One of my random and frequent overstatements, “The yellow exclamation mark is the greatest invention in the history of MMO design.” Now, I don’t really think that (the real greatest invention would be, of course, clickable hyperlinks for items in chat), but I still think it’s way up there.

Of course, WoW didn’t invent the ‘hey! there’s a quest here!’ signifier – several games, including some non-MMOs, had it at some point. Other games have made their own interpretations of it – I believe LotRO’s looks like a one ring, for example. There’s clear indication why this idea has persisted – it does good things for your game. Of note:

  1. It removes the dreaded ‘house to house search’ that plagued many early RPGS – wandering into every house in the village and searching the entire dialogue tree to see if a quest is there. There are few things that are more annoying than doing this — one thing that is more annoying is having to do it multiple times in the same game.
  2. It gives the player a clear sense of direction. In WoW, there is no doubt that the first thing you have to do is – click on that guy right ahead of you with a quest. While players appreciate their freedom, if you give your average player too much freedom, he is actually at a loss and doesn’t know what to do.
  3. “It makes me feel good” – this is something that Erik Bethke said when discussing how he’s adding some classic MMO elements to GoPets. Why? Well, beyond the sense of direction it offers, it also makes your player feel important. There’s shit to do here! And I’m the man to do it!

Interestingly, WoW has gotten more refined in their use of the exclamation mark. They found in beta, for example, that too many of them in a town looked ridiculous – the lead designer of the game called it the “Christmas Tree effect”. Recently, they added the symbols to the minimap (something they borrowed from LotRO, I believe). And most interestingly, after years of getting players to find wanted signs on their own (including a comical patch where they added an NPC in front of most wanted signs saying “Wow, I wish I could read this wanted sign, then I could get the awesome reward!), they finally gave up and put an exclamation point over all wanted signs.

That being said, the yellow exclamation mark has its share of detractors as well. One common complaint is that it breaks immersion. Personally, I don’t see it that way. To me, immersion is whether or not I am consumed by the experience. Many design elements designed to make the world feel more realistic — the house to house search, for example, or mousing over every pixel in the landscape to find the ‘right’ piece of debris for a quest, are immersion-breaking to me because the player is not in the game, engaged with the content. Instead, he is out of the game, fighting with the camera and/or UI and trying to read the designer’s mind.

Still, I’m interested what everyone else has to say. Do you like the move towards the quest signifying icon over NPCs? Does it push them too much towards ‘vending machine NPCs’? And if so, what are better alternatives?

Original comments thread is here.