The idea that World of Warcraft was ever light on quests sounds like blasphemy at this point. Why would you ever make a game about killing seven wolves not because an NPC asked you to but just for the fun of it? But that's how MMOs like Everquest worked back then, and it's how the team at Blizzard thought WoW should work too, according to quest designer and former game director Jeff Kaplan.
Speaking to Lex Fridman, Kaplan said the goal during his early days as a quest designer on WoW was to try to mirror Everquest, the biggest competition at the time. That meant trying to guess how many quests it had and attempting to launch WoW with a comparable amount. It also meant the quests were initially designed in a radically different way than WoW ended up shipping with.
