I was fairly attached to WoW while never paying much attention to the superficial stories and quests. I did at first, but it honestly wasn't great from what I remember (the first WoW), and so I just focused on the gameplay and team work rather than the story.
Personally, I read books for the story, and play games for the mechanics.
And you'll see it repeated over and over on the reviews on the steam page.
Some people claim it gets better if you stick with it, and I did because I was playing it over a holiday. My experience was they're wrong, it never gets better.
Take EVE Online. I love the ideas of the game. There are no rules (As long as you're not hacking/cheating) to what players can do. You can scam people. You can kill noobs (Though if you're in high-security space, you'll be instagibbed by CONCORD, essentially the space police). And the fact that losing your ship means its GONE means there's always a demand for crafted goods. Skills are learned over time whether you're playing or not, so you don't need to grind.
But...the actual gameplay is boring as hell [0].
OTOH, I found the mechanics of the recent Spider-Man game kind of fun, but the macro game is just endless repetition. Which feels true of a lot of AAA games these days.
Me and my wife both cringed really hard to the repetitiveness and the blandness of the characters however. Tons of plot inconsistencies!
The above is a fairly interesting flowchart detailing where all of the core employees moved on to after leaving Blizzard. Some have met success, most have folded.
To me, the only employee that ever mattered was Chris Metzen. He was the one who developed the core of all of their stories and personally approved every quest in WoW. If you're going to try to get players to emotionally connect to characters and story arcs, I would think that the writer would be the best place to figure out how.