Originally Posted by
Eurhetemec
WoW already does this.
Telling the story through the design of the world, how the enemies look, where they are, and so on is a huge part of the design of WoW since Vanilla. It's undeniable and it's massive. Some parts of some expansions are better at it than other ones, but even BfA is extremely good at it. In a lot of cases, even without the quest text or anything, you can work out what's going on just from what you're fighting, where, and what's happened to the environment. It's weird to even suggest otherwise, given anyone who has played through an unfamiliar area without actually reading the quests (which I'm guessing is virtually everyone sooner or later) has probably understood what, basically, is going on (in the same way you do in DS).
So I'm not convinced Dark Souls does have anything to actually teach WoW here. DS is a wonderful series, but it has plenty of areas where it's actually less clear than WoW from the "who and where" of things what's actually going on (especially in DS2, imho).
The only thing DS does really heavily that WoW does only lightly is tell the story through the items. And I'm not sure that's something that would be viable with WoW's loot setup.
(As an aside, most MMORPGs to some extent tell stories by positioning mobs, showing the environment and so on. Indeed, back in the days of EverQuest and Dark Age of Camelot, where quests were rare, often the only way you knew the story of some area was what you inferred from the positioning of the mobs, the environment and so on. WoW derived very directly from them, and continued this, but added loads more quests which put a lot more direct or indirect explanation on top of that, but the environmental and mob storytelling continues to this day. Some MMOs do it less, or in ways that make less sense. FFXIV has some mob positioning that makes no intuitive sense and is forced to explain it, and often doesn't have the environment explain much, so it's clearly not doing this as aggressively as WoW. City of Heroes was a mixed bag on this, sometimes doing it very well, sometimes making you wonder "Why am I here, beating up random street thugs, in the middle of a very high-tech laboratory?". Warhammer Age of Reckoning was pretty good at it - verging on the great in places, with loads of obscure stories told mostly through mobs/areas hidden away. I could go on.)