Gamerant lists MMORPG's with best stories, FFXIV #6, WoW #1, uhh

I don't see PSO2 on this list. I mean, yeah, the isekai crap in Episodes 4 and 5 was a load of horsepucky, but still!

List is crap. I can't speak for WoW, but I know it's not a contender for #1. I've never had an ex-WoW player regale me with the game's story. Just raiding moments, mostly.

I think FFXI should be on the list, in the top 3. It had great story, but the way the gameplay worked when it was current, especially if the expansion had just dropped was dreadful. You'd be waiting months at a time to move on with the story, cause it didn't all drop at once. Pacing was dreadful too.

That said, the content of its stories is memorable. Some of the best Final Fantasy storytelling to date. RoZ was weakest, but CoP, WoTG, and SoA were all great. TOAU was also phenomenal, but it went on for a little too long, and tried to fit in a little too much imo.

"My flesh remembers the wounds of ten thousand blades. Come, cut me again..."

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Originally Posted by Vyrerus

I've never had an ex-WoW player regale me with the game's story. Just raiding moments, mostly.

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To be fair, I think most people's opinions on the subject are complete and utter crap, as evidenced by things like failing to distinguish between story and storytelling. FFXIV's storytelling is actually kind of lame. It's just a movie interspersed between mostly meaningless periods of gameplay. WoW used to have vastly superior storytelling, where sure there was quest text, but a lot of it was left for the player to discover and infer as they explored the world in the form of mobs, spontaneous events, random items, and the environment in general. It treated the player like an even remotely intelligent and active participant in receiving the story, rather than a passive consumer who needed everything spelled out and spoonfed to them while they shut their brains off. That's perfect since we're playing a game, not watching a movie.

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Originally Posted by Nixxe

WoW used to have vastly superior storytelling, where sure there was quest text, but a lot of it was left for the player to discover and infer as they explored the world in the form of mobs, spontaneous events, random items, and the environment in general. It treated the player like an even remotely intelligent and active participant in receiving the story, rather than a passive consumer who needed everything spelled out and spoonfed to them while they shut their brains off. That's perfect since we're playing a game, not watching a movie.

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So you say WoW made use of environmental storytelling? Where you basically make half of it up, like in Dark Souls? I mean, that's great for the imagination, but it doesn't make a concrete narrative. XIV has that too, to an extent, but unless you're invested in it, there's no reason to care about it too much as it's all for side stuff. The weakness to that type of storytelling is that perception makes and breaks it. There's plenty of people who never and will never notice what's being told by an environment.

Personally, I don't care how a game delivers its story. If it's all in cutscene, then hey, as long as the cutscenes are good at conveying the emotions and what not, I'm fine. If the game is dropping clues via the environment and item descriptions, that's also fine, because I like to read and explore.

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Originally Posted by Vyrerus

So you say WoW made use of environmental storytelling? Where you basically make half of it up, like in Dark Souls? I mean, that's great for the imagination, but it doesn't make a concrete narrative. XIV has that too, to an extent, but unless you're invested in it, there's no reason to care about it too much as it's all for side stuff. The weakness to that type of storytelling is that perception makes and breaks it. There's plenty of people who never and will never notice what's being told by an environment.

Personally, I don't care how a game delivers its story. If it's all in cutscene, then hey, as long as the cutscenes are good at conveying the emotions and what not, I'm fine. If the game is dropping clues via the environment and item descriptions, that's also fine, because I like to read and explore.

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I'm well aware most people would rather just passively have the story spoonfed to them. I've listened to people tell me exactly that for years. I just think it's a tragedy.

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Originally Posted by Nixxe

I'm well aware most people would rather just passively have the story spoonfed to them.

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That's how stories are communicated. It's called storytelling, meaning you are being told a story, either visually or audibly. If you have to discover or, worse, infer the story yourself, then it's no longer storytelling.

So to refer to your statement about the difference between story and storytelling, a game may have a story, but if it's not telling it to you, then it doesn't have storytelling.

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Originally Posted by linayar

That's how stories are communicated. It's called storytelling, meaning you are being told a story, either visually or audibly. If you have to discover or, worse, infer the story yourself, then it's no longer storytelling.

