First, we want to pass on World of Warcraft lead game designer Jeffrey Kaplan's apologies. He's very sorry about Stranglethorn Vale's 19-piece fetch fest Nesingwary's Expedition. But it's clear WoW players adore questing.
How do we know? Kaplan says that the legions of players inhabiting Blizzard's massively multiplayer online game are completing more than 16 million quests a day on average. Perhaps the more staggering figure was the time slice from July of 2007 to March of 2009, when World of Warcraft players racked up an impressive 8,570,222,426 quests.
Kaplan noted that one of Blizzard's design goals with World of Warcraft was to ship with 600 in-game quests. That would have been half of what Sony Online Entertainment's EverQuest offered over the course of it's existence and many expansion packs.
That quest count would eventually increase to 2,600 in the original World of Warcraft, with the Burning Crusade add-on more than doubling that to 5,300 and the Wrath of the Lich King expansion bringing it to a staggering 7,650.
That figure makes my brain hurt. But you kids have fun storming the castle!