Out of all of the factors that made World of Warcraft an instant juggernaut in 2004, the quest system was — by far — the most significant. It honed and refined the questing experience in RPGs and MMOs to the point that it was intuitive, addicting, and an industry trendsetter. Even Blizzard was taken aback at how popular questing was, scrambling to add more missions to meet the great demand.

As World of Warcraft continued to build upon the questing system over the years, all of this addition came with one small subtraction that isn’t too noticeable until you flip back and forth between retail and WoW Classic. There’s a part of quest design in the latter that the former abandoned pretty early on, and if Classic Plus is smart, it’ll keep it going this time around.

A Burning issue

To speak of this change, I want to jump ahead to the first expansion, The Burning Crusade. When this pack came out, players had spent over two years in old Azeroth and become very, very used to the way things were done. That “were” is past tense because the second the Dark Portal opened up, everything changed in the questing department.

What you’ll notice of the reviews and impressions back in 2007 was a lot of effusive praise for how Blizzard improved the questing system with TBC. This is where the game truly transformed into a hub quest model, where you’d find a bunch of quests at a particular location, do them all, and then get a breadcrumb quest leading to the next hub.

And that’s totally fine. In fact, my voice was among those praising the game because this took something really good and objectively improved it. There was now a real questing “flow” that players could ride from start to finish throughout a zone (or expansion!) without hitting dead ends or massive level jumps or whatnot. Plus, it didn’t hurt that the rewards were a whole lot better!

The missing piece

Everyone was so excited about the bump in quest design that few if anybody noticed what was being lost. That’s sometimes how it is with “progress”: We’re so excited to move forward that something worthwhile gets left behind.

Vanilla WoW was a journey down branching roads, some which went interesting places and others that petered out along the way. After the first zone or so, you had to go look for quests, which encouraged exploration and also lent a sort of choose-your-own-adventure feel. You had to hunt for quests, making them a reward (of sorts) for searching through zones. Quest logs weren’t neat and orderly; they were jumbles of options that could be picked up and put down based on where you were in the world and your level.

Let me mangle an analogy: If vanilla was a series of twisty-turny roads, Burning Crusade was a six-lane highway bypassing the sights and taking everyone on the same streamlined trip. The developers stopped peppering zones with all of these little quests here and there; a majority of quests showed up in hubs, and that’s how it was for a long time. Even in retail, there’s no mystery as to where any quest might be because your map clearly shows you were the next hub is and how to get back to that highway.

Stories from Azeroth

When you go back to Classic WoW and revisit all of these quests, it’s hard to deny that it hits different. They may contain simple stories, but those stories propped up zones and created memorable experiences. It’s fun to hunt the quests down (even with Questie holding our hands) because it’s a return to a time before the hub was the be-all, end-all of quest design.

I also liked how many of Classic-era quests aren’t overblown spectacles. Usually they’re small, intimate narratives that draw you in with a simple request. Find my dead wife. Help clear out some kobolds from a nearby mine. Take a turtle on a trek across a desert. Follow a treasure map to a secret location. Help a ghost girl with her missing dolly. Discover Legend of Zelda tucked into a jungle. Learn the secret of a grave digger.

So here’s my hope for Classic Plus. I would love to see Blizzard add a ton more quests into the world, but in that old-school fashion. Hub questing is well and good, but it doesn’t have to be everywhere in MMOs, and it doesn’t need to be in Classic. There’s a huge world out there with plenty of places to tuck additional tales and objectives, and I think that players would have a blast ferreting out new ones as they once did with the originals.

Jump back into the MMO time machine of WoW Classic, Justin Olivetti offers up observations and ground-level analysis as a Gnome with a view. Casually Classic is a more laid-back look at this legacy ruleset for those of us who’ve never stepped into a raid or seen more than 200 gold to our names.