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This is flatly incorrect.

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Originally Posted by Nixxe

This is flatly incorrect.

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How so, if you care to tell?

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Originally Posted by linayar

How so, if you care to tell?

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Because the game world is still a deliberate arrangement and presentation of information to convey a certain set of knowledge, events, and perspective to the player. If you can't figure that out for yourself, then you've failed to grasp something very fundamental about some combination of stories, storytelling, and games. The fact that the game doesn't spell out every single thing for the player in fact puts it in excellent company with our culture's most cherished works of literature and cinema. That you may fail to be told some stories if you choose not to engage with certain content is little different than how you will not be told a short story in an anthology you've purchased unless you choose to read it. Certainly, this sort of storytelling is a little more deconstructed than what we're accustomed to from other mediums, but it's plainly storytelling nonetheless if you have any genuine grasp of what storytelling is.

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Originally Posted by Nixxe

Because the game world is still a deliberate arrangement and presentation of information to convey a certain set of knowledge, events, and perspective to the player. If you can't figure that out for yourself, then you've failed to grasp something very fundamental about some combination of stories, storytelling, and games. The fact that the game doesn't spell out every single thing for the player in fact puts it in excellent company with our culture's most cherished works of literature and cinema. That you may fail to be told some stories if you choose not to engage with certain content is little different than how you will not be told a short story in an anthology you've purchased unless you choose to read it. Certainly, this sort of storytelling is a little more deconstructed than what we're accustomed to from other mediums, but it's plainly storytelling nonetheless if you have any genuine grasp of what storytelling is.

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Knowing a story by engaging in content doesn't contradict that you still have to receive any story either visually or audibly. The fact that you compare it to reading a short story in an anthology proves my point.

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Originally Posted by linayar

Knowing a story by engaging in content doesn't contradict that you still have to receive any story either visually or audibly. The fact that you compare it to reading a short story in an anthology proves my point.

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It's not intended to. It's intended to contradict your claim that the only legitimate storytelling is storytelling that allows you to be passively spoonfed without having to mentally engage with the material.

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Originally Posted by Nixxe

It's not intended to. It's intended to contradict your claim that the only legitimate storytelling is storytelling that allows you to be passively spoonfed without having to mentally engage with the material.

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What do you think you're doing when you are being told a story visually or audibly? It's a passive thing. Did you know some people have a hard time mentally engaging with a cutscene or a dialog box where they're forced to listen/watch/read so they tend to skip it?

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Originally Posted by linayar

What do you think you're doing when you are being told a story visually or audibly? It's a passive thing. Did you know some people have a hard time mentally engaging with a cutscene or a dialog box where they're forced to listen/watch/read so they tend to skip it?

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Maybe it's passive for you because that's the only way you want to engage with media or because that's the media you engage with, but that by no means makes it passive for everyone, and a lot of media pretty much requires you to engage with it in some way to get the most out of it. The world doesn't consist of only the likes of Die Hard and 300, which are meant to be entertaining, but not the least bit thought provoking.

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Originally Posted by Nixxe

Maybe it's passive for you because that's the only way you want to engage with media or because that's the media you engage with, but that by no means makes it passive for everyone, and a lot of media pretty much requires you to engage with it in some way to get the most out of it. The world doesn't consist of only the likes of Die Hard and 300, which are meant to be entertaining, but not the least bit thought provoking.

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So, your only definition of not being passive is thought provoking? So a guy can be mentally engaged watching a TV on his couch all day, and as long as his thought is being provoked by what he watched, you would say he's not being passive?

If that's the case, then your criticism for FFXIV's storytelling doesn't make any sense because it certainly can be thought provoking and it does require you to be engaged with the content. Just because someone chooses not to be engaged with the story, as you've said, then that's the choice of the player.

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Originally Posted by linayar

So, your only definition of not being passive is thought provoking?

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The last post was mostly an attempt to politely inform you that your perspective is very limited because honestly it's kind of tedious and I'm rapidly growing bored of you.

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Originally Posted by Nixxe

The last post was mostly an attempt to politely inform you that your perspective is very limited because honestly it's kind of tedious and I'm rapidly growing bored of you.

