Worst video game quest ever created: World of Warcraft's Green Hills of Stranglethorn | Jeff Kaplan

Jeff Kaplan discusses his design of the Green Hills of Stranglethorn quest, one of the most infamous quests in World of Warcraft history. The quest required players to collect scattered pages across Stranglethorn Vale to reconstruct a short story Kaplan had written as a homage to Ernest Hemingway. The quest giver, Hemet Nesingwary, is an anagram of Hemingway's name, and another NPC references Jack Kerouac, showcasing Kaplan's literary references.

Kaplan explains that while the core concept wasn't necessarily flawed, the implementation failed catastrophically due to technical limitations. The pages didn't stack in inventory and there was no dedicated container, so collecting them consumed valuable bag space. Players often received duplicate pages while lacking others (like having multiple page fives but no page six), creating frustration rather than the intended collaborative social experience Kaplan had envisioned.

Kaplan describes his approach as 'ant farm designer' mentality—treating players as subjects in an experiment rather than designing for their enjoyment. He acknowledges this was the hubris of a junior designer who thought he was being clever. His goal was to encourage player interaction through trading and cooperation, similar to McDonald's Monopoly mechanics, but instead players simply became frustrated, avoided the quest, or used the Auction House to trade pages rather than engaging in the organic social experience he'd imagined.

The transcript concludes with Kaplan explaining how this notorious failure ultimately became valuable to Blizzard's design culture. By being publicly self-critical about the quest's failure and explaining why it didn't work, he created permission for the team to be more critical of their own work and challenge each other to design better content.