i know, it's a bit silly to not play a game because of this, - but he wasn't the first, to start playing wow then get turned off by quest reading.

i'm just abit surprised that this is one area that never got upgraded in 4 expansions. Texts are still presented in a rather plain looking window, that nobody reads. So no one gets in on wow's story. actually i think someone did a survey, and summarised less than 10% of wow players actually read the quest.

iT's funny, this new expansion is supposedly all about teling a great story, but already I think it is a waste of time if your quests are once again going to be given in text windows. "i wanna play , listen and watch, not read" - is the comment I got. But with almost all video games having their story told to you in NPC speech with the text log available for back up, it's not surprising.

Anyway, with this attitude to their lore, i'm very scepitcal about the future of wow, especially when blizzard is boasting about a great story but will conveniently forget to present it well, leaving it to text boxes and bad npc animations. Finally I know some of you would say who cares, people will still play, its fine as it is, maybe you're right, but witht aht sorta attitude, why bother make any changes at all apart from new areas?

Slight distinction here, there is a difference, though slight between reading the story and reading the quest, a lot more people read the quest, but the survey was less than 10% read the story. Yes, I know both are presented in the same quest text - but people just read the summary b/c it's quicker - and tbh, having to read the story is boring when everything around you is so exciting.

The game has excellent gameplay, graphics, beautiful scenes, cool stuff, then you have the story in a boring quest text window and you expect people are going to pay attention? ofc not. and these, days, with add ons like quest helper and guides, people read guides instead of quests. They need to put quest in speech and present it a bit more exciting, maybe not cut -scene, but good voice acting and npc animation when taking and handing in quests, so at least you hear it.

Because there are also downsides to NPC text and speech quest telling.

Imagine you started on an awesome quest chain, and the person standing next to you handing in the final quest, spoiling the entire chain.

And no, phasing every chain of the quest would be impossible to do.

TBh, it's blizzard who lose out, I've always said this time and time again, if they got even 50% of playing wow population into their lore, their franchise sales would rocket, including comic books, novels etc, as it is only the 5% that bother to read the stuff are then going on now and buying comics and books, can you imagine if the story was presented like in WC3?

In WC3 there is speech all the way, when quests are giving you hear what is going on as you move along, and that game is a lot shorter than wow so don't tell me people won't find time to listen. Those who played WC3 are far more familiar with what is going on in wow than those who play wow, like 16 hrs a day, every day. Incredible.

There is a story to wow, you just have to work hard to find it

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Q u o t e:
There is a story to wow, you just have to work hard to find it

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more like it's hard work to find it. It's blizzards fault that kids don't want to read anymore isn't it :p

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Q u o t e:
There is a story to wow, you just have to work hard to find it

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and therein lies the problem. People don't come here to work, or put any effort into their game time.
If people were to put a little bit of effort into what they do in WoW, they'd enjoy it a lot more.

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Q u o t e:
Because there are also downsides to NPC text and speech quest telling.

Imagine you started on an awesome quest chain, and the person standing next to you handing in the final quest, spoiling the entire chain.

And no, phasing every chain of the quest would be impossible to do.

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Just have it play the voice stuff just on your client? problem solved and annoyance prevented :P

So in other words your friend pulled a TLDR on nine lines worth of text?

I fear for the future of our societies if people like these become the norm. "I don't want to read wah wah". Move to North Korea then, nobody will expect you to read anything there.

EDIT: I thought going to school was a great idea but text in books was the dealbreaker.

EDIT2: And I also strongly disagree with the notion that "you have to work hard to find the story" in WoW. You don't. It's literally presented to you on a silver platter. I guess some people are just too damn lazy to actually hold the platter and grab its content.

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Q u o t e:

Actually, in a recent interview posted on Gamasutra, Cataclysm's Lead World Designer Alex Afrasiabi comments on the notion of telling a story and quest texts. The article is an interesting read, and can be found here: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=25192

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2nd

brb, reading

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Q u o t e:

more like it's hard work to find it. It's blizzards fault that kids don't want to read anymore isn't it :p

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no one's talking about blame, but then after 5 years, you should know by now that the quest text window is a terrible way to present your story, it's the worse aspect of the game, - iamagine in wc3, the lore use to be one of the best things about warcraft, but then it was presented better.

i can understand if at release, they didn't have time to sort out the questing issue, and the text window was a temporary measure cos they ran out of time, but not having updated it in 5 years, with no plans for an extra 1.5 years of wow, shows that the value of story is lost on these guys,

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Q u o t e:
Which is a flawed way of making a game.

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Kinda, it is a flawed way to make a game, true, but i thik it is one are wow has been a victim of its success, so popular and successful, they probably said to themselves it would make little difference to do up this aspect, a lot of work for little improvement impact, our ratings are still high. So they may not do anything about this until they start losing subscriptions big time or another mmo that odes have all this steals all the subscribers.

Voicing a computer game takes a phenomenal amount of time. Doing it in a way that doesn't look completely rubbish and cheesy takes even longer.

I don't know about you, but I am waiting quite long enough between content upgrades.

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Q u o t e:

Actually, in a recent interview posted on Gamasutra, Cataclysm's Lead World Designer Alex Afrasiabi comments on the notion of telling a story and quest texts. The article is an interesting read, and can be found here: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=25192

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Thanks for the link, that was an interesting interview.

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Q u o t e:
Because there are also downsides to NPC text and speech quest telling.

Imagine you started on an awesome quest chain, and the person standing next to you handing in the final quest, spoiling the entire chain.

And no, phasing every chain of the quest would be impossible to do.

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Actually no, he wouldn't be spoiling anything if only you heard the voice.
And that is not phasing, at all.

About handing in the last bit of the chain, that already happens in old world/out land when the npc starts to do his thing and you see what is going on even thou it's no you who triggered it... and you have to wait to click the npc again since he's engaged in whatever the other player triggered.

However having voice overs for all quests would be... expensive.

Actually World of warcraft doesnt have something to fear at the moment. There are zero mmos in the market that feature 100% recorded voices, or even a good percentage. But when Swtor comes out, we will see what happens.

In the Death Knight starting chain, the quests the Lich King gives you have actual voice acting. To be specific, he reads you the quest text. Now... how many people do you think actually listened to him finish his long-winded speech? I know I didn't after the first quest.

Making the NPCs talk would be even slower and people would get annoyed by it. Real story progression should not be done in your quest log. It should be visible to you as you are doing the quest. A good example is the Battle of Undercity, where you can tell what's happening without having to read anything but chat bubbles (and even that is spoken out loud).

how would you otherwise do it?
have an npc talk to you instead of text? so you are forced to watch a cut scene every time you get a quest? damn that´d be boring and a waste of time. or just haveing the npc talk out in the air ´whenéver you get a q? so that if you leave before they are done you have no idea what to do?
seriosuly come with an example of how you could do something else because i can't think of anything
and don't dare use the "it's blizzards job to figure it out" because that only works if there's an actual problem that needs to be dealt with. which there is not