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Ah, of course, the usual, can't explain yourself so you get bored. Oh well. This at least explains your weird view on storytelling, getting bored easily.

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Originally Posted by linayar

Ah, of course, the usual, can't explain yourself so you get bored. Oh well.

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Many people make it very difficult to successfully explain anything to them.

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Originally Posted by Nixxe

Many people make it very difficult to successfully explain anything to them.

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Many people can't explain at all, perhaps because they don't understand it themselves, but that's fine.

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Originally Posted by Nixxe

Because the game world is still a deliberate arrangement and presentation of information to convey a certain set of knowledge, events, and perspective to the player. If you can't figure that out for yourself, then you've failed to grasp something very fundamental about some combination of stories, storytelling, and games. The fact that the game doesn't spell out every single thing for the player in fact puts it in excellent company with our culture's most cherished works of literature and cinema. That you may fail to be told some stories if you choose not to engage with certain content is little different than how you will not be told a short story in an anthology you've purchased unless you choose to read it. Certainly, this sort of storytelling is a little more deconstructed than what we're accustomed to from other mediums, but it's plainly storytelling nonetheless if you have any genuine grasp of what storytelling is.

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This is assuming that said deliberate arrangement is indeed trying to convey a portion of the narrative, and hasn't been arranged for another purpose. It assumes that the arrangement, if it has been wrapped to fit the game's narrative, isn't coincidentally adding or detracting from the story. This runs us into another problem with it. If we're to believe that every portion of a game that has environmental storytelling is trying to tell us a story, then the parts of the game that are trimmed down and clearly don't tell stories other than, "Hey the creators ran up against their deadline." cause a more dissonant clash with what's presented and what's there, storywise.

I don't think it's really a higher form of storytelling than a direct narrative. It's more fun, if you like to do a bit of guess work and fill in some blanks, but holes and inconsistencies affect it more than a direct narrative. There's only so far you can take it before it becomes cumbersome, and then in the next game, patch, or segment when you've got something wrong... well, tough on your imagination, heh.

FF14's storytelling as whole isn't even limited to MSQ to begin with. FATEs, Sightseeing log, items, levequests, side quests - all of this has a story behind it as well which you are free to explore if you want to know more about the world. Physical books and short novels at Lodestone are also there. There's even some lore info you can get only from re-watching old Q&A panels if no one wrote them down.

The way they did MSQ is fine - it's solid and doesn't have any major holes in it and you can get most of needed info about the world from there. If you want more - it exists too, but to get it you'll need to "engage with the world", either the in-game or real one. What it lacks at this point is time - the game is much younger than WoW's universe.

About a deep lore, no game can beat WoW.
Lotr, and Swtor would be close to it.
But these 3 have so much lore just because of the age.

But about the storytelling itself in the game, WoW is more on the bottom end.
I played WoW for the first time a few month ago and tryed to follow the story but when I reached max level I knew nothing about it.

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Originally Posted by Vyrerus

This is assuming that said deliberate arrangement is indeed trying to convey a portion of the narrative, and hasn't been arranged for another purpose. It assumes that the arrangement, if it has been wrapped to fit the game's narrative, isn't coincidentally adding or detracting from the story. This runs us into another problem with it. If we're to believe that every portion of a game that has environmental storytelling is trying to tell us a story, then the parts of the game that are trimmed down and clearly don't tell stories other than, "Hey the creators ran up against their deadline." cause a more dissonant clash with what's presented and what's there, storywise.

I don't think it's really a higher form of storytelling than a direct narrative. It's more fun, if you like to do a bit of guess work and fill in some blanks, but holes and inconsistencies affect it more than a direct narrative. There's only so far you can take it before it becomes cumbersome, and then in the next game, patch, or segment when you've got something wrong... well, tough on your imagination, heh.

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That I think it's more fun when playing a video game and lost it due to the preferences of the majority is the only point I was making.

