WoW needs more roleplaying elements

Community General Discussion
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WoW is a MMORPG - a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game. I’m not actually seeing many roleplaying elements, though. Personally, I never really feel like I belong in this great big world Blizzard has created. For example, off the top of my head, I can interact with the world in precisely two ways - sitting in chairs and petting dogs or cats. I think that’s it. Oh, you can ride some rides at the Darkmoon Faire once a month.

Cities are “empty” in the sense that they are static. At night, the shops are still open and that same NPC is still standing outside offering his wares that no one needs to or wants to buy. What’s the point? It’s raining outside and the NPCs don’t change their behavior whatsoever.

Imagine if there was an entire part of the game where you’re just living in Azeroth. You’ve bought a house in Westfall and started a farm. You’ve hired NPCs who you’ve instructed to plant and farm these types of plants during certain weeks or months. You then sell your crops to vendors and tavern owners who actually want them based on what they sell in their tavern.

Or imagine if WoW had a radiant AI questing system that sent you all over the land with specific tasks based on you’re character’s skill. Perhaps you’re talking to a recent widow in Stormwind and notices your reputation as a rogue. She asks you to track down her husband’s killers and bring them to justice. She gives you a clue and off you go. Or perhaps the local tavern owner notices your skills as a hunter and tasks you to bring him this rare animal across the world for him to butcher for his menu.

Instead I feel like WoW should be called a MMOAG - an MMO action game. There are no roleplaying elements in it. I’m playing a character how Blizzard wants me to play the character. I’m doing the things that Blizzard says I should be doing. That’s not a roleplaying game. That’s a basic form of an action game.

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I’m too out of it to give your post the attention it deserves but I agree that we need more RPG in our MMORPG so good on you for sharing this with us friendo :heart:

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WoW is a themepark MMO, so it doesn’t really fit the nature of roleplaying. It’s a combat-centric MMO with fast paced questing, pvp, dungeons, raids, etc. That kind of style doesn’t mesh well with roleplaying.

Sandbox MMOs and virtual worlds are best suited for roleplaying.

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Modifying vendors and stuff by time of day is one of those things that sounds better than it would be in practice. Real people have stricter schedules than ingame NPCs.

Class-specific questlines are always welcome. That’s most of why Legion was so popular.

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No it isn’t. It has the elements of questing and whatnot, but it’s always been an MMORPG and isn’t all combat centric. There’s lots of roleplaying elements. Always has been.

There just aren’t dynamic roleplay elements like the OP is talking about.

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There were some of the elements you described in garrisons and that didn’t end as expected.

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I’ve been saying for some time this game needs more possessive things and I agree with you, imagine if as a paladin you could join some kind of round table type of situation and you stop rogue groups from carrying out plans to plunder your zones of authority or something like that, giving players a sort of mini game within the grand scheme of things so the world isn’t just revolving around one subject and nobody cares or is doing anything else but that one subject. If we had side things to do that aren’t generated world quests and have some kind of meaning to the player like social belonging and class fantasy maybe people would feel like sticking around

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I wish they would deepen the lore of existing races and expand on their cultures. Like do Blood Elf children go to school? Where do Orcs and Trolls actually live? What do they eat? What the family structure like?

It doesn’t have to have any game implications but it would be cool to see guards changing shifts in cities, or non-quest npcs going to sleep at night. NPCs meeting in the morning for coffee or whatever.

FFXIV does a better job at this with NPCs who have gossip text and some short small quest lines.

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RPG does not mean a systemic sandbox, it’s just a genre of game that tries to put you in the shoes of a character. How it makes you live the life of that character is down to the developers. The typical Japanese RPGs are extremely scripted and completely story-driven, and people still consider them RPGs through and through.

WoW used to feel like an RPG. Over its life Blizzard has expelled almost every RPG elements from its gameplay loop for the sake of convenience, freedom and immediate access to content (which may or may not be good according to your preferences) but in classic it felt like a legit RPG to me.

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Garrisons were super disappointing to me. I thought garrisons would have an almost real-time strategy element to them with a bit of WC3 vibe to it. Instead we got: click this… wait a day… come back tomorrow… repeat.

