Life quest

Life quests were a type of epic race-specific questlines which were planned to be included in the original World of Warcraft. Each life quest told the story of its respective race and what their purpose in the world is, often continuing the story set up in the "smaller" regular quests. For example, the undead life quest revolved around their effort to develop a new plague and would have involved rescuing the undead player character's father from captivity, while the orc life quest would give players a taste of the demonic influence from their past and force them to combat it.

Blizzard planned to implement life quests after they had finished adding all of the game's regular quests. However, while life quests were intended to feel cool and individual, the developers increasingly found that they instead started feeling overly canned since they gave the same backstory to every player character of a particular race. The designers ended up steering in the direction of simply making epic high-level questlines with stories based around the NPCs (such as the Darrowshire questline or the Horde Onyxia's Lair attunement) rather than trying to tell players what their character's life story is.