WoW veteran says the MMO’s devs had to make “ten times the amount of quests” as originally planned to sate playtesters, and now the game has 38,000 of them

20 years on from its release, it’s easy to forget that MMO titan World of Warcraft had to start off somewhere, too, and part of that was creating more than tenfold more quests than they were expecting in order to keep their playtesters happy. 

In an interview in Edge issue 405, former executive vice president of game design at Blizzard Rob Pardo spoke about the huge demand for quests during WoW’s playtesting phase. During early playtesting, things had initially gone smoothly “until playtesters ran out of quests, at which point they reported that the game felt ‘broken’.” For Pardo and the team, “the answer, of course, was to simply add more.”