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Lol this game barely has a functioning day/night system, and the system it does have is vastly broken and leaves some ppl always playing when the world is daytime or when it’s nighttime

I think PkmN G/S/C did their night day cycles better then WoW has always done it and that’s quite pathetic

It’s an RPG and we can’t even buy our own player housing

A huge world, of empty space and useless NPCs, who never change and old content is left to shrivel up and die a sad forgotten death

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There are RP servers which cater to different players. If you want more role playing, try one of those.

I think the amount is “role playing” in wow is fine for my tastes, which is a watch-cheesecake-wiggle-and-smash-stuff taste.

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I agree that the RPG aspect could be improved upon. But that means so many aspects of the game would have to come into question then changed. And that’s a mountain of tasks I’m not sure Activision Blizzard is not willing to take on.

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I agree.

Sometimes it’s the small RP things that bring this game more to life. As a Belf Paladin it was so cool when you ‘made rank’ and could /eye a Silvermoon guard and they would kneel to you. We need more of those things not less.

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I’m playing Red Dead Redemption 2 on the Xbox One.

It has a lot of the stuff you mention, NPCS that operate like entities that have an agenda (ask you to do stuff, etc.) It is very complex.

Like sometimes out I’m riding, when a guy is trying to get something out of his horse’s hoof or something. You see the white dot on him, on the minimap, so you know that it is a “quest” type thing where you can help somehow. I’ve not figured out HOW though, I’m always too slow with his horse getting aggravated and kicking him (so he dies.)

It does make the world seem a lot more alive.

Then sometimes you might randomly get jumped by the “O’Driscols.” This also happens in the Online version, which is kind of neat. So your online character will be riding along to a place, mainly only being wary for other players. Then some NPCS were in hiding and start trying to kill you.

It does make things feel way more realistic.

Plus, I REALLY hate cougars (both in single player and Online.) They also may spawn and attack you, being stealthy so you often can’t see them. Your horse acts panicky, with a red dot appearing on the minimap; The thing is, a lot of the time the red dot is just a rattlesnake which poses no problem (unless you go over and stand by it or something, or if your horse bucks you by it.)

The scary thing is when the red dot goes away, then it appears closer to you and you see it MOVING MODERATELY RAPIDLY. Then you know it is probably a cougar, since if it is a Grizzly you would also HEAR it.

Then I really start moving on that Horse, since the stupid Horse will buck you otherwise if that thing gets too close. This is also where “Dead Eye” comes in handy, to paint the stupid cougar with “X’s” and shoot it several times.

It just spices things up a lot more, especially in the online version where you might get to thinking the only danger is other players.

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I think Blizzard is missing a huge opportunity to populate these old zones with player driven agency. You could have empty towns grow dynamically with player owned housing.

Imagine Blizzard starting a system where players can go to any of the major/minor settlements and purchase a plot of land from a number of pre-defined plots for that settlement. Depending on how many players bought that plot of land, the size and quality of that settlement would dynamically change and scale.

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That and the game has random encounters where cool things happen in the outside world that keep things fresh (I too have been playing rdr2 while WoW is in this current state) other games do this too like fallout, etc. I think if WoW threw in some random cool encounters it would make the game more interesting and less predictable and stale. The game is called WoW but I can’t remember the last time I’ve said wow while playing this game

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I think if they do this plot of land idea they could easily create player driven factions where territories are fought over for perhaps a currency that we can use to buy new sets that are class specific or maybe just emblem specific to your faction or perhaps armor dyes matching your guild or group (speaking of a lesser faction not horde alliance). War mode is a failure give people something like this so there is organic world pvp that rewards something we want

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Another thing to add. Blizzard could start adding more roleplaying elements with each and every patch, piece by piece. Before long, in theory, they could have all sorts of sandbox elements to this game and they wouldn’t even have to spend a lot of time per patch developing it.

One patch, for example, could simple add more right-clickable interactive elements in the cities. More chairs to sit in. Maybe you can actually sit in a barstool and drink. And perhaps you’d have to actually sleep in a bed or bedroll to accumulate rested XP. These are all tiny roleplaying elements that would add to the feeling that this world exists and it’s functioning as you would expect.

Another patch could update the NPC AI in all the towns to give them places to live and day/night cycles. You could follow an NPC around and watch them as they go to a door (their home) and phase out. They’d come out the next day. Taverns would be more empty during the day and crowded at night.

I could go on and on.

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I am not sure I have ever seen a single MMORPG with the elements you are describing.

While they sound great, I just don’t think they’d translate to MMOs well, and its why they are typically only in single player offline games.