I think wow would profit a lot from libraries located in the game, where players can read stories/books of everything that happened in a somewhat chronological way. Currently the story telling is problematic, especially for new players, because of how fragmented it is. It’s very hard to get an idea of the story. Libraries in the game could be a very beautiful and atmospheric way of handling this problem.
Some ideas to implement this practically:
Collection system, where scribes craft books and can sell them on the AH. The mats of these books, which the scribes craft, could be found with archeology. Players would collect these and fill their personal library. If we ever get player housing, these could be stored in a library, that we have in our house.
Another option could be a library located in the game that everyone can access. For example we could have libraries in undercity, ironforge, or also in expansion zones like in valdrakken or dalaran that store the story of the respective expansion.
Artwork and the music themes of the respective expansion could be included in the books, so you hear/see it, while reading.
The idea would be that these aren’t long detailed books, but rather summaries of various stories.
Books could vary in quality, meaning that some epic books could have some cinematic included into them after you finished reading. This means for example that finishing the last chapter of the story of arthas could trigger the wrath of the lich king cinematic. Some rare books could have artwork embedded, and so on. This would of course work with the crafting system. If they want, they could also use a comic format for legendary-quality books.
I like the idea of the city libraries; I don’t want the hassle of collecting my own because I just won’t bother.
But push the boat out, hire voice actors, have each book be a 1-2 minute clip that covers the game lore for a particular segment of time, both stuff that’s gone on behind the scenes, and which players would have ‘lived’ through.
I agree. Another benefit of city libraries would be that it’s a little more social, if that makes sense. However, ofc with player housing it would also introduce behaviour like inviting someone, so they can read through your library, if they don’t wanna bother collecting them. Additionally instead of books being sold on the AH, it could also work through crafting orders, where archeologists farm BoP mats, where they can send crafting orders to get books from scribes.
However, personally I think it would definitely be very cool to go into the library of silvermoon for example to read the story of kaelthas and how their city has fallen to the scourge. These are RPG elements that very old games have usually, but in wow they seem to be missing, so ultimately I don’t care either way and I would enjoy such an addition a lot.
It’s crossed my mind a few times as well, would be an elegant solution I think. I’d love it even more if there could be ‘fluff’ books too besides the ‘getting you up to speed to what the story is anyway of this or that expansion’.
A book on demons and the Illidari, by Archdruid Herodion Moongazer, with scathing comments on the path Illidan took, while alongside it there is another book by renowned mage Tizzydinks who puts down his own perspective on the Man and the Matters. Obviously only some entries, not whole books, but lotsa flavour.
I could get lost in a library like that for a while!
Good idea. You can put the major story events in it by default and we could go and collect all the books scattered around the world now and they would be added to your “personal library”.
It would add a pretty nice touch of flavor for new players to actually stumble across a library and can read in game the story of previous expansions/patches. Even better introduce a new interface to make it easier for players to read it/have artwork.
It’s been done already, in Pandaria. Finding the Lorewalkers’ items got you pieces of the lore to rewatch any time, and some more when a section was complete. If only we could have it more than there.
