most quests now feel unclear or outright bugged. it seems like blizzard barely does QA on quest design anymore. a lot of them give no proper instructions, almost as if they expect players to go straight to wowhead for answers.
the irony is they keep claiming they want players to depend less on addons and outside guides, yet the quest design is so weak that you have no choice.
this is what happens when you push out skilled developers and designers and replace them with c-level staff who dont know what theyre doing…likely the result of microsofts takeover.
Decline? The quest design was never good. What quests aren’t clear for you? I did the dumb bee quests yesterday and feel everything was rather straight forward and all the other Karesh quests, nothing seemed vague.
Quests truly are difficult. You have to talk to an NPC, which is the most difficult part. Then you have to hit an accept button. The instructions arent always clear how to use the accept button but it can be quite complex at times. Then theres a quest log you have to open. The game can make it quite a task by telling you exactly where the quest log button is. its daunting to figure this step out. then a marker is on your map and in the game field. why they put a marker in the game to show you where to go is beyond me, its all rather confusing.
Honestly there have been a couple quests where I’ve definitely needed Wowhead, especially the Warrant: Purple Peat ones. Holy heck some of them don’t say where to go or what to get or how to get what you need… I don’t think I’ve ever been as confused/frustrated at quests as those ones.
And yeah I’m finding a lot of weird bugs, like even moving or selling items, or transmog. I was changing equipment and then it became duplicate equipment… transmog would show correctly in the window but not in the open world… all the having to reload or relog… it definitely feels rough.
It isn’t news that they fired a ton of people… So you probably got a whole 2 people in QA left
From what I hear from people who directly report stuff to them, they are just very overworked.
And we also had that other dev who recently left because he was also being overworked. It doesn’t look like it’s a good working environment at the moment… And all the talent also leaves for higher paying jobs cause blizzard also underpays.
Pretty sure they do, for the most part they are not wrong on that.
I feel like for the most part with the changes they did with quest objectives, waypoint markers and auras on interactive objects it’s pretty easy for the even the most illiterate people to get by.
Maybe I’m overestimating people?
Design where the quest has text which explains generally what to do, has markers on the map for where to go, has a giant ! or ? over the NPC, etc.
Design where quests have scripted steps and somewhere during the steps, the text disappears, map markers don’t show, the next step doesn’t load, the log just says ‘wait for blah blah’, and only relogging will update the game to progress and show text, objectives, map markers, ! or ?, and such.
People too dumb to read the quest and look at the map deserve what they get.
But no amount of reading comprehension or map skills will help with the buggy mess that seems to come with every new patch.
You get to hub with a large unexplored world outside, load up your quest log to the brim with mostly local quests dealing with local concerns, then head out and explore and adventure only limited by how much bag space you have to bring junk back to sell.
Then you come back and turn in quests by the half dozen for the rewards and experience.
Now, it’s a very curated on rails experience where you’re drip fed two or three quests at a time with hand holding all the way.
And they’ve definitely gone much more female / social type quests, meet the people, talk to them, stay a while and listen, instead of the male / beat it with a stick until it’s fixed type quests.
Yeah when it’s bugged, doesn’t show on the map, or if the quest text doesn’t have any instructional details. Sadly most quests that have funky map issues often also don’t have any real instructions so it’s been a pain, at least for me occasionally.
It’s all like you said, at least until you have to reload or log in/out to get parts of the main quest to progress or the game to process the next chain
Also, lots of NPCs will not let me hit complete. It’s like a dead html button. I have to go for a walk come back and then hit complete
