WoW: The War Within will tell its main story via delves and dungeons 'when it makes sense', giving me hope for an escape from 2 decades of raid-centric storytelling

pcgamer.com:

I've always wanted to love the setting of World of Warcraft—but its storytelling, gnarled up in confusing timelines, optional quests, raid cutscenes, and books,has always kept me at arm's length. Despite that, I've always been rooting for it to get better. That's mostly out of nostalgia, sure, but I also have a love for the mechanics of stories, and I like to cheer for an underdog.

Dragonflight, when I've dipped my toes in, hasn't fired on all cylinders in the way I was quietly hoping, although it was definitely an improvement over what came before. But a sore spot remains: Because of how WoW is structured, almost every climactic moment in its story has had to exist in a goddamn raid.

Sure, there are questlines with their real-time cutscenes—but developers have limited resources. Are you ever going to polish a solo quest set piece (which a player typically does once) to the level you might polish a dungeon (which a player does a ton)? Probably not. 

Dungeons are an excellent place to marry story with spectacle. Final Fantasy 14 mastered this trick a while back—and while I have mixed feelings on their corridor-heavy design, I still adore dungeons like The Vault, The Heroes' Gauntlet, and The Dead Ends because of the story moments they're attached to. 

Granted, that game only let you go through its dungeons with NPCs in Shadowbringers—and retroactively added said helpers to older ones in Endwalker—but in FF14, not letting new players watch cutscenes is generally taboo. I mean this with a healthy dose of affection, but I can't imagine that kind of thing flying in WoW's PvE subculture. They're just two fundamentally different games. 

Going to a recent alpha showcase event for The War Within, however, gave me hope for the game's narrative future. I spoke with associate design director Maria Hamilton in a one-on-one interview, as well as game director Ion Hazzikostas during a roundtable—and one point came up multiple times: The WoW team can really do more with its story,