Quest texts in World of Warcraft? You don’t have to read them! Apparently, many think so. Because only a small fraction actually reads the quest texts.
World of Warcraft is known for many things. On the one hand, there is the extremely long lifespan of nearly 20 years. This, of course, goes hand in hand with the fact that the game world is now huge and the story is correspondingly extensive. For many, the story, that is, the lore of Warcraft, is even one of the main reasons to still play the MMORPG at all.
But how many people actually read the quest texts? Blizzard wanted to know this too – and the result is a bit sobering.
What kind of survey is this? On X, the World of Warcraft account initiated a survey to find out how attentively players actually read the quest texts in the game. There were a total of 4 answers, and the result is probably somewhat sobering for some story fans:
- 17.8% state that they “always” read the quest texts.
- 25.9% say that they don’t do so when they are “really going for it”.
- 18.5% read the quest texts “only for the big quests”.
- 37.7% ask “Quest text?” and basically read no quest texts at all.
Or in other words: Just over 1 in 3 do not read the quest texts at all.
Why do so few read quest texts? Many play WoW because of the mechanics and the gameplay feel; for them, the story plays a secondary role. Moreover, reading quest texts is in most cases unnecessary to complete a quest. The short summary for current objectives and the marking on the world map is usually sufficient to understand the task.
That many players only read the quests once or only for the major main quests also seems logical. They want to know what happens to the well-known characters around whom the story revolves – what rather unknown NPCs are up to is not equally important for everyone.
How can this be fixed? On X (formerly Twitter), there are some discussions about how to make the quests more engaging so that players are more interested in them. The solution seems obvious in many cases: more voice acting.
Even if not every quest comes with elaborate voice acting, as is currently the case only for the most important missions, it would be helpful to have some kind of “narration voice” that presents the mission to players.
In the Classic version of World of Warcraft, this is already achieved through an add-on. Here, an AI generates a voice that reads out quest texts – even with different voice acting depending on the quest giver.
Whether there will be something similar for the modern version of World of Warcraft, and whether Blizzard might even officially offer such an option, remains to be seen. It would be desirable to give the old-fashioned “quest texts” a somewhat modern touch.
Because World of Warcraft is full of great lore and amazing stories, even in the side quests. It would be a shame if in the end only just under half of the players even noticed that. If you have hardly read any quests until now, we have summarized the entire story of WoW here.
