MMO Feels

I think it's something of an achievement in art and entertainment to evoke emotion. Some might argue that's the whole point. But when you get down to it, the bulk of quests in an MMO are fleeting and forgetable. If I really focus on it, sure, killing those ten rats in the basement may have been a huge relief for the tavernkeep, but I wasn't ever really drawn into his plight - to use cliche as example.

Most of the big emotional events I recall from WoW were meta-game events, where I felt a sense of accomplishment come from playing well or overcoming challenges with a team. There aren't a lot of purely in-lore events that evoked a major response. But I can think of a few.
- It may be an edge case, but seeing the changes Cataclysm wrought on territories instilled a great sense of loss within me.
- Facing the inevitability of death in the Bridenbrad quest chain was mournfully sad.
- I felt a certain kinship toward the alien Klaxxi after working with them, and I suspect having to fight their paragons would have had some emotional punch if I'd played that long.
I think there were probably more, especially in Wrath, but it's been a while and they just don't come to mind at present. The bombing of Theramore probably should have had that impact, but fell flat due to cross-media delivery.

While I don't remember strongly caring much in Guild Wars (perhaps due to rushing through much of it), the sequel pulled off one big gut punch from the get-go and has managed some evocative situations in the Living Story releases since.
- The Battle for Claw Island may be the most sad one of these games has managed to get me, though I'm also bitter about how poorly the scene was handled. I still haven't played enough of the Vigil or Priory to see how those compare, but the Order path... ouch. I almost refuse to play that again because I don't like reliving it.
- The "new guard" characters have been handled well enough that I do feel some for scenes with them. In recent events, I especially found myself wanting to protect and comfort Taimi - it's easy to forget the little genius is still not an adult. It made me really miss having more option in response choises. Rox and Braham less so, at this point.

In most cases, it's the build up and investment with characters that makes their loss more poignant. FFXIV actually managed to get me to tear up over a relatively newly-introduced one, which sort of surprised me. But while I've been rolling my eyes at a lot of the running back and forth doing standard fetch and/or kill quests, the main storyline hit a point for me where some good people die. Most of them are unnamed, but the one who was acted (foolishly) heroic and perished in the process. That was sad.
The game doesn't stop there, though. You actually collect bodies to be buried and take that one particular individual back home for funeral rites. That sort of digs the knife a bit deeper.

I guess in some ways it can't be done too often, or such scenes would lose impact, but I'm still impressed when they do come up...