I do agree with Tamer, the writers are trying to make WOW this progressive awe-inspiring game that battles issues when being so ignorant of the tone of their entire game. Wow is so a weird steampunk fantasy game with talking scaley porn dragons. It used to quip at real-world references etc. It's kind schizo like that but nothing I ever took seriously for the story. Now lore is different, lore is rules it sets itself which it always contradicts.
This shit popped up on my feed, what the fuck the art is horrible. People were not lying about the voice acting. This does not feel or even look like a finished product.
why the fuck did the chromie port onto the chest for no reason?
What grates people about this idea that your character is actively asking the NPCs to talk about themselves is that it's trying to force the players to care because their characters supposedly do. It's insulting the players' intelligence just so the writers feel "validated", while the players themselves want to play the fucking game. If I wanted to read I wouldn't be playing a quest-centric theme park MMO, I'd be replaying fucking Mass Effect or KOTOR.
that really depends how it's pulled off. asking some bloke that wants you to collect boar testicles "why?" isn't that far fetched, but then it also shouldn't be shoved down your thrown (but then you might not wanna read it in the first place, and the little writer's ego can't have that). it's also much cheaper and faster to cram whatever you want in a quest dialog than rig up a NPC script and hire someone to do voicelines etc.
you can have those kind of dialogs, but again that's a WoW problem. quests aren't a singular event (think runescape), but hundreds of mundane chores, where after a certain point you just zone out and click through it - although I think they changed it at some point by having less of it at the same time but longer questlines in the form of follow-up quests. that doesn't really fix it tho since most people grab all the quests in a hub, work them off one by one and then get the next batch. it's like reading 2-3 books at the same time.
to go back to ESO (I know I know), it's as themepark as it gets too, but since the amount of quests is much smaller, and there's a clear separation between "main/zone quest" (which gets all the effort in voicelines and scripts) and sidequests, it's much easier to remember what happened at that location and who was involved.
said sidequests are almost always around a single 3-4 quests chain per hub, which all tell their "own" story. the dialog itself is always the same size and format, 1-2 pages of text after which you get the quests, with 2-3 extra options to ask about. this way people can grab the quest quickly and follow the compass, storyfags can read up on everything they want.
on top of those quests there are dozens of books scattered around like you'd expect from an elder scrolls game, either part of the quest going into more detail/explain what happens (journals and stuff) and general lore books.
there's also the little know fact that every sidequest you complete you usually have those same NPCs show up at the big celebration after you complete the final quest of the main story (think that eastern plaguelands story), which again gives you a nice info what the NPCs were up to in the meantime and plan to do. and that's not even considering you'll run into some of those very same NPCs a few times more in later content, which again adds some nice little arc to otherwise faceless, dime-a-dozen distributors of chores.
there isn't really preventing WoW from doing the same if they want.
TLDR: less is more, and more is optional.
To clarify, the quote above was talking about Baldur's Gate and the bizarre "trans" character that was shoehorned in there. But the sentiment expressed in the video applies perfectly for the exact reasons you're outlining.
If, if World of Warcraft wanted to take their story more seriously, there's nothing wrong with that. It could be one strategy amongst many at shifting gears and maintaining player retention. It'd be risky, sure and almost assuredly lost on its intended audience (I'm sure you've seen the many instances of retards completely missing the boat over plot points in the XIV thread.)
old WoW lore was pretty serious in itself, it was just presented in a lighthearted way. like you can show death in a kids cartoon and deal with it, or go full edgelord and have a live 20 minute vivisection to show how "mature" your story is.
there has been more than enough said about modern writing, but in essence current year writers don't take anything serious nor handle it with respect, that's why even when they want to do sErIoUs ToPiCs it comes across as stunted and immature because that's how they treat everything else. old WoW worked because the levity was few and far between and otherwise treated it's characters "authentic" (in lack of a better word), even if it was just a simple quest dialog. lot of people also confuse "for kids" with "excuse to be shit", when kids itself can smell bullshit far easier than people think. ask yourself, why are transformers and the main chunk of old-school saturday morning cartoons so beloved (even "cringe" stuff like he-man and his advisory at the end?).
Come to think of it, how long have dialogue trees even been in WoW? The only instance I remember in my whole run with the game was one quest in Cataclysm where you had to "persuade" a NPC in I think Hyjal to do something by picking one of three dialogue choices - it was insultingly obvious which the right one was, and the whole format felt very jarring and out of place. Afterwards, I never saw anything like that again until I quit towards the end of WoD. And with good reason; besides how weird it felt, WoW and its quest interface are simply not built for that kind of interaction. A static text box is a good medium for telling the player to do X thing, not for dialogue, and the game's linearity precludes the multiple choice aspect from being really meaningful. All this is good for, besides disguised fetch quests like the one in Cata, is asking characters for information, and I don't remember that ever being very high on the list of anyone's priorities for WoW.
because other games do it and the writer really want's you to care about the npc (and their struggle/self-insert/message) - for better or worse, there's nothing wrong in itself and probably helps write better NPCs, on the other hand it's easy to end up with something like this:
as
@Well Intentioned said it really comes down to better writers. for example, why is mankrik's wife still remembered? there's nothing special about the quest itself, 2 dialogs (one being a single line) and a single interactable.
