“We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”
Charles Bukowski
A Mercenary in Azeroth
I have always liked the idea of being a mercenary in WoW. If you are offering rewards, I’d be glad to earn them; if you are offering me a crown, I’ll shove it under my bed.
The designers do everything they can to tell a story to us players in WoW. This is a very hard thing as I don’t always know what I’m doing beside collecting ten ears or, humbled, picking up poop. By the way, where is our Poop Quest in Legion? It’s a tradition!
The problem as I see it is that time is moving right along when I get the basic thing: a quest. Let’s say that I am in Teldrassil and I meet a quest giver. Four things, at least, are happening at once when I get a quest: the reason, the quest, the task and the location. Adding anything on top can make me lose the reason, like guild chat or a new spell or night elf standing there doing that bobbie bobble thing.
The immediate becomes the most important, “collect poop” and “over there” and “stay safe” and then you lose the why of your task. Maybe you picked up four quests at once!
A lot is packed into the quest interaction and, I am saying, that it is easy to lose what is happening. If it were a different game than an MMO, time would stop and you would read the quest and have a little button that says “more”. But time does not stop and the quest voice-over is saying “hurry, hurry, hurry”.
Improvements in the Adventurer’s Journal have been very good. You can preview a boss and read the story. The annoying pop-up box alerting you to near-by stuff is an improvemnt but very distracting when you are trying to remember what you are doing at all in the game.
There are a lot of outside sources; podcasts on lore, blogs and books. They’ve even hired Christie Golden! But there must be a way to further the story better in the game itself and try as they might, I feel that we are losing a lot of the details that make it a rich experience.
How would you improve the story-telling in WoW?
Coffee Cakes and Crits 
Why, but we had a poop quest in Suramar! We needed to search the felhound poop for a cage key to free a dwarf in the Legion camp. I keep tracking the thing you know, because once we don’t have that in any next expansion, we immediately know that the poop quest lobbying guy was fired from Blizzard. But I don’t know how they could make it more epic than in WoD. There was an orc – no less than Durotan’s brother who died a heroic death in cinematic – who did nothing less but SHOVELING poop when we meet him 🙂
Is the post about pop-up world quest briefing? Because it’s clearly an answer to the players dismay (mine at large scales) that in Draenor we came into the world quests area, and got no briefing at all. Just fill the 100% bar for grind sakes, and that’s it. No encouragement for what you’ve done, no nothing. I agree that briefing in Legion may be annoying after a while, but we need an optional briefing toggle on/off button, and that’s it.
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Zomg, the poop quest in Suramar! What a …. relief.
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Good thoughts. Tough nut to crack in 2017 where everything around us goes so fast.
Remember how quest text once was sort of written to you, as you accepted the quest? Oh the sound alone of that writing takes me back.
I use Story line or Immersion as Add-ons and they help a lot with slowing down and reading the whole thing. I can set the text to go slower, faster, enable, disable in dungeons.
I would love it, if something as simple as emotes were more used by NPCs. Just a /is giving you a subtle nod, as you move out into the wilds. “Don’t forget this!”, he suddenly yells, as he approach you carrying a lantern”. Something like that. Little more interaction.
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Good ideas!
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