I think you're really overestimating just how open to speculation the stuff I'm talking about is. I'm not talking about stuff that's genuinely open ended and you can make like six different cases with no real ability to determine which one is the most likely because even FFXIV has that sort of thing. Every MMORPG will have that sort of thing just because every MMORPG is perpetually in an incomplete state, including the story. I'm just saying that Blizzard opened up the puzzle and then scattered all the pieces in the game. If you collect all of the pieces, you can pretty reliably assemble the puzzle correctly. Sure, some people may get it wrong, but most will get it right because just like an actual puzzle it was made so that you could. In contrast, this game tends to be more like watching someone assemble the puzzle for you, but only 5 pieces at a time before they make you do some chore to watch them assemble the next 5 pieces.

Coming from someone who bought all novels and other lore related stuff up from Classic until Legion, I can say WoW´s lore is (currently) one of the worst ones in videogame history. This is because of two important facts:
1. Gameplay > story mentality, which the devs openly admit to doing. This means if something is cool or epic in the eyes of a developer, they will put it in the game regardless if it fits in the lore or not. If it involves retconning previous stuff they have no qualms about doing it. As of today, Warcraft´s lore is a Frankenstein monster of lore patches one on top of the other.
2. The two faction system. The fact that the playerbase is divided between two factions means no permanent change can befall any of them, or any player race for that matter. This could work if both sides were good, but in a world where both factions are constantly at war, things that make no sense are bound to happen, like one faction constantly starting wars agains the other for ever increasing absurd reasons and the other always forgiving them when an external threat appears. This is even more absurd when there are races that have cultural or even blood ties to a race in the other faction (there´s one race that is literally the same).

The storytelling also fails if you dont´buy the extra stuff like novels and comics, since a lot of important stuff only happens there and is barely explained in the game, although I will admit that practice has become less common lately.

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Originally Posted by Nixxe

That I think it's more fun when playing a video game and lost it due to the preferences of the majority is the only point I was making.

I think you're really overestimating just how open to speculation the stuff I'm talking about is. I'm not talking about stuff that's genuinely open ended and you can make like six different cases with no real ability to determine which one is the most likely because even FFXIV has that sort of thing. Every MMORPG will have that sort of thing just because every MMORPG is perpetually in an incomplete state, including the story. I'm just saying that Blizzard opened up the puzzle and then scattered all the pieces in the game. If you collect all of the pieces, you can pretty reliably assemble the puzzle correctly. Sure, some people may get it wrong, but most will get it right because just like an actual puzzle it was made so that you could. In contrast, this game tends to be more like watching someone assemble the puzzle for you, but only 5 pieces at a time before they make you do some chore to watch them assemble the next 5 pieces.

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So at what point did WoW stop doing that? I'm completely unversed in it, so I've gotta take your word for it.

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Originally Posted by Nixxe

That I think it's more fun when playing a video game and lost it due to the preferences of the majority is the only point I was making.

I think you're really overestimating just how open to speculation the stuff I'm talking about is. I'm not talking about stuff that's genuinely open ended and you can make like six different cases with no real ability to determine which one is the most likely because even FFXIV has that sort of thing. Every MMORPG will have that sort of thing just because every MMORPG is perpetually in an incomplete state, including the story. I'm just saying that Blizzard opened up the puzzle and then scattered all the pieces in the game. If you collect all of the pieces, you can pretty reliably assemble the puzzle correctly. Sure, some people may get it wrong, but most will get it right because just like an actual puzzle it was made so that you could. In contrast, this game tends to be more like watching someone assemble the puzzle for you, but only 5 pieces at a time before they make you do some chore to watch them assemble the next 5 pieces.

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Id say debatable. There are pieces that they arent giving you straight up. Its just that people dont really care to search for it. Few examples are the reasoning behind the cure naming convention, a whole lot of the summoner/scholar/arcanima lore, what palace of the dead is, and maybe to a lesser extent what voidspawns are.

Also just call this kind of story telling Darksoulian cause thats what you guys are describing.

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Originally Posted by Vyrerus

So at what point did WoW stop doing that? I'm completely unversed in it, so I've gotta take your word for it.

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I don't think they'll ever stop entirely, but it has become less common over the years, especially as they made a shift towards a more FFXIV-esque mode of storytelling that emphasizes NPCs explaining everything to you in the last few expansions. In particular, the sheer volume of items in WoW and Blizzard's love of flavor text means it will probably always exist in at least a small way. I also have like a decade of memories that are deteriorating and becoming muddled since I quit over two years ago and am never going back, so it's kind of hard to give specific examples anymore.

