We need more worldbuilding

One of the things that i dislike the most about content patches is that they do a very poor job in telling us how the world is reacting to the things that are happening.

This problem was particularly annoying in legion when we were supposed to imagine what the hell was going on in other parts of azeroth.

how many good stories we missed while we were busy on the broken islands?
How were people reacting,acting and interacting with this threat?

We can get some sense at the beginning of the xpac with the quest of the zones, like now in BfA we get a good amount of context about their cultures,people and how they are.
by example, we were introduced in kul tiras as a kingdom who hated jaina and condemned her to death,with literally singing songs about her, that was good, it gives them a personality, a context, and how they reacted when we arrived. you could feel the inmersion, i guess.
But then she was back thanks to things that only katherine knows, and she bringed the fleet back, that would be a start for the kultirans to trust her,but you can’t expect us to believe that all of them are going to be happy with katherine’s decision.
How did the kultirans react? what do they think? do they agree with this?
just like that?

My point is, blizzard does a really poor job in showing who the nameless people are that we are supposed to protect and care… nameless who will probably die at some point and we would never have a reason to care. because they feel like a cardboard,is almost like they don’t exist anymore.

We don’t only care little about what happen to their deaths, but we only care about how main characters react and this is a problem, because a leader without his people is nothing.
in an ideal world, we get both, how main characters react, and how the “nameless” people interact with their leaders,the world, or the threat.
we can get a minor mentions to the “nameless” but usually the plot focuses in the “war” aspects, fight just for the sake of it, and forgetting what we are fighting for

i feel like the inmersion aspect in wow fails extremely when it feels like we should only care about main characters, when in fact,we should care about everything.

and i also think that we need far more interactions between characters, it is annoying that just a few npcs gets dialogue while the rest of characters don’t get a single line, and in consequence, they feel like a cardboard, they don’t exist, they don’t bring anything to the table.
i can think right now in a huge amount of examples in the alliance,alleria,velen,veressa,poor aysa,the dwarfs, hell even tandreed at the end of 8.0.
i don’t ask too much, only a few minor dialogues.
Like by example, how some horde characters have extra dialogue when derek gets resurrected, it may not be much, but at least we can think that they are actually characters.

TL’DR Blizzard should put more effort in the inmersion aspect and less in how our superheroes acts.

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What if the world constantly changed? What if the weather actually phased stuff around the world? Wouldn’t that be a bit neat? We could have some stuff like that with the world actively changing, what are your thoughts on that? This could also phase in new quests, and new stuff so things would always be constantly changing and interactive. There could be 3-10 different phases per zone, which would change it entirely depending on the weather, or what happens in the game at the time. Thoughts?

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The main problem I have with the current way the story is being told is that there’s too much focus on the perspective on the main characters. I suppose a lot of it comes from the emphasis on cinematics.

I think a lot of that stems from superhero comics being such a big influence on WoW. The story ends up being more and more about these great heroes, who are magnified to the point that it’s difficult to imagine anything approaching “normal life” for the average person in Azeroth.

It’s not a bad way to tell a story in and of itself, but it does shift the priorities away from world-building. For world-building to really work, you need to get some idea as to how a regular person lives. WoW does touch on that, particularly in some of the beautifully designed BfA cities, but it’s typically a secondary priority.

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Which dovetails into something I wrote about why the emphasis on Named NPCs has shaped how WoW and Warcraft in general has developed.
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/analysis-narrative-problems-involving-npc-death/22992