Key Takeaways
- Next time you feel like there’s just too much to do in World of Warcraft, feel free to thank a playtester.
- That’s because during the early playtesting phase, playtesters ran out of quests, which prompted the team to add more in to prevent any unhappiness.
- The end result is a game full of well over 30,000 quests, enough to have been going on since 2004, with no signs of stopping anytime soon.
Put simply, there are a lot of things to do in World of Warcraft. The MMORPG has been around since 2004, and whether it’s new players jumping in for the first time or established veterans, the game remains as popular as ever. As TheGamer reported earlier in 2024, around 2.5 million daily active users are engaged with the game.
That said, there was once a point in time that there wasn’t enough to do in WoW. Yes, you read that right. And if it weren’t for some angry playtesters, the World of Warcraft we know wouldn’t exist all the same.
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Playtesters Helped Shape WoW For The Better
In part of an interview with Edge magazine (thanks GamesRadar), former executive vice president of game design at Blizzard, Rob Pardo, revealed that there was a huge demand for quests in WoW from unhappy playtesters. As the story goes, according to Pardo, the playtesting phase was running relatively smoothly, “until playtesters ran out of quests, at which point they reported that the game felt ‘broken.'”
The solution?
“The answer, of course, was to simply add more,” the executive affirmed.
The end result was Pardo and company creating “ten times the amount of quests” that they had initially planned for. Flash forward to today, and World of Warcraft has 38,000 quests in all, give or take.
In other words, if it wasn’t for some dissatisfied playtesters, then the WoW that would have launched would likely have experienced the same level of sentiment from general players, which likely wouldn’t have boded well for the game’s long-term outlook.
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