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Originally Posted by HeulGDarian

Id say debatable. There are pieces that they arent giving you straight up. Its just that people dont really care to search for it. Few examples are the reasoning behind the cure naming convention, a whole lot of the summoner/scholar/arcanima lore, what palace of the dead is, and maybe to a lesser extent what voidspawns are.

Also just call this kind of story telling Darksoulian cause thats what you guys are describing.

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I've never played more than about 15 minutes of Dark Souls and don't especially like blindly making analogies of that sort.

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Originally Posted by Nixxe

In particular, the sheer volume of items in WoW and Blizzard's love of flavor text means it will probably always exist in at least a small way.

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So, WoW's storytelling is good because it's in flavor text while FFXIV is not as good because it's by NPC? So you think it's better storytelling because you can miss out on important information about the story rather than having a predefined narrative (while also having extra information that you can miss out on). Again, a weird take on storytelling.

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Originally Posted by Nixxe

I've never played more than about 15 minutes of Dark Souls and don't especially like blindly making analogies of that sort.

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fair enough i can respect that

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Originally Posted by HeulGDarian

fair enough i can respect that

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Since both you and Vyrerus brought it up in this context, I did go and find an article talking a bit about how Dark Souls does story and I do think it's at least somewhat similar to the sort of thing I liked in WoW. The example of the archer, at least as presented in the article, is exactly the sort of thing I like. The game assumes you're smart enough to put the pieces together and let's you do so. FFXIV would just have some throwaway messenger NPC show up to report that the legendary archer is dead, while Alphinaud is on hand to say anything that that needs to be said on the player's behalf and can't be expressed with a single emote.

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Originally Posted by Nixxe

Since both you and Vyrerus brought it up in this context, I did go and find an article talking a bit about how Dark Souls does story and I do think it's at least somewhat similar to the sort of thing I liked in WoW. The example of the archer, at least as presented in the article, is exactly the sort of thing I like. The game assumes you're smart enough to put the pieces together and let's you do so. FFXIV would just have some throwaway messenger NPC show up to report that the legendary archer is dead, while Alphinaud is on hand to say anything that that needs to be said on the player's behalf and can't be expressed with a single emote.

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well like i said debatable. In order to find out what miasma does i had to read up what black rose does, as well as put 2 and 2 together that what thancred was doing with his aether was exactly that.
Bio was never called out (in ff14) as poison and didnt really fit as one either but by simply watching someone duel the flame guy in bosja , i had the chance to overhear him call bio 4 poison.
I learned the nature of bad breath by the blu mage spell book , that it isnt poison but instead earth and water aether based
Cure 1 2 and 3 naming convention was from a book in the library
We can make assumption that voidspawns are just humans that lost all their aetheric balance like sin eaters only theirs is dark aether, and it fits since they are attracted to black mages aetherial attunements
the palace of the dead i learned from a nearby historian searching for broken pots that it was actually an amdapoor city if i recall correctly
Due to seeing the ascians cast acn spells , we assumed from hw that they should be as well. Shb ofc confirmed that.


etc etc. So id say youre partially correct as in it is not using the darksoulian method for the most part but there are still some instances of it.

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Originally Posted by HeulGDarian

well like i said debatable. In order to find out what miasma does i had to read up what black rose does, as well as put 2 and 2 together that what thancred was doing with his aether was exactly that.
Bio was never called out (in ff14) as poison and didnt really fit as one either but by simply watching someone duel the flame guy in bosja , i had the chance to overhear him call bio 4 poison.
I learned the nature of bad breath by the blu mage spell book , that it isnt poison but instead earth and water aether based
Cure 1 2 and 3 naming convention was from a book in the library
We can make assumption that voidspawns are just humans that lost all their aetheric balance like sin eaters only theirs is dark aether, and it fits since they are attracted to black mages aetherial attunements
the palace of the dead i learned from a nearby historian searching for broken pots that it was actually an amdapoor city if i recall correctly
Due to seeing the ascians cast acn spells , we assumed from hw that they should be as well. Shb ofc confirmed that.


etc etc. So id say youre partially correct as in it is not using the darksoulian method for the most part but there are still some instances of it.

