why i quit before reaching endgame (feedback from a new player)

[Mavrias]

The OP sounds like a perfect candidate for mindless mmos like WoW. They will love you there. Peace.

wow isnt mindless it has a story as well. its simply told more through quests, npc dialogue, and text rather than shoving thousands of unnecessary cutscenes down your throat.

[Penthea]

wow isnt mindless it has a story as well. its simply told more through quests, npc dialogue, and text rather than shoving thousands of unnecessary cutscenes down your throat.

For context I quit WoW at the end of WoD. If the story telling has since improved, I don't know much about it.

WoW's story is told very badly.

For a start when the Vanilla content was still in the game it didn't do a great job of telling what happened in the rts games that came before. Then Cata came along and wiped the Vanilla content away so the scraps that did tell you about the rts games are no longer there. Which also means the chronological order of the game is messed up because you now end up starting with Cata content, then you go into TBC and Wrath which actually came before Cata. You go back in time because Cata replaced the original game content. So because of that you don't get a decent explanation as to why you literally end up travelling to a different planet when you go into TBC, and why you must fight the armies of Arthas in Wrath who is previously referenced as already defeated. All of this of course confused anyone interested in the story that started playing at Cata or later.

A lot of the story is hidden away in novels and comics, which lead to the end boss of an expansion being severely misunderstood by nearly everyone, and most of the playerbase having no clue why a faction leader was missing since the start of the game for several expansions and how he came back.

The npc dialogue is mostly in a quest window in walls of text with no voice acting, animations or cutscenes most of the time. So it's not really presented in a compelling way that makes players interested. The majority of the npcs are lifeless mannequins you will never see again after you leave the area. The lifelessness of the npcs is something I understand to a point, because WoW is an old game. The standards of game story telling have changed. But the above paragraphs are not aspects of being old school. They're just bad decisions.

WoW has an amazing story but my god the way it is told in the game is a blasted mess, and so many important plot points are completely absent from the game. You have to go to a wiki if you want to understand what is going on.

So yea while WoW doesn't "shove thousands of unnecessary cutscenes down your throat", it instead does itself a disservice by presenting such rich and wonderfully written lore in a bland and disordered manner with chunks missing to the point that players are encouraged to not care very much because they must literally stop playing the game and go read a wiki if they do want to understand it. WoW's story isn't mindless, but the majority of how it is presented is.

I have heard the story telling in WoW has improved since I left, but I assume the older content has remained unchanged. I seriously doubt Blizzard spent the time to improve much of anything from the old content.