Storytelling in World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King
When I originally learned that Blizzard’s World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King would feature a greater emphasis on narrative storytelling, I couldn’t help but have concerns. While its predecessor The Burning Crusade came through with promises of fatter purples, flying mounts, and more, more, more, one of its weaknesses was the impact of the storyline. Meeting a bunch of fellows from Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal in The Burning Crusade was kind of neat, but I never really felt as if I belonged fighting Illidan. It was difficult to see how helping sick children and mending blue space-alien rejects helped liberate a people from Illidan’s tyranny, and despite the fact that my character was supposedly a hero, I didn’t feel all that heroic. In The Burning Crusade, I was a hero without friends or a real cause. Wrath of the Lich King changes all that.
From the beginning, there is a clearly defined goal that the story revolves around: you’re traveling to Northrend to battle the Lich King. Large chunks of the quests address this storyline, in which you’re not merely shuffling through dung looking for quest items but rather undergoing some task that will deny the Lich King allies, or bolster your own faction’s forces.
What’s more, some of these quest-givers aren’t just your run of the mill NPCs. If you paid attention during the original World of Warcraft ( Buy wow gold ) you should know them quite well. They know you, acknowledging your pre-expansion blood, sweat, and tears before asking you to help them again.
Touches like this add to the believability of the plot and the sense that your character is actually a hero. This idea gets ratcheted up with a mid-expansion cut scene that kept me glued to my monitor in spite of the fact that my character remained uninvolved. In the aftermath, the cherry on top of Blizzard’s storytelling sundae is revealed, as NPCs that die in the storyline stay dead from your character’s perspective.
Another serious storytelling event whisks your character off into another event, this time one in which you boldly charge off with NPC heroes for truth, justice, and the Azerothian way. Unfortunately, though this type of one-shot real-time quest seemed like a great avenue for storytelling in Wrath of the Lich King, the event ran on a timer that some other player had tripped just before I arrived. Because of this I flailed around wildly trying to find the NPCs, irrevocably missing part of the storyline.
Though the permanency in this case was annoying, I’m convinced that without it Wrath of the Lich King’s storytelling would go down quicker than Hogger goes down to a level 10 player character. The permanency helps promote the feel that what your character does matters. It definitely beats watching a certain NPC from the original World of Warcraft ( Buy wow gold )die over and over and over. Because of this permanency, Wrath of the Lich King feels less like a never-ending quest for loot, and more like a single-player RPG.
NPC dialogue, cut scenes and real-time storyline events are implemented well enough that they add to rather than detract from the storyline, which is Wrath of the Lich King’s real triumph over its predecessors. It doesn’t have the storytelling depth of a Final Fantasy or Metal Gear Solid title, but it comes closer then most and definitely tops the previous expansion and original game.
