Can Blizzard surrvive without Chris Metzen?

[Wyrt]

They would do well to hire better writers to replace Metzen and Kosak.

[MadHyena]

Of course, they can. That would be an improvement.

[rda]

Someone should tweet a link to this thread to Metzen.

Because, really, man, what you have been doing with the lore in the past few years is just... you deserve it.

[Haven]

I hope Warcraft never forgets that at its core, it's Orcs vs Humans.

Since WC3 it's got cool feral xenophobic night elves (degenerated into generic) and cold ruthless undead (still holding on). It was best with four factions to choose from. Back in WC2 Alliance and Horde were mirror reflections of each other.

I get that some people don't like his RAWR!! style that he does every Blizzcon. Whatever, Warcraft has a big diverse fanbase nowadays so that's inevitable. But to say that that means he writes dumb lore then well, you'd have to apply that to the entire RTS era of Warcraft as well. So no.

You see, back in the day it was a kinghtly epic, a badass ballad with a faint smell of Conan, Beowulf, Arthur Pendragon. It held out with the addition of undead and night elves, but once they've added joke races, Ancient Evils Rising one after another, stripped night elves of their individuality, added even more races because Alliance needed something, and overall turned it into a generic comic book about single generic heroes defeating generic villains in generic ways for generic reasons, the game kind of lost its taste. Apparently Metzen's creativity only goes so far.

[Duravian]

Metzen set the foundation, Blizzard can do fine without him

Also, if anything, Red Shirt Guy is living proof metzen is not that into lore etc

Well.. that's not an accurate statement in the slightest. Metzen was called out on one singular piece of lore that wasn't exactly a huge thing. No Chris Metzen is quite clearly the loremaster of WoW, but nobody can remember it all.

[Haven]

Well.. that's not an accurate statement in the slightest. Metzen was called out on one singular piece of lore that wasn't exactly a huge thing. No Chris Metzen is quite clearly the loremaster of WoW, but nobody can remember it all.

Huh? It was about dwarven leadership. Can you imagine him forgetting the name of that orc who killed that pit lord with an axe? Nope. But ignoring dwarves is okay, who cares about dwarves when there are RAWR MUSCLE ORCS BADASS AXE EPIC EPIC?

[NoiseTank13]

I hope Warcraft never forgets that at its core, it's Orcs vs Humans.

While true, it's more like Orcs vs. Humans.

[Mormolyce]

Since WC3 it's got cool feral xenophobic night elves (degenerated into generic) and cold ruthless undead (still holding on). It was best with four factions to choose from. Back in WC2 Alliance and Horde were mirror reflections of each other.

In the Age of Chaos, two factions battled for dominance...

Don't get me wrong I have nothing against the world expanding, and having four playable factions in Warcraft III was cool. I just think WoW should never neglect its core of factional conflict, with Orcs and Humans as the most prominent races. It's just not Warcraft otherwise IMO.

You see, back in the day it was a kinghtly epic, a badass ballad with a faint smell of Conan, Beowulf, Arthur Pendragon. It held out with the addition of undead and night elves, but once they've added joke races, Ancient Evils Rising one after another, stripped night elves of their individuality, added even more races because Alliance needed something, and overall turned it into a generic comic book about single generic heroes defeating generic villains in generic ways for generic reasons, the game kind of lost its taste. Apparently Metzen's creativity only goes so far.

Please they added "joke races" in Warcraft II. Hell, DWARVES were originally a "joke race". Wee little drunk suicide bombers. If you don't like Warcraft's tone then fine, go play Final Fantasy or Darksiders or something!

While true, it's more like Orcs vs. Humans.

Shrug. The villain makes the plot :P

[Wyrt]

It's just not Warcraft otherwise IMO.

You're right, it's not Warcraft. It's World of Warcraft.

I wish they'd get over their WC1 nostalgia and go back to WC3-BC stuff where they actually cared about more than 2 races.

[Barnabas]

Someone should tweet a link to this thread to Metzen.

Because, really, man, what you have been doing with the lore in the past few years is just... you deserve it.

I don't know why he'd want to read this thread. I'd be kinda angry if someone linked a masked "you should be fired" thread on my twitter. It's ok to ask him to change the direction of the WoW story because you are unhappy with it but this thread is more like a personal attack.

[rda]

I don't know why he'd want to read this thread. I'd be kinda angry if someone linked a masked "you should be fired" thread on my twitter. It's ok to ask him to change the direction of the WoW story because you are unhappy with it but this thread is more like a personal attack.

Maybe, but then again, people have been asking him and other folks in chardev politely to do anything, anything regarding the lore issues (won't list them here, there's plethora) perfectly politely and respectfully, in low voice, with tons of constructive ideas - for so long, and to no avail... it just doesn't work. Like I said, it's beyond recovery for many, the rage is objective at this point, it exists, they created it themselves, and the question of whether they'd like to know about it seems a bit secondary.

