Really? Woah.

I mean, you CAN play WoW as “go there, smash that”, but you do not have to. Otherwise it would’ve never gained that traction it has. The world has a complex history, each faction and race it’s own culture, conflicts, goals, hopes and fears.

Granted, lore IS optional, you don’t need it to have fun, but the second you bother reading quest-texts you get dragged into a complex world that easily easily rivals or surpasses Morrowind, Oblivion or Dragon Age story-wise.

Some of the quests are crap, some are fantastic, some are mundane (help a gal to get together with her lover), some are epic (deal with the trolls who killed their own gods in a desperate attempt to fight against the Scourge, end up freeing and fighting alongside their last surviving god.), but overall the quality ranges between good and great. Granted, the quests in the later expansions are much better than the vanilla ones, but hey, that’s why the lowlevel content gets revamped.

Take the current big bad Arthas for example.

He used to be a prince of a now-destroyed kingdom (and now in the hand of the playable zombies) and a paladin, a warrior of light. He fell through his own hubris, recklessnes and the machinations of a certain Demon, until he took the mantle of THE big bad in azeroth, killed his own father, the king and became exactly what he fought against, raising and commanding an army of undead minions, staging a planned and controlled zombie-invasion. And the world started to wage war against him. That’s the story why Sammy’s raiding icecrown, to help another paladin, a former teacher/confediate/friend of Arthas, to take him down.

Fun Stuff.

Rest assured, I wouldn’t play it if it hadn’t a good story. I get bored too easily to deal with mindless crap.

That’s a lot deeper than I expected for a MMO.

@Kao
The poor gal got zomby-fied, enslaved and turned against her old family by Mr. Lichking. We kinda saved her.