Rivalwatch: WoW

[JonnyG]

Blizzard is advertising for a quest designer (http://www.blizzard.com/jobopp/quest-designer.shtml).Quest Designer

Blizzard Entertainment is looking for a Quest Designer to help enrich its in-development, massively multiplayer online game: World of Warcraft. Duties will include designing fantasy adventures, writing NPC dialogue and quest descriptions, and scripting quests into the game world. The ideal candidate will be an avid gamer and an epic storyteller, with work experience in a software development environment.

Blizzard offers a fun, creative, and challenging environment with excellent compensation and a full range of benefits.

Requirements

* Excellent verbal and written communications skills

* Experience in MS Word and Excel

* Strong creative writing skills

* Organized; works well under deadlines

* Experience playing massively multiplayer online role-playing games

* Experience writing character dialogue, short stories, or quest scripts
I can understand the Word requirement, the Excel one is interesting. Do you think they use spreadsheets to keeptrack of the dialog trees and quest elements or somesuch?

[Leageth]

not sure. You'd think it'd be easier if one of the programmers came in on a saturday and made a simple text based quest scripting tool to care of all of that.

EDIT: I don't mean make the quests, I mean use a tool instead of MS word or excel. Probably make things go quicker if a tool is designed for the job.

[Leoghan]

I think most games should hire professonal writers when it comes to dialog. I am sorry but I find most of the MMORPG dialog to be horrible and it detracts from the immersion factor for me.

[Seraphym]

Originally posted by Leageth
not sure. You'd think it'd be easier if one of the programmers came in on a saturday and made a simple text based quest scripting tool to care of all of that.

EDIT: I don't mean make the quests, I mean use a tool instead of MS word or excel. Probably make things go quicker if a tool is designed for the job. Yeah, but why spend time creating a new tool when Excel is already available and robust? You can create dynamic and depandant lists for choices to map among other things. Just guessing since I've not used it for something quest related, however it is a heavily used tool at work for database loading and correlations etc.

[Yigg Yous]

Yeah, but why spend time creating a new tool when Excel is already available and robust? You can create dynamic and depandant lists for choices to map among other things. Just guessing since I've not used it for something quest related, however it is a heavily used tool at work for database loading and correlations etc.

basically I think that Leageth was trying to say that it might be easier to have a specific program to make quests. As such, you would think that a big company like Blizzard would have made something to do such a thing. I think that they actually might have one, you never know....mabye its just not formatted for WoW or something.

[esion]

If you make a program that just makes random quests you end up having multiple quests that just follow a simple format, or you might get a random quest machine that is repeatative.

The problem with a program lies in the fact that you dont get originality based on the fact that the computer only does what you tell it to. Another problem would be quests would just not make sense...i.e. the comp would make "bring the fish to the guard to make a staff"...rather than a person would make "bring the fish to the butcher to make a stew."

I think being a quest designer would be a pretty fun job. You would get to take a look at all the mobs and NPCs and correlate them into something that has role and functionality in a game.