[MUD-Dev] Re: MUD-Dev Digest, Vol 20, Issue 16

[Mike Shaver]

On Sat, 29 Jan 2005 12:15:09 +0100, Vincent Archer
<archer at frmug.org> wrote:

> WoW has additional nices ones, including some that are well
> integrated in the world.  One has been dubbed the "Indiana Jones
> quest". It's a shaman quest, in which, at one point, you end on a
> mountaintop. No exit anywhere in sight, no mobs to fight, no
> nothing.  You just have to have faith and jump. 2m above ground,
> plop, you get teleported to safety.

That's actually a quest that's available to everyone, and it's quite
well done, I agree.  The real "Indiana Jones quest", though, is the
one in Uldaman with the rod to open the chamber. =)

>   (IMHO, they really should have let you an escape route, and
>   you'd get a failure if you take the coward's way, but WoW's
>   quests are like most games', they cannot be failed. You can take
>   six months, and it's still not failed)

WoW does indeed let you fail quests, actually.  There are a fair
number of timed quests, usually involving either FedEx or
collection, and pretty much any escort quest can be failed by having
the escorted NPC or mob get killed.  I think those are the only ways
to actually get (Failed) in your quest log, though, and I have
inadvertently experimented quite thoroughly with my options in that
regard.

> There's others that take advantage of the in-game features. WoW
> has an email system. You can send emails to any player on your
> side, and you can also attach items, including CoD (nice for
> trading).

Also nice for people to scam during the xmas season, when they would
send mails from a character with a name very similar to that of the
"Father Winter" NPC, with a little COD attached.  Hard to blame that
one on Blizzard, though; we're still trying to find a good way to
fight those attacks in internet email.

>> the occasional surprise and quite a bit of humor buried inside.
>> I got a chuckle from the nurse mob named "Michelle Belle", which
>> I'm hoping is named for the Beatles song.  I laughed my a** off
>> when I encounterd the Fearbot 4000 mechanical harvester in the
>> human farmlands.

> The game is chockfull of easter eggs like that one.

Yeah, which makes their "no name with pop culture references" policy
somewhat annoying.  Clever pop-culture puns would seem to make a
player fit in _better_ in the game world, and the same name that
would be illegal for a player character can often be found on a
quest NPC. Alas.

There have been some recent, and heated, discussions on the WoW
player forums about realm imbalance.  These ones haven't been
focused on class abilities or racial traits, though, but instead on
the Alliance's generally superior quests and "colour", like NPCs
making Stormwind feel more alive, or the truly excellent-sounding
dragon-battle event in the middle of Stormwind as part of the quest
line to gain access to Onyxia's Lair.  I was impressed that people
felt so strongly about it, and grateful for the brief respite from
paladin-vs-shaman nerf-cry threads.

Mike
_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev