris, and a few other pioneering games, redefined what it meant to have options.

Case 2: Smash Brothers

Smash Brothers is a game renowned for its customizability, with one exception. While all other items and settings have always been ridiculously thorough and deep to the point of insanity, each game in the series has overlooked adding an option to select which Pokemon will come out of the pokeballs.

This is a very, very small detail, and detracts only a little from the series, but has nonetheless remained a very obvious opportunity that remains overlooked. Two of the games even feature challenge modes where the developers restrict Pokemon themselves, tormenting players who with to have that power.

Case 3: Battle.net 2.0

Battle.net 2.0, and specifically RealID, is the catalyst for this entry. RealID is the ability to "friend" other players on a first-name (rather than anonymized codename) basis, allowing you to see them as online no matter what game they are playing. The ability to track good friends and relatives in this manner while you're playing games is a neat feature.

The problem with RealID is in its options. RealID is an all or nothing feature-set. You can't friend someone through RealID and not have them appear in your list of friends with their full name followed by their account name. You can't choose not to have your list of RealID friends visible to all your RealID friends. You either add friends through RealID and subject yourself to all the features you like and all the features you don't like, or you opt out entirely.

This failure to break RealID down into separate, optional features has been a major sticking point for many players. In fact, it has been such a problem during testing that the developers had to intentionally break other options in order to force players to test the RealID system. RealID simply wasn't something the testers wanted to use because they couldn't turn off the features they didn't like.


The thread which joins these cases together is a simple principle: options should allow a player to do something they want. Tetris players will often want to get to the exciting fast-paced portion of the game, and so giving them an option to skip to that portion makes sense. Battle.net 2.0 users may not want to identify their friends by their full names, or for their friends list to be readily visible, and so failing to provide an option to disable these features is a critical oversight. Players that can mold the game to their needs will always be happier than players who are forced into specific implementations.

So when deciding on options, be very careful when making assumptions about player needs. Considering everything individually, and whether it makes sense for certain things to be immutable or joined together. If a deadline is your reason to avoid implementing an option, so be it, but make certain that you have at least that as a reason rather than nothing at all.