Chapter 1080: Why Is Everything Green (Third Update)
The nearby tauren were mostly hopping around excitedly, just like Zou Zhuo, and several were wildly playing with their own tails.
Well, it seemed everyone really liked the tauren!
The number of players in the entire newbie zone didn’t look too small, but it wasn’t overwhelming either. Actually, this was achieved through mirror technology, splitting players into different mirrored areas to ensure the current newbie zone wouldn’t be overcrowded.
The VR version of *World of Warcraft* supported ten thousand players online simultaneously per server, but the total server population was likely much higher than that.
With eight races total, if a thousand tauren all appeared at Red Cloud Mesa at once, the scene would be completely unmanageable.
Then it would be shoulder to shoulder, a sea of cows—probably not even fighting monsters or doing quests, but just squeezing up to an NPC to accept a quest would be tough.
However, even after the mirror technology split the crowd, there were still plenty of people—or rather, cows—here.
Zou Zhuo saw a dozen or so players gathered around a cow with a yellow exclamation mark over its head, ready to accept a quest from it.
He watched as the NPC named Grull Eaglewind waved his hand impatiently, signaling the surrounding players to back off, then said loudly, “Alright, I don’t want to repeat the same quest dozens of times, so all you newcomers, listen up.”
“Welcome to Narache Camp. Many of you might soon be welcomed into the great city of Thunder Bluff, but first, you need to prove your abilities.”
“We tauren living on Red Cloud Mesa take pride in our excellent hunting skills. Our meat stock is running low, and we need feathers for clothing. Now, go hunt the nearby plain striders to supply the village, and you can prove your skills at the same time.”
As soon as the NPC finished speaking, Zou Zhuo saw a quest interface pop up in front of him, detailing the objectives and rewards.
Zou Zhuo selected [Accept], and the interface disappeared. He opened his adventure journal, and sure enough, a quest called [Begin the Hunt] was already there.
“This NPC’s intelligence is pretty high,” Zou Zhuo noted.
He realized this NPC wasn’t like those in other online games that just stood there dumbly, popping up a quest interface for any player who approached.
When players turned in or accepted quests from this NPC, it was done through dialogue—real voice-based dialogue.
And when the NPC had nothing to do, he didn’t just stand around; he busied himself with his own tasks. If many players crowded around to accept quests, he’d shout out loud like he just did, sending the quest directly to every nearby player.
Zou Zhuo flipped through the quest log. The quest was very simple: just collect seven pieces of bird meat and seven feathers. The reward was pretty average too—two white-quality items.
But hey, it was the first quest; you couldn’t expect much.
Zou Zhuo, Lin Xue, and Old P were still in the same party. Zou Zhuo looked around and saw Lin Xue standing not far away, staring blankly as she flipped through her adventure journal.
Zou Zhuo asked in the party channel, “Old P, where are you?”
Lin Xue replied, exasperated, “Little fatty, are you dumb? Old P’s playing an undead; his spawn point is totally different from ours.”
Zou Zhuo suddenly remembered, “Uh... well, Old P, you’ll have to level up on your own. Come on, Lin Xue, let’s go do this quest first.”
Lin Xue was shocked, “Little fatty, who are you calling that?! My chest is huge now!”
Zou Zhuo took a look and saw she was right. Damn, the female tauren’s bust was indeed impressive—probably the biggest in all of Azeroth... but as for the rest... ugh, better not look, too blinding.
For efficiency, the two split up to find striders. These birds were scattered sparsely across the plains, not many in number. Zou Zhuo ran quite a distance before finally finding one, charged over, and smacked it with his hammer.
The combat was like any other next-gen VR game—you could operate however you wanted, and the actual damage was calculated based on the physics engine’s effects, not just some numerical damage values.
Hitting different parts of a monster had different damage effects, and could also apply additional debuffs.
Zou Zhuo’s hammer smacked the strider right on the head, stunning it a bit, then he followed up with two more hits. The strider barely managed to react, turning to peck at the little fatty, but he sidestepped and finished it off with another hammer blow.
After killing the strider, Zou Zhuo bent down to pick up the strider meat and feathers.
He initially thought he’d need to cut it open and pluck the feathers himself, but it turned out he didn’t—he just picked them up directly from the corpse. Thinking about it, this was probably to simplify player operations. Otherwise, killing every monster would require pulling out a knife to gut and pluck it, which would be way too tedious. Most players wouldn’t bother with that.
Of course, there were tasks where you had to work with a knife yourself, but that was for skinning.
After completing the quest, Zou Zhuo smoothly leveled up to three, got a mail gauntlet, and equipped it.
Wearing mail felt pretty good—heavy and reassuring. The only annoyance was why the gauntlet was green...
Zou Zhuo had already noticed that the tauren race seemed to have a special fondness for green. The NPC who gave out quests wore a green vest and green pants, and now the gauntlet he got was also green. Damn...
Continuing with quests, Zou Zhuo found one aspect that wasn’t very user-friendly.
Specifically... quests didn’t mark exact locations on the map.
The first quest was easy enough—just kill a few striders, and you could spot them on the distant plains. But later quests got trickier, with some requiring running errands, others collecting items. There was even a quest that needed you to read a note first before finding the corresponding NPC.
Still, since these quests were accepted through face-to-face conversations with the NPCs, Zou Zhuo didn’t just stuff the quest items into his bag and run off cluelessly. He followed the NPCs’ instructions to complete them.
But even so, it was still quite troublesome. Many NPCs you needed to find weren’t marked on the map; you had to determine their general location from a few words in the quest description, then search for them.
However, it wasn’t completely without guidance. The map would circle a rough area, and you just had to search within that range.
This gave Zou Zhuo a sense of “searching.” In a highly immersive next-gen VR game, players’ mindsets were clearly less impatient than in PC or mobile games, so they could better enjoy the fun the quests offered.