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by Mike Schramm 
Apr 2nd 2009 at 5:00PM
One of the most interesting things we heard from Jeff Kaplan last week (besides that he agrees the Green Hills quest sucks; won't do that one again) was that quest designers are given only 511 characters (not words) to put their quest text in.It's surprising to think that they've created all the backstory, throughout Azeroth, in just 511 characters at a time. But even Kaplan said the limit is a good thing: it means Blizzard has to show story to the player rather than tell it.
Still, doesn't seem easy to
Crap. Out of room -- that's 511 characters. Of course, they can fudge things a bit by having those "story quests" where characters can use multiple pages to build up their background, and the 511-character limit doesn't apply to all of the dialogue -- some of the later quests have pages and pages of dialogue as the quest goes on. But squeezing enough information to keep a player interested in just 511 characters is quite a feat.
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Odds and ends, Blizzard, Quests
Reader Comments (Page 2 of 2)
Keyra Apr 2nd 2009 8:03PM
I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that so many people these days, with the instant gratification that our society demands - i.e.; 1-minute microwave burritos and lots of eye candy and explosions to keep our interest in our daily "entertainment" from television - is that we have become a bunch of people plagued with Attention Deficit...............ooooo....shiny!
(Runs off to play with the butterfly)
BunnyGirl Apr 2nd 2009 8:32PM
i lol'd
Elliott Apr 2nd 2009 9:33PM
I'm willing to bet that with that much practice, they could write personal statements and keep their "judges" intrigued to say the least. Granted they're prob. out of college anyways.
Yats Apr 2nd 2009 10:46PM
For old world, They should up the character limit to 1022 halve the amount of quests and double the exp for quicker levelling :P
1-60 in half the time!
(logistically it wouldn't wok - but it's be great to halve the leveling time while still telling the whole story :))
Ilem Apr 3rd 2009 12:53AM
I think of myself as the cause for quite a bit of TL;DRism, so I'm more than happy to have been bumped upside the head with the quest text limit. It's so obvious, few would have thought of it as an effective way to keep the game going.
I still hold that the WotLK quest designers have greatly upped their game as far as storytelling goes, but once in a while, I become a guilty party to just clicking "Accept" instead of actually reading what's there in that window. After a few months on break from Northrend questing, I finally got started on Storm Peaks and Icecrown, and the storytelling there is just so much better than in the other zones (except for Zul'Drak, perhaps). Compared to the oftentimes terse (as in, two-word) quest texts from classic WoW, I'm actually getting a real story now. And it's amazing to realize most of this is really done in 511-character increments.
And, just to be nerdy and agree with others: the 512th character probably is the string terminator. It's an odd choice (I'm much against odd powers, so I'd have expected 2^8 or 2^10), but if it works, it works. The WotLK quests make full use of that self-imposed limit, and it seems to have been a good choice.
zappo Apr 3rd 2009 9:08AM
I was thinking about the quests where you accept it to "listen to so-and-so's story", but this perhaps also explains the quests where you talk to one guy, and he sends you to a guy across the room, and he sends you back to the first guys sort of quests. The limitation really does tend to keep you more involved.