You’re Doing it Wrong: Wildstar Quest Text Down to 140 Characters

From time to time we all need to vent our frustrations, so today I’m starting my new rant column titled “You’re Doing it Wrong”. For my first victim I’m choosing  the developers at Carbine Studios, who just announced yesterday they’re cutting down their quest text size to be approximately the size of a tweet, or 140 characters.

So Carbine agrees that quest text is pointless, as most people never read it, but the quest themselves are perfectly fine?  *Facepalm*

Here’s a little inside scoop for you Carbine, there’s nothing wrong with reading quest text. You see it’s not that players are lazy and don’t want to read the text, it’s that you guys have written the same quests for 10 years. I already read it! I already know I have to kill 10 bears, or deliver some pointless item to some pointless person, or to find some idiot that wandered into a cave full of monsters. I’ve done it already, more times than I can count.

It’s not the text, but the quests that are the problem, and when you make thousands of them, of course we’re not going to give a damn about the story.

Not to mention that you tell us exactly where to go on the mini-map, provide one sentence instructions on the quest side-bar, then highlight the quest item/NPC once we get there. Why the hell would we ever read a quest, when you lay it out for us like that?

So thank you for realizing that no one reads the quest text and removing it; which effects no one, since we do skip it, except the people who actually enjoy reading it. Thank you, for completely ignoring the fact that your entire quest system is an out-of-date, broken, leave-your-brain-at-the-door grind that is a copy of nearly every other MMORPG on the market.