Is it just me, or is the quality of the writing in quest text going downhill fast? Everytime I pick up a quest, I read it, then re-read it, then read it a third time and still have no idea what the NPC is trying to say. Every time I do this, I feel like my brain is being violated somehow. It’s like a simulated stroke. It feels like a crime against written language itself. And I don’t even mean the typos and grammatical errors every third sentence. It’s as if an AI was fed a series of key words which it then vomited out into a sentence which was then translated and retranslated into what we have now.
The written directions should be be simple, direct, and to the point. I shouldn’t come away from reading the quest text more confused than I was before reading it. As an example,
Quest: 10 Bear Asses for NPC
Text: “We need bear asses. There are bears in the woods to the east. Kill them and bring me their asses.”
What we have instead is more like this:
Quest: A Strange ReQuest
NPC: “They are attacking the things! And we just ran out of chicken soup. This is horrible! We don’t know what happened when the things do what they did! To make matters worse, abominable dire creations are gloriously galavanting in the trees! Henceforth, we must enact something about it straightforwardly!”
If “typos and errors” are prevalent enough to start a thread whining about them, surely you can provide some examples. I think I noticed like 1 or 2 while questing. Couldn’t tell you which quests…probably because it doesn’t matter in the slightest.
I read all of the quests when I play my monk replaying Pandaria content. With Dragonflight… I just can’t be interested. There isn’t as much story and feeling in new quest text.
The Horde quest in Krasarang Wilds titled, “Blind Them!” has a couple errors. They simply didn’t capitalize “Sunwalkers” and “Horde”. It doesn’t really matter but there are quests that have errors.
Remember when the quests were puzzles? Even kill quests didn’t tell you what to kill or where, you just had to roam around until you found the type of mob that dropped the specific item? Those were crazy times… especially when the ‘clue’ was a LONG way from the quest giver.
I remember the vanilla quests and I replayed them again when Classic came out. They gave very detailed explanations on where to go and what to do. Like, “Go East 40 paces then turn North at the giant tree stump and the mobs will be in the town on the right behind the hill” levels of specific. I blame the map marker Addons for killing quest design.
I miss the cataclysm first person quests.
Like the Eel killing quests in Cataclysm.
Those were written very well, and I don’t think we really had anything like that since.
Stuff like this:
"You have found something. This something looks like it’s a something that Local-NPC-Name wouldn’t like. You might want to continue killing the things that were originally in possession of this something to collect all the rest of the somethings and thus eliminate a threat to Local-NPC-Name. He’ll probably want to offer you a reward in gratitude as well.
You are a hero that does things like this, after all. It’s basically your job at this point. "
He’s literally complaining about both in his original post.
I’m not sure how you can play this game for any amount of time without figuring out that quest windows are formatted with flavor text, and then a more concise sentence/paragraph of instructions below it:
