World of Warcraft

The elements that make Wow’s content is widely varied and would take many blog posts to cover but narrowing it down to player narrative a few things jump out at me.

Quests

The skeleton of the story in World of Warcraft is the quests.  They hold up all the plot and the direction of the player.  Each task you do has a reason to do it.

Characters

Follow characters through 16 years of content.  Some stay and some go but lots of them get arcs and go through changes over the years.  (Although my queen Sylvanas has swapped between good and evil many times she has never changed her outfit.)  Lots of people end up getting attached to certain characters too.  If they die or leave many players don’t forget.

Player’s Story

This is one of the things that has changed throughout the 16 years of this game.  As an RPG you are playing as your character.  This is the none named kind of roleplay so essentially you are playing yourself.  In the earlier content you were usually tasked with menial work such as helping defend a farm from attackers.  Pretty quickly you rise through the ranks in the story and have now saved the world from destruction several times.  The writers tend to very cheekily get around this fact by having you meet new people who you haven’t proved yourself to yet.  Usually you end up proving yourself by some menial task as well.  

Despite that, the majority of the time is spent in raids or dungeons where you do get to be the hero and it feels really good.  For example in the final raid of Battle for Azeroth you get to kill an Old God.  And although it potentially could be a trap for the next expansion it still feels like you are immensely powerful.  This feeling is created in several ways.  One method used is releasing several tiers of raid difficulty so that you can play out what you feel is your best fit.  Some groups never even complete the lower levels before moving on.  You can define which difficulty is the “true” difficulty for yourself and therefore if you just want to get the story you can but if you want to play through the game in a hardcore mythic raiding experience that is also really rewarding.  Another way it’s made rewarding is if you release the raid simultaneously with new gear that is made to be grinded for.  Players will head into the raid immediately while being under geared so they get the feeling of not being strong enough to take on this enormous boss.  This is creating the narrative in their heads that this thing is so strong and powerful.  When they come back to the boss in weeks (or months) later with their new gear and they make better progress they don’t think about the gear, they just see themselves killing something that they saw as immensely strong.