It depends on the expansion, really. Launch EQ mostly kept the story to zones like Estate of Unrest or Kithikor Forest, High Pass Hold or attatched it to notable NPCs like Lord Nagifan. Nagifan and Vox even had their story expounded upon in the later Scars of Velious expansion.
Expansions usually had an inciting incident like the abduction of Firiona Vie by Venril Sathir which kicked off the exploration in Ruins of Kunark. Kunark also had really (really!) elaborate lore around the Iksar and their fallen empire. But once you arrived it defaulted back to zone-by-zone lore like in vanilla EQ.
Later expansions like Planes of Power and beyond had something closer to the full expansion-wide narratives that WoW has, getting more elaborate as time went on. I hopped off at Depths of Darkhollow, which Iâm pretty sure was about Mayong Mistmoor the vampire lordâs apotheosis into godhood.
the msq is way too long and forced. weâre like10yrs into the game and being forced thru the msq thats like over 100hours to even complete its too much. i can hardly imagine being a new player trudgin thru it tryna be w/ their end game friends as well. iâve personally finished the EW (9.0?) and just said f it. i cant listen to these ppl no more.
i hate the scions lol.
i love ff, i get its a story but it shouldnt be so focused that it gates a lot of content.
think they touched on this before recently abt how it is for new players dealin w/ it.
also if they made my character more interactive like in GW2 i might have more fun being the wol. im just silently there lmao.
Itâs not actually. One of the core elements of a story is how you present it. FF14âs presentation of story is hands down one of the worst experiences Iâve ever had. And thatâs coming from your standard JRPG perspective.
WoWâs story might suck but it presents it pretty well. Better than FF14 at least.
I think itâs also important to clarify FFâs storyline is a JRPG story. We as a community really need to find an appropriate high fantasy story to hold WoW accountable to. Not a JRPG story.
To be fair, the first seven or eight years of the sword removal project would be hella boring â full of RFPs, ROMs, proposals, meetings, and enough PowerPoint slide decks to choke Shen-zin Su.
(Seriously, I donât know how the guys who work full-time on the business development side of our shop do it. A steady diet of nothing but proposal after proposal would destroy my will to live.)
If we rejoin the action once they actually award the contract, that might be interesting.
The only reason LoTRO is my primary MMO (only, actuallyâŚWoW is pre-paid months in advance) is because it is primarily story-driven. By every other metric that we measure MMOs with, it is vastly inferior to most other AAA options we have. The stories of the last three WoW expacs were so uninteresting to me that I finally just gave up with halfway through DF and honestly have zero interest in WS Saga.
ButâŚif theyâre going to keep taking the story to places like Gundabad, Umbar and the southeast of Middle-earth, places Tolkien only ever scratched the surface with in his voluminous writings, Iâm in.
I am a âsprout,â but I will never catch up. I am now finally into Stormblood, but about to tap out again. I have played the game for years, but still feel like Iâve yet to actually PLAY anything. Donât dislike the story, but itâs so long itâs all Iâve ever been able to do.
Also WoW LORE has been good (imo) in the past, but the storytelling has gotten dreadful. There is a component of poor quality storytellers, but also a failure of Modernity and ongoing generations as we sink further into post-literacy.
Weird time to launch a trilogy of games based on Narrative arc to a bunch of Zoomers that donât read the quest text.
Story is kind of important for engagement in a game. I donât think this would be a very fun time if you just picked a wordless quest from a nondescript NPC that says something akin to kill â10 boarsâ
Story adds flavor to it. Suddenly your nondescript NPC is a pathetic farmer trying desperately to protect his crops, but his fields are under siege by a pack of boars. This can breadcrumb off into further quests. What if the boars were being controlled by something? Or being forced from their natural habitat onto this farm? Itâs now your job to find out.
Suddenly youâre in a plot about quillboars who are trying to force the local population out of their homes so they can claim the land as their own, and sending boars was the first wave in a much bigger plan.
Itâs engagement and perhaps a personal stake in what would otherwise be a mundane series of quests. Because you might want to see what happens next. Whereas without any story to string you along, you might lose interest a lot faster.
