WoW is suddenly a real role-playing game again – and I love it

In World of Warcraft there are suddenly real RPG elements again. At least MeinMMO demon Cortyn praises this and names many successful examples.

I have now played all of the quests in World of Warcraft The War Within and have also brought several classes to level 80. I have noticed a few details that you might miss on your first playthrough. There are a whole series of small but subtle differences and details that you only see when you play multiple classes.

The War Within has incorporated some interesting “role-playing elements” that have been sorely missed in World of Warcraft in recent expansions.

Actions for specific classes

One innovation that has not been seen in such abundance before is interaction options that only exist for your class or your race. Everywhere on Khaz Algar you can find small details that are only available to selected characters. I would like to present a few examples that I have come across so far.

Mage conversations in Healingfall

In Healingfall, there is only one mage left among the Arathi with a rather dark backstory. You can ask the mage about all sorts of details, such as why he doesn’t just open a portal to the Arathi Empire.

But you can only ask more detailed questions if you are a magician yourself. You will then find out more details about how he is trying to learn this spell and what problems he has encountered. He will then explain to you at length how he is making progress with the calculations of his magical research – and for you as a magician, that sounds plausible.

You can also taunt him a little as a fellow magician. It is very strange that he is the last magician stuck there.

No trust in the evil

We have already reported on another detail. The members of the Arathi expedition are anything but open to dark attitudes and have little to do with sorcerers or other dark characters.

For this reason, these classes need a little more persuasion to get one or another NPC to cooperate with you. This even leads to you getting an exclusive quest in which you have to defeat a large creature of the void. The skeptical NPC accompanies you and assumes the whole time that you will stab him in the back.

The quest isn’t particularly challenging or very long. But it does help to finally explain why some people work with heroes who have a completely different alignment.

In the past, this had often led to conflicts, for example when a paladin suddenly had to work for villains or when particularly gullible beings were willing to cooperate with witches.

Villains don’t like puzzles

In the Healing Falls area you can find a pirate’s treasure – but the chest is locked. If you click on the chest, a message appears along the lines of: “The heavy chest cannot be opened easily. Perhaps there is a clue if you look around a bit.”

Most classes would now have to do just that, look around everywhere and ultimately recover the key from the body of a fallen woman.

Rogues, however, get a dialogue option and can choose:

“That may be true. I’ll just pick the lock anyway.”

It’s such a small detail, but incredibly cool.

Details that simply fit well

Of course, these are all just small details and nuances. The choice of class does not change the larger, overarching plot or have a drastic impact on the story.

But it doesn’t have to. It’s enough for me that World of Warcraft recognizes my choice of class or my previous achievements in the game and sometimes says: “Here, this is just for you because you are exactly this class or this race.”

Baldur’s Gate 3 last year showed impressively how well the appreciation of such details can be received. I would be happy if WoW brought more content like this. It doesn’t have to dominate the game, but having small, exclusive dialogues or options for certain classes makes the world so much more convincing.

Endless dialogues and so much to read

Another point is the additional dialogues that you can listen to if you want. Whether it’s small NPCs that you can simply ask about their everyday life or their attitude, or the big, historical heroes like Anduin or Magni, who you can listen to for a while as they talk to each other.

This is a great thing for story fans like me, but also for everyone who perhaps doesn’t have such a good understanding of the lore and often asks themselves: Who are they? What are they actually doing here? Because you can often ask a question like that to refresh your memory of who you’re actually dealing with.

My only criticism is that more of these scenes could have been voiced. With a few exceptions, this is only the case for the main quest. The fact that many quest NPCs have dialogues with speech bubbles without actually hearing a voice is starting to feel a little outdated.

All of this is optional, of course. If you are not interested in the story, you can almost always just skip it and won’t be bothered with “boring details”.

Conclusion: A more rounded MMORPG through small details

I realize that many people are reading this and wondering, “Okay, so why does this matter?” Because these details have virtually no impact on gameplay, and if you don’t care about the story, none of this matters anyway.

But I do care. I love these little role-playing details. For me, it makes me fall in love with the game world even more and gives me the impression that there are people behind it who have developed it with love and passion and have invested a lot of time in precisely these little moments. People have put a lot of thought into making sure that everything looks harmonious and fits together. Something that unfortunately couldn’t always be said with certainty in the past with WoW.
Of course, there are also details that are a little more amusing and less serious. Like Spongebob being found in The War Within.