On reading quest text

Community General Discussion
1

Blizz made a poll on youtube I saw recently about whether we read quest text or not, and that compiles with a recent interview, so I wanted to come here and give my PoV, how I interface with quest text. Others feel free to add your own.

For me, normally it depends about what the quest is about. I like elves, specially BEs, I like magic (mainly arcane), and I like things that bring up the RTS games’ stuff, the core concepts so to speak. So quests that involve these I’m more likely to read in detail. (Among other things, but mainly these). If it involve characters I care about I’m also more likely to pay a lot of attention. I also pay a lot of attention if actual lore is being explained. Or if it’s the payoff of a long story.

The quests I pay the least attention to are those where they just expand on things we’re doing. For instance, say we’re mid questline, we were sent to steal some bombs, and the goblin quest giver is like “Now, you need to get in there and put these bombs on the bridge to blow it up.” Where it’s like an expanded version of the quest objective, but we already were told about the bombs several quests ago and why we wanted them. I typically skip it in these cases.

So these are the extremes. But most quests fall somewhere in between. If the quest is about some farmer who lost their prized pig, generally it doesn’t interest me, because I don’t really care about the farmer or the pig, and it seems like small potatos compared to say, the legion invasion. However, these kind of quests often have amusing text, or some kind of twist end, or they stealthily feed you important stuff about the main story of the zone, so while I may not care about the pig (for now), I still pay some attention, enough to understand and remember, because sometimes they really pay off by the end.

Finally, what I pay attention to tends to change depending on which character I’m playing. Some degree of role play, I suppose. While playing say, my troll, I may pay attention to a quest about trolls, which I only skimmed though on my blood elf. Also I pay more attention to smaller quests while leveling subsquent alts. On my first go I ruh towards that which interests me the most, ignoring that which is less interesting to me, but on alts, already knowing the main quest, will pay attention to the smaller stuff.

2 Likes
2

I did back in Legion and before, but now that I no longer care about the Warcraft story I just blaze through everything to get back to the gameplay; the modern writing team has no respect nor care for the Warcraft lore so neither do I.

6 Likes
3

i dont read the quest text at all unless i am doing that quest to read the text, if that makes sense

4

I’ll read everything the first trip through new content. But I’ve usually forgotten most stuff by the end of the expansion. Playing through MoP again in Remix, and I only vaguely remember what I read a decade ago…so it’s basically a new expansion’s worth of quest text.

4 Likes
5

Quests have text?

1 Like
6

Dialogue UI has changed my game life and reading quests is so much easier now. I love it.

1 Like
7

I stopped reading anything after 8.1

8

If you don’t read quests at least the first time you do them, then do you care about the setting?

2 Likes
9

Depends on what i mainly do with the toon

If its a pvp toon i skip and look at objectives.

If i pve on the toon i skim it unless its the starter quest for the xpac

If i rp i have addons that slow scroll the text and i read all the quest

1 Like
10

I read quests when I was newer to the game way back when.

At some point I stopped caring, even with new releases.

I think at this point it’s more to do with the fact that they make sure to have voiced NPC dialogue and talking heads and cinematics for the stuff that you actually need to know for the story to make sense.

Basically, Blizzard makes it easy to not read quest text beyond the objectives without getting lost story-wise, so skipping it doesn’t mean much anymore.

Now if you’re muting NPCs and clicking off the talking heads and skipping cinematics on first viewing, that’s a different story, but at that point you’re actively deciding not to know what’s going on.

11

I generally don’t care precisely about quest text that could be in any setting, I think. Farmers specially, I hate quests about farmers. Those and the ones that are just a long explanation about what you have to do but that don’t add context.

12

I read the quest text… usually on the first time or I’m in a good mood

1 Like
13

I can’t read. ;(

14

I like reading the quests, I always do it the first go around. Seems like a weird question to poll on?

I completely ignore those stupid talking heads for world quests.

15

Seems a lot of people don’t read it.

And I really liked those talking heads in legion, but they became so much more generic since.

1 Like
16

Immersion addon really really helps me read through the quest text and get more into it. Without that addon I usually don’t want to read it that much if at all.

17

New quests I read the text. Afterwards, I ignore them since one read through is enough.

18

Grammar Priest probably tells me to don’t bother reading the text since i am an uneducated Orc who can’t read . Just follow the X on the map right next to the pig :pig:.

19

I feel many players would be happy with “Go here, kill this thing” for quest text.

Which always gives me a chuckle when you get FF people saying how wonderful the questgiver story interactions are in FF, because you can practically go away and make a coffee while they tell you all about the quest.

20

I read quest text the same way I read the OP in this thread:

I skim it to get the gist, and then figure if there was something important in it something in the subsequent fallout will point it out.