Understanding the WoW story is like trying to interpret Hieroglyphics with a nokia phone and a brick.
As a newer player to WoW, how can I possibly understand what is going on in the Warcraft universe?
I’m gonna be honest, I have almost completely abandoned to Main story quests because Blizzard doesn’t even attempt to point you in the right direction sometimes. The indicators for quests and their order needs redesign. Stop relying on the Add-ons to band-aid fix the problem.
Plopping new players in the new expansion every couple releases has to stop, its monotonous and doesn’t solve the core issue here.
Why doesn’t Blizzard accept the fact the story is too long to comprehend and actually do some redesign so it doesn’t just feel like I’m chasing the main story just to unlock content?
Why don’t they just build a large main hub area (sorta like Mythic+ portals are designed now) and have portals leading to each expansion? Also actually in order this time (Chromie Time).
Maybe do some cool voiceovers with each character explaining what’s going on? Or are we just gonna rely on Youtubers to actually do Blizzards job?
A brick could very useful. You find someone who understands and threaten them with bodily harm via the brick (heft it once or twice for effect).
To your point, the old way was to make new players or alts progress from one expansion to the next. People got tired of that, so they changed it to what we have now.
It is to be expected from a game that is almost 20 years old.
My advice as a new player is to pick an expansion and level through it to learn that story. Then to do a different one, make an alt.
Short of a few instances, most expansions are fairly self contained and you can pretty much get the gist of the story w/o the background of the previous expansion.
You might have to throttle your XP gains if you do this. Ive often barely passed the halfway point in story progression when Chromie starts demanding i stop fooling around in the past and join the present.
Yeah, this has been an issue in WoW for a long time. However, Blizzard do acknowledge it’s a major problem they want to get right. Chromie Time is a step in the right direction, but of course more needs to be done. I believe the whole Pandaria Remix event is a cover for a possibly bigger solution. A way for new players to in the future, to play through an entire expansion (including patch and group content solo) in a chronological manner. Though that’s still ways away to see if they apply it to other expansions.
As an avid reader and someone who learned WoW lore primarily through the wiki’s and books back in the day, if you’re like me, I’d suggest some of the new books they have available today which are pretty awesome. Chronicle Volumes 1-3 cover Warcraft 1 - Cataclysm. Of course, as you mentioned there’s always the big lore YouTubers who got practically every story arc summarized and covered in some form.
Playing through it all yourself can be a mess as you said. But still somewhat possible, but like D&D, WoW’s story is so vast nowadays and spans over a decade and even begins in older games so it can be very difficult to get the authentic experience. You can try to play the RTS games for example to get the Warcraft 1-3 experience. Then move on to WoW Classic Hardcore / SoD for the Classic story. Then from there it’d be back to Retail and doing the opening quests for Burning Crusade and leveling through there and doing their dungeon and raid content (would need to search up patch releases to get an understanding of what dungeons and raids to do in what order), then repeating for WOTLK.
After that you can maybe hop over to Cataclysm Classic and hang with them there to experience that story in a true authentic manner as it’s released over the next couple of months / years. Then MoP Remix is coming out next week so you can experience the story of MoP in its entirety with a twist. After you’d have to go through the prior process I mentioned with BC and WOTLK, but instead for WoD - DF each in order. As said, it’s a brutal mess to try to do all this before they put in a more reliable and permanent non-leveling solution.
I’d suggest maybe just picking up the Chronicle Books. They’re fun reads and really summarize most of the story in a digestible manner. Afterwards if you still don’t really want to force yourself through Chromie Time or doing my semi-loremaster suggestions for each expansion in Chronological order after Cataclysm (as Chronicle Volume 3 ends there) then best bet is YouTubers. Like just typing in “Full story of Mists of Pandaria”, “Full story of Warlords of Draenor”, “Full Story of Legion Expansion”, “Full story of Battle for Azeroth” etc etc until you get to Dragonflight. Might be more digestible.