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All of that is exposited in far earlier instances of the game. And Dark Souls didn't invent environmental storytelling. It just capitalizes on it, and is what has introduced many people to it.

Not saying what Nixxe is saying isn't debatable, but idk, this is the first time I've heard anything about WoW having environmental storytelling on a big scale. Of course, I don't usually come to the table to hear about WoW, but now I'm curious.

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Originally Posted by Curisu

About a deep lore, no game can beat WoW.
Lotr, and Swtor would be close to it.
But these 3 have so much lore just because of the age.

But about the storytelling itself in the game, WoW is more on the bottom end.
I played WoW for the first time a few month ago and tryed to follow the story but when I reached max level I knew nothing about it.

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WoW's lore isn't even that deep, because they are constantly retconning and trashing the old lore to make room for whatever the current raid designer feels like doing. This isn't even a new problem, it goes all the way back to Burning Legion and the "lorelol" jokes of how they basically rewrote the Draenei on the fly and then had the Blood Elves stealing spaceships because "reasons".

At this point it's a soup of stuff that is barely held together by any kind of common narrative, as shown by how the game lets you just skip almost all of it to get to whatever is new and current.

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Originally Posted by Vyrerus

All of that is exposited in far earlier instances of the game. And Dark Souls didn't invent environmental storytelling. It just capitalizes on it, and is what has introduced many people to it.

Not saying what Nixxe is saying isn't debatable, but idk, this is the first time I've heard anything about WoW having environmental storytelling on a big scale. Of course, I don't usually come to the table to hear about WoW, but now I'm curious.

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its just the most known one.

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Originally Posted by Nixxe

Since both you and Vyrerus brought it up in this context, I did go and find an article talking a bit about how Dark Souls does story and I do think it's at least somewhat similar to the sort of thing I liked in WoW. The example of the archer, at least as presented in the article, is exactly the sort of thing I like. The game assumes you're smart enough to put the pieces together and let's you do so. FFXIV would just have some throwaway messenger NPC show up to report that the legendary archer is dead, while Alphinaud is on hand to say anything that that needs to be said on the player's behalf and can't be expressed with a single emote.

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Huh, what a weird blog post. I mean, he does describe Dark Souls correctly, but he says that 2009 him thought Demon's Souls had no story... when the intro directly sets up the story for you, and you have to talk to the Monumental, who does probably the biggest story dump of any Souls game. Like, compared to Dark Souls, Demon's Souls is practically FFXIV vs. this old WoW you're painting up for me. I wonder if the blog runner just wants brownie points for claiming to start with the first Souls game or if he's just got a poor memory.

I have played WoW since launch, and the article itself is high fantasy and obviously the opinion of someone who couldnt appreciate good story if it came over and spent the night.

WoW has a story that has been confusing and contradictory over the years and at no time have I felt invested in the characters or the story. Never have I felt a longing to see the next installment to see how it would all turn out.

I cannot say the same for FFxiv, I have always found the characters well written, typically evoking actual feelings for how they will fare or what happens to them. When I get to the end of a story point I count down the days until they release more of it.

Lore is an encyclopedia, and story is a novel. yes, WoW has a lot of lore, maybe more than FF XIV, but no one read encyclopedias for fun, no encyclopedia invokes feelings. (in most people anyway)

For this reason alone, I feel that article is full of it.

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Originally Posted by Vyrerus

Not saying what Nixxe is saying isn't debatable, but idk, this is the first time I've heard anything about WoW having environmental storytelling on a big scale. Of course, I don't usually come to the table to hear about WoW, but now I'm curious.

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It's probably worth knowing and keeping in mind that I started playing WoW in 2007 and generally made a point of doing everything there was to do and seeing everything there was to see in it. Like I did both versions of Loremaster just because it was there to do, and the pre-Cataclysm version of it basically required downloading an addon and tracking down every single last quest in vanilla content to accomplish, some of which I had never encountered, despite leveling 8 characters to cap in that time and prioritizing new experiences. In 2010, Cataclysm happened and detonated virtually all of vanilla WoW, replacing it with a more streamlined and modern questing experience that was much more hand-holdy than what I had started with. Now it's 2020 and I suspect a non-trivial portion of the playerbase never knew a pre-Cataclysm time unless perhaps they used the Classic servers. Likewise, it's completely believable to me that people who just spam click through the quests and mindlessly follow the objective markers on their maps would never have taken the time to notice it.

