Whether Story Decide the Popularity of MMOs Like World of Warcraft?

"We want to reproduce the game experience that we all enjoyed from the original, classic WOW,”said executive producer J. Allen Brack, following a trailer that revealed the server. But with the more details leaked out abput this classic server, we understand that great stories don't necessarily make great MMOs.

This server would recreate the experience of WoW as it was in the ancient days when Tom Cruise was jumping on Oprah's couch and Jar-Jar Binks was, at last, leaving the big screen for good. As a former member of one of "vanilla" WoW's top guilds.

The seeming popularity of classic servers proves that many of us remain interested in game stories that emphasize working together with other people to achieve a common goal.  For years now, Blizzard and other MMORPG developers have embraced the principle that players want their games stuffed with the type of rich self-focused stories you find in single-player RPGs like Skyrim or The Witcher 3, but the roar in Anaheim may prove their audiences crave more interpersonal interaction that they've believed.

There is no doubt that story is not the only factor to decide the game's  popularity at least for World of Warcraft players. The game go through over ten years, you can't see the storylinee in current edition is better or worse than that in original period. But from players' attitude towards "vanilla", we can see the reason why WoW's original minimal storytelling was more than today's comparatively interesting personal story. In an MMO, the design of the overarching story affects almost every other aspect of how you interact with the game.

Instead, the quests often focused on group-based objectives that merely gave you some direction with some scant context. Is there a badass gnoll terrorizing Elwynn Forest? It was cool to see Warcraft characters like Sylvanas Windrunner in "person," but the quests then reminded us that we were the center of the story, often with the plural "heroes."
 
Warcraft is perfect primer for player-told stories. Azeroth, its vast open world, is simply too intricate to be contained by the main story. It’s peppered with background stories, thousands of fictional dead ends and unanswered questions. And it’s held together by patchwork of themes, tones and a fairly generic fantasy setting that provide just enough material with which to create your own divergent narrative.