WoW's questing system was inspired by a playtest that didn't work out as planned, because the testers didn't play MMOs and had no idea what they were supposed to do: 'I ran out of quests right away!'

The idea that World of Warcraft was ever light on quests sounds like blasphemy at this point. Why would you ever make a game about killing seven wolves not because an NPC asked you to but just for the fun of it? But that's how MMOs like Everquest worked back then, and it's how the team at Blizzard thought WoW should work too, according to quest designer and former game director Jeff Kaplan.

Speaking to Lex Fridman, Kaplan said the goal during his early days as a quest designer on WoW was to try to mirror Everquest, the biggest competition at the time. That meant trying to guess how many quests it had and attempting to launch WoW with a comparable amount. It also meant the quests were initially designed in a radically different way than WoW ended up shipping with.

The point of quests, as Kaplan and the other designers, like Allen Adham, thought at the time, was to point players toward a group of enemies they could kill over and over again to level up—just as they're designed in Everquest. But when it came time to playtest the game with Blizzard developers who hadn't touched an MMO before, Kaplan and the rest of the team quickly realized their approach to quests wasn't universal.

"Our assumption was because of the way Everquest worked, players want to level up. It was a level-based game. You go out, you kill a creature, you get experience points, you level up a little bit," Kaplan explained.

"We do this team playtest and we had a bunch of people on the team who had never played MMOs—you know, guys with shooter backgrounds, StarCraft fans, etc.—and they play WoW. I think we played for like an hour of two and we only did Elwynn Forest," he said. "And the overwhelming feedback from our team—and these are people who really didn't play Everquest—were like, 'My god, Pat [Nagle, quest designer], that was horrible! I ran out of quests right away!' And we're like, 'Wait a second, you just expect to have quests just keep going?' And they're like, 'Yeah, we expect to have quests just keep going the whole way.'"

Kaplan said the team had an "'oh shit' moment right after the Elwynn Forest playtest, where we had realized that we had vastly underestimated the number of quests we were going to need." This led to a massive shift in how quests were designed and is one of the few key reasons why WoW took off when it launched. Instead of leaving players to figure out how to level up, quests were made to take you through the entire experience from level 1 to 60.

The former Blizzard developer remembers coming up with a philosophy to "design along the path of least resistance," or to lead players through the experience, and said it became a core pillar of the studio's approach to making games.

It's fascinating to think about how a single playtest changed the shape of how one of the biggest MMOs turned out. I certainly don't think I would've ever played it if all I had to do was kill the same monsters over and over to watch an experience bar go up. Although Kaplan was also responsible for one of the most annoying quests in early WoW that involved collecting pages of a story by killing tons of enemies. They can't all be winners, I guess.