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Originally Posted by Nixxe

It's probably worth knowing and keeping in mind that I started playing WoW in 2007 and generally made a point of doing everything there was to do and seeing everything there was to see in it. Like I did both versions of Loremaster just because it was there to do, and the pre-Cataclysm version of it basically required downloading an addon and tracking down every single last quest in vanilla content to accomplish, some of which I had never encountered, despite leveling 8 characters to cap in that time and prioritizing new experiences. In 2010, Cataclysm happened and detonated virtually all of vanilla WoW, replacing it with a more streamlined and modern questing experience that was much more hand-holdy than what I had started with. Now it's 2020 and I suspect a non-trivial portion of the playerbase never knew a pre-Cataclysm time unless perhaps they used the Classic servers. Likewise, it's completely believable to me that people who just spam click through the quests and mindlessly follow the objective markers on their maps would never have taken the time to notice it.

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Sounds like questing in FFXI. Go to the websites that datamined the quests, determine quest NPC and objective, shout for help cause ain't no way your level 55 ass is making it alone against those level 59~68 orcs, proceed to area. Though FFXI only had flavour text on non-gear items( Key items and other quest related items usually and food).

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Originally Posted by Vyrerus

Sounds like questing in FFXI. Go to the websites that datamined the quests, determine quest NPC and objective, shout for help cause ain't no way your level 55 ass is making it alone against those level 59~68 orcs, proceed to area. Though FFXI only had flavour text on non-gear items( Key items and other quest related items usually and food).

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I think XI was a lot more hardcore than WoW ever was, but yeah, WoW didn't have any of the quest tracking we take for granted in this game. No object highlights, no map markers, no nothing. You needed an addon for that. The quests were written to give you some idea where to go and you went and looked around until you found what you needed. There were uninstanced dungeons too, areas with limited access that were filled with elite NPCs that you didn't want to touch without a group or severely overleveling the content. I loved that stuff. Really helped the world feel real and immersive to not have everything revolve around my character.

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Originally Posted by Nixxe

I think XI was a lot more hardcore than WoW ever was, but yeah, WoW didn't have any of the quest tracking we take for granted in this game. No object highlights, no map markers, no nothing. You needed an addon for that. The quests were written to give you some idea where to go and you went and looked around until you found what you needed. There were uninstanced dungeons too, areas with limited access that were filled with elite NPCs that you didn't want to touch without a group or severely overleveling the content. I loved that stuff. Really helped the world feel real and immersive to not have everything revolve around my character.

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In reality, if you didn't know how to use the Allakhazam website you were more or less out of luck when it came to finding quest objectives in many of the early leveling areas -- especially things like obtaining the Druid water form.

Getting lost attempting to find a quest objective in a mountainous area was both real and exceedingly immersive. And frustrating.

Running around Azuremyst Isle when starting out as a Draenei certainly felt compelling and immersive, until you ran into those elite NPCs by accident, and then on purpose. Having to actually battle them towards the end of your stay in the starting area wasn't particularly fun. Oh the joys of an instanced area with nobody else sticking around long enough to finish the quest chains!

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Originally Posted by Anienai

Swtor should be #1.

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Can't disagree with you. SWTOR just obliterates most other games for the quality of the story, and how the game allows players to interact and proceed through it in game.

I don't think wow should be #1, it's latest xpac writing was just awful overall, but WoW does a great job in giving players choices in how they interact with the main story and give characters meaningful ways of being part of the story.

FFXIV has good story writing but without a doubt the worst mechanism of incorporating the player into the story. Its rigidly linear. There are no alternatives or choices involved. The story is essentially told to you with minimal importance given to your character. 99% of the MSQ steps are going somewhere and talking to someone. You're not the "Warrior of Light" but a "Messager of light". You're not entrusted to get Alphy his coffee, you're only entrusted to pass the message along to the guy who actually makes it. Occasionally you fight or do something but really you're not important.