Mordiceius' Gaming Blog Flying Away on a Wing and a Prayer

While questing last night in the WotLK beta, I struck up a conversation with a guildmate about the lore of the dragons in the Dragonblight. I won’t bore you with the details, but I’ll let you know that I consider myself a well versed lore-whore for WoW. On the border of being an apologist, I can’t get enough of the lore. It’s one of the main reasons I play the game. I’ve always loved a good story. This all made me wonder… How many people don’t care about lore at all? How many just see some NPC with an exclamation mark over their head and just read what they need to do and none of the flavor text? I would bet that it is a lot more than you would first think.

It breaks my heart every time I strike up a conversation with someone in WoW and they say things like “Who’s Arthas?” or “Who’s Deathwing?”. I guess a lot of people just see the game as just a bunch of numbers of who or what they need to kill/rescue/destroy/recover. To that extent, it would not really matter where or what they killing/resucing/destroying/recovering as long as there was another quest beyond it. I just love the story. I don’t want to get into the whole “Warcraft is just a rip-off of Warhammer” argument, because while I think it may have started off that way, the Warcraft universe has really evolved into something unique and both IPs are filled with rich and unique lore.

Another reason I have been thinking of this subject is because I’ve been rewatching the Warhammer videos that they had been putting out each month. I could be wrong, but I think Mythic really overestimates how much people care about the lore. I don’t mean this in a negative way, it is just how I think people are. Granted, Warhammer will probably receive a huge following from the tabletop crowd, but beyond that, I think the interest in lore will be limited. In the videocasts Paul Barnett and Jeff Hickman do about the game, they talk as if all the players will have a deep pride in their side. I don’t think this will be the case. Most people will probably make their decision because of it’s the ‘side their friend plays’ or ‘these ones look coolest’ and nothing more.

The Tome of Knowledge has been one of the main features that people have been boasting makes Warhammer unique. It contains everything you could want to know about anything. If I recall correctly, it even has lore entry for every NPC you meet in game. I doubt this will get much use. Even for just the central lore figures in the Warhammer universe, I don’t think people are going to want to sit there and read pages of lore on NPCs. Just as they’ll skip past the quest dialog just to find their objective, I predict they’ll never read about the lore because it keeps them from the game itself.

As for the American/European playerbase of WoW, I would guess that at most, 5% of people even care about any of the lore. Maybe one of my future projects, if I don’t end up being too lazy, will be polling a bunch of people across different servers on if they know or even care about any lore.