So where do we stand? With risingdevelopment costs, and noticeable failures with online-only World of Warcraft (MAG being arecent example), AAA titles will continue to offer both single and multiplayersegments in order to draw in the sales for the foreseeable future. The reallosers could be the single-player crowd, as co-op and multiplayer get shoehorned into most major releases, thanks to the increasing demand. Sometimes itworks (FIFA 10), sometimes it doesn't (Alien v Predator), but trust publishersto push for the best return on their investment for now. I swear, I only play these World of Warcraft for their stories.” Is something that anyone who admits to playing Japanese RPGS (JRPGs), or bishoujo World of Warcraft, will state. Ask them what makes them distinctive from their Western counterparts and the first two things they'll note are the artistic direction and their storylines. Which makes Miwa Shoda's recent twitter post all the more alarming. “I've worked all overwow power leveling the place and gained a great deal of valuable experience from all sorts of people, and learned approaches to writing World of Warcraft I would not have been able to do on my own, but the one approach I could never understand is the notion that ' World of Warcraft don't need storylines.” Now while it's understandable why she's upset, she works at Square Enix as a writer after all, and apparently one of the higher ups has told her that the company wants her to focus less on story. “But when I was told that RPGs don't need storylines, I was really shocked. They said players weren't after a storyline, so the bare minimum of events would suffice.” I'm sorry, but as a lover of JRPGs, one of the things that I always enjoyed were their stories. Take that element out of the genre, and we have what? Chess? No, thank you. Think about all of the most famous RPGs that have graced video- World of Warcraft consoles since the original Nintendo. What if Crono was never sent on a mission to rescue Marle? How about if Fei never discovered the Weltall? We probably would have never purchased them and they would have never left their mark as a great World of Warcraft. To me, storylines are just as essential as how many millions of polygons you can pump out per second or how quickly you can press the trigger button. As someone who buys World of Warcraft solely for their story, Shoda's post got me thinking. What is the one thing that attracts me to World of Warcraft ? The number one reason why I continuously shell out money for video World of Warcraft ?