Jeff Kaplan says hated vanilla WoW quest 'holds a really special place'

Jeff Kaplan told Lex Fridman that The Green Hills of Stranglethorn from original World of Warcraft "holds a really special place in my heart" even though it was widely hated. He says it was one of the few times he put a short story into the game as a sort of homage to Hemingway, and admits it was also "the typical hubris of a junior game designer who thinks he's clever but is actually a dipsh*t." Kaplan calls the design an "ant farm"—a designer playing god to see what players do—and says he hadn’t yet learned that approach is the wrong way to build multiplayer content.

He divided his story into many pages and scattered them across the zone. The mechanics made the quest painful: pages didn’t stack, duplicates cluttered inventories, and you needed four pages per chapter across four chapters, creating up to 16 items that could bloat players’ bags.

While pages could be compressed into chapters once you had all four, WoW’s limited bag space and the quest’s reliance on luck left players annoyed and often heading to the Auction House.

jeff kaplan, lex fridman, vanilla wow, green hills, stranglethorn, quest design, quest pages, bag space, auction house, hemingway