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All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsBreakfast Topic: How often do you read quest text?
by Josh Rose 
Nov 29th 2010 at 8:00AM
If you have played WoW for more than five minutes, you have done a quest. It is nearly impossible to avoid doing them altogether. Since the option has been implemented to have instant quest text and the options tracked on the map by Blizzard's default UI now, most players see the exclamation mark, click on the NPC, accept the quest, and go get the items -- whether it be someone's head, 10 rocks, or going to kill a certain number of creatures -- without paying attention to the why. We want the gold, experience, achievement, or perhaps a quest reward, but we cannot be bothered with why we need to commit genocide on a population of wild animals. We would rather crit the mobs required for the quest than be crit by a wall of text.
I am as guilty of this as the next person: Oh, bring you murloc eyes ... Sure, why not? Kill a bunch of boars? Whatever. However, when I recently went back and finished off Loremaster, I found myself actually paying attention to some of the quests, and I realized there can be some great stories there. The Burning Crusade, Wrath, and soon Cataclysm have come a long way in terms of making the quests feel like they are leading somewhere, as opposed to killing these random mobs for no apparent reason. While working on Loremaster, I was like, "Wow, that was a neat little storyline in that quest chain!" It made me both impressed and a little sad, wondering about all the possible nuggets of story I had simply ignored just so I could level a couple of minutes sooner.
Do you actually read the quest text? Do you ever want to know why we have to kill the creatures we kill and why the NPCs want these seemingly inane items? Or do you just do it for the XP and money and could not care less?
Filed under: Breakfast Topics, Guest Posts
Reader Comments (Page 8 of 8)
Eris Nov 30th 2010 2:46AM
I would love if Blizzard somehow adds visual marks so that you know what KIND of quest it is, ie:
_ either the grinding one (kill 10 murloc), where intructions is not important (even if sometimes funny).
_ or quests that are important for the lore (get Arthas!) and you *want* to read the text.
I was never satisfied with the fact that you play a true hero, some epic dragon slayer, but you have to walk your way by mixing these two. Help a farmer grab apples one day, and defeat the Burning Legion the next.
Not that i wouldn't do both, but rp-wise it's not consistent. You should have a fastest way to choose your adventure.
Xantenise Nov 30th 2010 6:18AM
It's not just the quest text that makes for a good time.
The other day I did a quest with a possessed bulldozer. The goblin priest who was supposed to exorcise it was beating it with his spanner while it drove around at high speed, and I had to kill it.
Then tell the owner his beloved bulldozer got... taken care of.
It killed me with laughter.
wilgjones Aug 31st 2011 10:20PM
I actually appreciate the story as a return gamer to WoW. So, I read the quest texts, and it doesn't take that long, so sometimes I'll read it again if I can't remember what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. That said, is there any way to recover old quest text? Wowhead only has the introductions to quests as far as I can see, not the concluding texts.
To each their own. :]
wilgjones Aug 31st 2011 10:26PM
acutally, there is a way to go over old quest texts: Wowpedia is an excellent site for pure info that's actually more organized, as far as quests go at least, than wowhead.