I started playing in BC and I didn’t read any quest text. The game was amazing and obviously pulled me in and I’ve been enjoying it ever since. In BfA I was doing the witch zone and the mystery unfolding finally got me curious enough to actually read the quest text because I wanted to figure out what would happen next. Plus I had just got back from playing the FFXIV story for the first time so I wasn’t as adverse to reading quests anymore. And ever since then, this game is like a thousand times better when you actually fully understand what’s going on in the story.
When fresh Classic servers released recently, I leveled through it and this time actually read the quest text, and it’s like a completely new experience even though I’ve experienced these zones like a million times before. There’s so many interesting things I’ve been missing out on all these years and I had no idea!
So if you feel like maybe the story is getting a bit stale for you, or maybe you wanna rekindle that feeling of playing this game again for the first time, I highly recommend actually playing through the game and reading the quests.
Some addons I recommend that make it easier to do so:
Immersion - Makes the quest text in an easy to read window that you can click through, similar to FFXIV
BtWQuests - Lays out all the quests for you for each expansion in story order so you can keep track of where you’re at in the story and what parts of the story you’re missing
Classic has an addon which adds voice acting for every Vanilla quest.
It’s called VoiceOver, helps a ton with immersion, and I find myself replaying quests in my log so I can listen to them repeatedly.
It’s part of me playing the anniversary realms, wish Retail had something remotely similar. (I guess there’s the talking heads for world quests, but those are generally really short.)
I agree. I played classic in 2019 reading the quest text and some of it is actually really cool. Villains like Onyxia and Vancleef are now some of my favorites in WoW.
The wildest part to me is when I realized I had been talking to so many major lore characters while playing the game without even realizing it. Like in BC you talk to Danath Trollbane right away in Honor Hold, he’s just chilling in there and because I didn’t read the quest text on him before I had no idea who he was, why he was there, etc.
Whatever works, I guess. I used to always read quest text, but gradually felt more discouraged about the story as the expansions went on until I was just left feeling like an idiot for ever having tried to immerse myself into the setting in the first place. The other MMOs I’ve tried couldn’t manage to hold me, though.
I’ll still read some sidequest stuff but unless I have a preexisting reason to care about something, I’m just skimming over it from now on.
IMO, Blizz has gone so far out of the way to make all of the semi-important information be presented via means other than quest text (cinematics, voiced lines / talking heads, NPC speeches in general, etc) that I don’t feel you’re missing much by skipping or skimming the actual quest text.
That said, this doesnt apply as much to side quests and older content, so I’d recommend reading those if youre going to bother doing them instead of dungeon spamming to 80.
At the start of a new expansion I enable the Storyline addon that presents quest text in a more enjoyable way. I normally read my way through the first time.
