My friend thought quest text was deal breaker

#0 - Oct. 7, 2009, 9:49 a.m.

i know, it's a bit silly to not play a game because of this, - but he wasn't the first, to start playing wow then get turned off by quest reading.

i'm just abit surprised that this is one area that never got upgraded in 4 expansions. Texts are still presented in a rather plain looking window, that nobody reads. So no one gets in on wow's story. actually i think someone did a survey, and summarised less than 10% of wow players actually read the quest.

iT's funny, this new expansion is supposedly all about teling a great story, but already I think it is a waste of time if your quests are once again going to be given in text windows. "i wanna play , listen and watch, not read" - is the comment I got. But with almost all video games having their story told to you in NPC speech with the text log available for back up, it's not surprising.

Anyway, with this attitude to their lore, i'm very scepitcal about the future of wow, especially when blizzard is boasting about a great story but will conveniently forget to present it well, leaving it to text boxes and bad npc animations. Finally I know some of you would say who cares, people will still play, its fine as it is, maybe you're right, but witht aht sorta attitude, why bother make any changes at all apart from new areas?

Slorkuz

#9 - Oct. 7, 2009, 10:04 a.m.

Q u o t e:
[...]i'm just abit surprised that this is one area that never got upgraded in 4 expansions. Texts are still presented in a rather plain looking window, that nobody reads. So no one gets in on wow's story. actually i think someone did a survey, and summarised less than 10% of wow players actually read the quest[...]

Actually, in a recent interview posted on Gamasutra, Cataclysm's Lead World Designer Alex Afrasiabi comments on the notion of telling a story and quest texts. The article is an interesting read, and can be found here: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=25192

Slorkuz

#29 - Oct. 7, 2009, 10:58 a.m.

Q u o t e:
On topic, the problem with voiced text is that you have what, a few thousand quests in game? All those lines spoken would be hours of text, which equals craploads of data. I'm still wondering how Bioware plans on delivering that, it's gonna take loads of data just at release, not even counting the actual content patches following. Imagine downloading an 800 MB patch now. Then add another 2 GB just for spoken quest text - it's simply not worth the resources. Imo, of course.

Well, another thing to consider is that World of Warcraft is not a game released in just one language, but multiple. Localising voices for all quests would not just require voice actors and recordings for English, but a replication of all this data in all the languages and regions World of Warcraft is localised in. This is not to say that such a task is not possible, but rather some food for thought for those of you debating the pros and cons of game wide voiced quest text.

On a related note, perhaps some of you will also find this article on Gamespot about some of the numbers behind World of Warcraft an interesting read: http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/worldofwarcraftexp1/news.html?sid=6228615&mode=all