Earlier this week I was running dungeons on one of my lower geared characters. One of the dungeons I got was The Well of Eternity. Having just read the War of the Ancients trilogy, I decided to not skip through many of the story parts. One of the members in my group noticed and said something about me not skipping them. I told him that I had just finished these books and decided I wanted to revist these parts in the game to see how they transfered from the book to the game since I had not seen them since the first time I ran it months ago. He replied telling me that “Lore is for noobs.” Now I could care less about this statement, but it did get me to think, how could Blizzard implement these story elements in ways that players will actually be more engaged in and not just skip? So after a pondering this thought, I have compiled a list of five ways Blizzard could improve story telling in WoW.
1. Cut Scenes- Cut scenes are no strangers to World of Warcraft, in fact they were implemented quite a bit in the Dragon Soul raid where there were three. However, these cut scenes were not very exciting. The major problem with these cut scenes is they show other people doing awesome things, such as parachuting onto Deathwing’s back. I feel that if these cut scenes showed your character doing these acts, it would make the whole feeling players receive from watching these much more meaningful and engage them much more into the story line.
2. Attunements- This is something many Hardcore Burning Crusade raiders want back. Attunements made raiding much more difficult to get into, since players needed to complete long quests in order to just step foot into the raid. I would like these to come back, but not like the Burning Crusade. I would like players to receive quests that were short and would simply set the stage for the up coming raid. This way players understand the lore behind the raid better and it would give the raiding experience a much more epic feeling.
3. Class specific quests- This is something I miss dearly from the older expansions of WoW, and I never realized it until I did the Rogue legendary quest. It was so much fun to do a quest line that was tailored specifically for Rogues. If they added more quests like these that players could do to get class specific rewards, I feel like players would have a chance to actually feel like their class.
4.Raids/Dungeons along side NPCs- Recently, Blizzard has done a good job of having dungeons like this. When fighting along side a character like Thrall, the feeling of a dungeon just feels so much more exciting. It also allows Blizzard to control the movement and pace of the instance, so players experience important plot points. Though I understand most dungeons can not be done like this, I would like to see Blizzard continue doing this in the future.
5. More in depth quests at end level- Finally, I would love to see Blizzard give players quests at max levels that are not just mindlessly grinding daily quests. The Molten Front quests in patch 4.2 were very fun, and actually told the story leading up to the Firelands raid pretty well. I would love Blizzard to release more content like this, maybe not on such a huge scale, but something just small to show that new things are still going on in Azeroth.
Now I understand most of these ideas have been tried before yet I feel that if Blizzard brought back things like Attunements and Class Specific Quests, as well as tweaking how stories are told in raids and quests, the story telling in WoW could be increased so much. Blizzard has such a rich story line in their game, it is a shame that it is being ignored by people who claim that “Lore is for noobs.”.
I have been screaming for class specific quests to come back since wrath. Maybe after all the positive feedback on the legendary rogue quests, we might see more in the future. I would love to see a new version of the island near Ratchet that warriors went fought on to get zerker stance from vanilla. That quest kicked my butt, but the flavor and challenge were so enjoyable.