The bread-and-butter of lev­el­ing, quest­ing, is bet­ter than ever in Wrath. Quest­ing is more fun from both from a nar­ra­tive and mechan­i­cal perspective.

The nar­ra­tives are stronger. A scourge-ravaged vil­lage where many peo­ple have been lost, where you ulti­mately rally the peo­ple to flush the zom­bies out. Some ani­mal activists work against overzeal­ous ani­mal hunters, you start off help­ing trapped ani­mals, learn­ing about the hunters, and even­tu­ally lead­ing an attack to stop their oper­a­tion. A gnome encamp­ment try­ing to learn what hap­pened to their lost peo­ple and how the miss­ing are con­nected to the grow­ing pol­lu­tion. They’re like short sto­ries that you play out in the WoW uni­verse. In orig­i­nal and TBC, you’d have a mix of good story pro­gres­sion with ones that seemed tan­gen­tial or designed to be filler. A much higher pro­por­tion of the quests are tied to these short sto­ries. There’s setup, there’s a cycle of activ­ity and con­tin­u­a­tion of story, and finally a con­clu­sion with per­haps a leader to the next chap­ter. And this story usu­ally ties into the over­all theme of the zone, or the neigh­bor­ing quests.

The mechan­ics of actu­ally doing a quest are the same–there are col­lec­tion quests, deliv­ery quests, smack ene­mies quests, and some oth­ers. It’s the con­di­tions sur­round­ing these quests that has improved. Most quest hubs have neigh­bor­ing regions where those quests are per­formed, and now a quest chain log­i­cally pro­gresses within that region with lit­tle ran­dom leaps to other parts of the world. No more won­der­ing if you’re going to be back in the same loca­tion for a dif­fer­ent quest. My wife and I used to tour the entire zone upon entry, pick­ing up absolutely every quest in the fear that two seem­ingly unre­lated hubs were going to ask us to per­form a task in the same loca­tion; it’s not fun when the Smelly Yeti Extinc­tion Soci­ety ask you to kill ten smelly yeti and then two ses­sions later, the Aro­matic Leather Crafty­mak­ers ask you to col­lect ten smelly yeti hides. No more of that, from what I’ve seen. Now we just come upon a quest hub and do what we like.

Both of these points are sub­tle, but clearly Bliz­zard has put a lot of effort into improv­ing the qual­ity of quests. I’m really enjoy­ing them.