That said. Wow really struggles with a narrative. They are not good at it, theyâve even started emulating marvel movie moments (guardians of the dreamâŚassemble!). Wow does a lot better with world building and small vignettes. I like that if i want to know about anything i come across, i can go to wowpedia and find lore on it.
On the other end, Thereâs FF14, which does decently well with a narrative (even though they struggle sometimes with âshow, donât tellâ and the characters stop talking like human beings for the purpose of exposition). But they suck at worldbuilding, like really bad. You canât look up anything aside from some super basic and not entirely true information on the playable races and some of the classes. You are just along for the ride and not to ask questions in FF14.
And then thereâs the secret 3rd option of GW2 which both has good worldbuilding and a good narrative (past the 1.0 story anyway). They even have a /wiki command in game which takes you to their wiki if you wanna look up information about anything.
If the game didnât need any story at all, Dragonflight wouldnât be performing worse than the last 2 expansions(as the person who claimed it was a success showed us with those graphs).
If the game didnât need any story at all, Blizzard wouldnât have hired Chris Metzen back to take charge of the story again.
If the game didnât need any story at all, Steve Danuser wouldnât have âleft of his own accordâ.
The fact of the matter is that the story and world building is WAY more important than the mechanics and interface of the game. You donât see development companies begging the person who designed even iconic encounters to come back. But you definitely see them beg narrative leads to.
Better story would be nice but I donât expect it. I know they had to evolve it but WC3, WC3:TFT and wow vanilla through wrath were peak warcraft story. Nothing wow does now will ever top it and Iâm fine with this.
Tbh I havenât known any of the wow lore since wrath finished and Iâve been playing continuously since vanilla. Story, world building, character writing, are all great for single player games, but in an mmo when your character is a voiceless cardboard cutout killing machine it really doesnât strike me as important. Who cares what these npcs are doing? I just care about what my friends and guildies are up to.
I think thatâs the dissonance that bugs people (especially former wow players) when they try to engage with ff14. The story is mandatory, yet it isnât your story. Really what ff14 does is that it provides references to all of square enixâs single player games, a little bit of marketing for other games to next to that nice big cash shop.
Maybe other mmos navigate these things better, but Iâm uninterested in finding out since itâs unlikely that my guild would hop to another game on a whim.
Ffxiv does it so well because the players care about the story no one (at least not the majority of players) even have an idea of whatâs going on minus âoh thereâs dragon people nowâ Iâm included in this also.
Wow doesnât focus on story because no one actually cares about it IMO
Personally, I wish they would improve on their story telling. Itâs one of the main reasons I play this game and I wish it was easier to follow and more streamlined. It feels like thereâs a lot missing, leaving gaps in the lore, and it can be hard to follow sometimes.
Iâve yet to encounter a video game with a story that made me sit down, and go, âWow! That was good!â So, Iâd rather a video game story to never be the focus.
My sir and/or madam, Iâd prefer if WOW had a good story for sure. I recently tried to write out my own expansion, just for fun. But, why would I do that I wondered to myself when thereâre games out there with good story.
What brought me to WOW was lore, was story. Itâs sad that itâs been phoned in so much in recent years.
I know the meme, and I think I get the context theyâre using it in.
Basically, itâs Sylvanas rejecting several Horde loyal rogues, but instead chosing to have rogues (Voss and Garona) who arenât explicitly loyal to the Horde by her side as spies. (Someone with a little more knowledge of Sylvanas, Voss, and Garona could probably explain it better.)
The meme itself can be used to show a like and dislike that points out flaws in thought processes, although itâs often used just for likes and dislikes. The meme format itself is called âDrakepostingâ because the orignal uses screenshots of Drake in one of his music videos. Knowyourmeme has examples of it being used, if youâre interested in seeing it used in different contexts to get a better understanding of it. Hope my explanation helps, Iâm not exactly great at explaining memes.
People who say this in relation to wows story, I feel like, are jaded. Wow is wow makes it seem that wow canât be a better form of itself. I believe with Chris back at the helm and bliz having a road map 3 xpacks ahead make it easier to tell the story without constant reworks or cuts and maybe⌠we actually get a cohesive story this time around.
The story in an MMO should be loose to create the setting and allow the players to fill in the rest.
Having a specific narrative detracts from a world that should have thousands to millions of main characters and creates a world of only a handful of main characters, none of which are the player.
