As I stated in this blog post – I started playing WoW in 2005. TL:DR – I knew based on my experiences with Dark Ages of Camelot in college that I was <exactly> the kind of person that MMOs were made to appeal to. I originally refused to play WoW, because I didn’t want it to become my life. I was NOT wrong.

At the Guildhall, while learning to make games, I started playing WoW and became obsessed with it. Even in my graduation picture, I was wearing a WoW shirt. I graduated saying “I want to be a quest designer on WoW.”

Well, it took me 12 years, but in 2017, I accepted a job at Blizzard to work on WoW as a Quest Designer.

I was hired right as the team was going into BFA crunch. I assisted in fixing bugs and doing small tasks for the last Legion Patch (7.3.5) but really was assigned to Zandalar for the BFA expansion.

For BFA launch, I made a couple of short questlines (8-12 quests each) a few of which got folded into the War Campaign. I also worked on Achievements and city spawning. I championed the return of the “Hug the Critters” achievements and filling out pet families that were missing some critters.

The 8.1.5 Shrine of the Storms Raid Introduction, which was the questline where the player frees Xal’atath from the Dagger and turns her back into a real person.

While working on this questline, I learned quite a bit about how to handle bizarre edge cases in WoW’s toolset.

As a frequent priest player, I decided it was worth the time to make the quest make sense for Priest players who had gained the artifact weapon in Legion that was featured in the questline. On paper, this would mean double the number of quests. In reality, it meant 3x the number of quests.

1.       Priests who unlocked Xal’atath in Legion, had Xal’atath in their bags at the time of doing the quest.

2.       Priests who unlocked Xal’atath in Legion and did not have the weapon. (The quest needed to adjust to make them go GET it, either from their bank or wherever they had it.)

3.       Everyone else who was Alliance. (Including Priests who had not unlocked Xal’atath.)

4.       Everyone else who was Horde. (Including Priests who had not unlocked Xal’atath.)

This questline was a huge success for players, giving them a moment to interact with a character before she became the literal poster child for Midnight.

There were cosplayers who made and wore the “Gift of N’Zoth” visual effect I created. I also accidentally got some influencer attention, because I didn’t realize that there was an internal translation tool for “old god speech” and I did it by hand, building it off of Welsh.

After 8.1.5 I was assigned to the Alliance side introduction questline for Naz’jatar. Having to build out unique questlines for Alliance and Horde players meant working very closely with the Horde designer (Andrew Buckazki) to ensure parity not only in quest numbers and rewards, but also in complexity and time requirements.

I also worked on World Quests for Naz’jatar. This was one of those times in game development, as happens, where we raised the concern that there were not enough quests for the size of the patch and the intended life span of this content. We were told not to worry about it, but it would be okay. As it turns out, it was not okay. When we released patch 8.2 we very quickly realized that the buckets of world quests were not sufficient and thus the quests would appear too often, leading to the players disengaging from the content as it quickly went stale.

After a quick meeting with the game director, we (Andrew and I) came up with a plan to add 10 Nazjatar World Quests. Now. On WoW there are two ways to update the game. A patch and a hotfix. Generally, anything with art has to go in a Patch. Hotfixes are more limited, and traditionally data only. And here we were planning on adding 10 world quests, via hotfix. As far as the team said at the time, it was the first time CONTENT was hotfixed in. WoW world quests also have “strings” (text) that need localization. In Legion, they added VO intros and outros to World Quests. We did not have the ability to record new lines, and were told to mitigate as many new strings as possible.

I was able to dig into unused voice lines (things that had been recorded, but then the content was cut or changed so they were not used) and found a large number of Tortollan VO lines that were unused. With some clever adjustments to the quests, we were able to salvage these lines and have VO for our Hotfixed in Quests. Further, I was able to find unused objective strings and game object strings so that our total added strings for these 10 quests was 10. I like to hold this up as my “I’m great at recycling.” story.

After Nazjatar, I was rolled onto Shadowlands development for Maldraxxus. This was a huge challenge for me, as I am not particularly good at handling body horror, and Maldraxxus was body horror the zone. I worked on the Lich Conclave and Kel’Thuzad scenario in the Maldraxxus storyline.

I also made a large number of the Maldraxxus World Quests.

During the Development of Shadowlands, we were sent home, as part of the COVID 19 pandemic.

This started to show up in various NPCs and quests we made, like my buddy here Pandemis, who would offer you a mask. (The mask prevented poison damage from the nearby non-instanced version of the Plague dungeon, allowing the player to complete quests and explore that area.)

Due to the Pandemic, I leaned into “silly” and humorous world quest. Including playing fetch with a three headed dog (using a skull), turning into a mushroom and yelling to attract other mushroom buddies, and adding in an Olympic style torch lighting relay.

The last bit of content I worked on for WoW was the Korthia questline and dailies. While I would like to claim full credit for my work with Kah-Than, this was one of those times where I recieved feedback from one of the other quest designers (Rachel) and had to include her hilarious comment in the quest text.