Of all the quests that are voiced, surely that one needed it!
Secondly, Blizz, you still tend to questhub, and make quests these small tidbits of kill and fetch. It’s one of the reasons why people rush through your zones towards endgame (because the quests are not engaging or fun, but chores to get to an end), get to maxlevel within a week and will whine this expansion has nothing to offer…
You mark quest areas off, after which we beeline to them, do whatever needs doing and beeline back to a questgiver.
You need to see zones or at least big parts of zones as quest areas. Instead of having a hub every few hundred yards, have one hub at the start and open up a big chunk of the zone to do the initial quests. Quests should be divergent enough to force you to explore the zone. You need to find more ways to keep us engaged while fighting/exploring, by for instance bringing back a few classics, gaining rep for killing certain mobs, improving weapon skills, or have many hidden and meaningful (random) items everywhere (so, not just a chest with the basic crap we’ve gotten in BfA and Shadowlands).
If people rush through a zone in a couple of hours, then that’s a failure of your design.
You should entice us to see, feel, know areas over time, before you push us to the next zone. Keep us more engaged in meaningful ways. You need people to WANT to engage with your world, not rush toward another xp reward.
In a good open world game, I tend to set off to do one thing and get sidetracked by dozens of other things. You need something similar.
Maybe, that’s one way you get there. Make it more open game. Don’t rail us on your storytrain that goes station to station. Story should be an overarching questline, but you need to condense it to the basics. What of the story do we need to do and what is just fluff you should cut out (most of your quests are btw).
Story quests should be huge and take you on an hour long adventure, but other than those your basic quests should be optional (like dailies) and available over the entirety of the zones.
They could be exploration quests you do for a certain faction and you map out the world. Maybe introduce fog of war.
They could be combat quests to train your weapon-skills, use certain talents, explore specs, that you have on the backburner and complete while you play.
There should be a way to put/take orders on the AH, so players can gather specific things while playing.
It seems this part of the game is one you gloss over so easily. You seem to believe people will rush to max level and only endgame is where the true game lies, but it couldn’t be farther from the truth. The levelling and exploration is WHY a lot of us play this game, why we make alts.
But judging how you are still sticking to this on rails questhub station design, shows me you don’t really see this as important part of the game unfortunately.
It’s truly a shame, because your graphic design team keeps knocking it out of the park, and instead of showing them love, and maximally engaging people with your beautiful world, you facilitate this beeline to the endzone.