[Deleted]

Also, if anything, Red Shirt Guy is living proof metzen is not that into lore etc

Yea cause some random guy that noticed a mistake in a fictional world is proof that Metzen has a life outside WoW...
He might have a fixation with orcs and voice acting but I think WoW would be worse without him, as for the people who hate him... It's hip to hate something/someone, so their opinion equals to zero.

[Haven]

In the Age of Chaos, two factions battled for dominance...

Don't get me wrong I have nothing against the world expanding, and having four playable factions in Warcraft III was cool. I just think WoW should never neglect its core of factional conflict, with Orcs and Humans as the most prominent races. It's just not Warcraft otherwise IMO.

IMO, four races of WC3 was just as much as this game should've handled. A fatal-four-way would've been more interesting, since just once two factions get along, a third one digs up dirty laundry, and... well, political sweetness, intrigue, conspiracies, alliances of convenience (not permanent unbreakable ones, like with Horde and Forsaken), etc. Constant peace-war-peace-war-peace shenanigans between two factions become idiotic pretty fast. We don't need peace (because it's Warcraft), but the devs don't have the balls to show outright hatred for xenos and contempt to pigskins, making the war constant yet half-assed.

Please they added "joke races" in Warcraft II. Hell, DWARVES were originally a "joke race". Wee little drunk suicide bombers. If you don't like Warcraft's tone then fine, go play Final Fantasy or Darksiders or something!

Oh please, don't remind me of FF. Nomura's design gets old after you've seen at least two or three games of the series, but by 13th part it's just a copypaste of a copypaste wrapped in funky design and Japanese tropes. I wouldn't say that dwarves were a joke race in WC2 - it was largely due to that they had to be mirror copies of goblin units. Someone had to be a suicide unit. Then again, their gryphon riders definitely weren't a joke.

[Ulfric Trumpcloak]

That's like saying, can FC Barcelona survive without Messi? They can get by as they proved the last couple of months, but they are much better with him. Anyways whats the point of the question? Metzen isn't going anywhere any time soon.

[Yig]

I feel many of you are making the mistake of assuming Warcraft's lore is trying to be something on par with literature. It is unabashedly a work of homage, a raw concentrated celebration of various universal human themes and pop culture and archetypes that give a road and a paintjob for the vehicle of Blzzard's video game gameplay.

And in the same way Blizzard boils down their gameplay as elegant and as simplistic as possible, so too do they do so to the lore. It's just supposed to be raw inspiring imagery, inspiring moments, dramatic moments, without any real exposition at all, that exposition is implied and meant to be eluded to in a way that impressionist painters use out of blurry shapes and blobs that your mind turns into a meadow of flowers lit by an almost photorealistic cadence of sunlight, but if you look at it up close, it's just a bunch of blobs.

And to judge Metzen as if he's a writer is missing the point and borders on the pretentious when you begin demeaning him as over indulgent and only able to play the same notes. That's kind of the point here.

Perhaps you feel juvenile or idiotic to enjoy something like that, but people have been responding to it positively for years, and mostly Metzen provides inspiration and pep talks that get the creative team fired up. He creates ideas, not narrative. We're given a hint of this world and our minds bring it to life with more detail and nuance than Blizzard ever personally has demonstrated, but that's kind of the point. We're basically playing a game in a world based on 20th century serialized superhero mythology hybridized with the folklore and myths of human culture, in the same tropes and iconic themes people have come to expect to have presented by the storyteller in an ancient unspoken agreement of exchange. Tropes aren't intrinsically flaws, they are actually in many ways required. And it seems to me that Blizzard just likes a certain very specific and bold collection which you see echoed in religions and sagas and comic books which they retell over and over again with new paint jobs out of a child like geek out, while giving us addictive gameplay that is ergonomic and intuitive.

It's kind of unfair to judge this stuff the same way you judge an actual fantasy novel, but Blizzard opens their self up to that by commissioning licenced novels from commissioned authors writing glorified fan fiction working with Metzen's enthusiastic ideas to try and give us something worth caring about.

And let's be honest, if you were a room of college students and 30 somethings geeking out over your favorite comic books and cartoons and novels working on the kind of video games you've always wanted to personally play, and you suddenly exploded with the level of popularity that WOW did, you'd find the idea of having novels and comics and statues and action figures and trading card games and t shirts based on these creations you made pretty cool. It's easy to say it's all done for money, but most of us would love to be in their place I would wager. And not for the money.


Our subculture of fandom (stemming from the word fanatic let us not forget) is obsessed with memorizing fictional histories and encyclopedia's worth of imaginary cultures and world's and debating hypothetical scenarios, and we seem to be the first generation of adult's who have kept playing with our toys long after childhood. But if you look back at this as a pattern, every generation has been doing this a little bit more and more. Adulthood becomes a second adolescence. The baby boomer's were seen as immature for their love of pop music carried into their adulthoods which used to be a thing teenagers left behind after getting married and having children. Now we're playing video games and will be doing so until we're geriatrics.

But with our increased emotional sophistication, we expect our media to keep up. But Blizzard deals with a kind of naive and indulgent adolescent brand of storytelling that seems to both paradoxically attract lovers of fiction and disgust them with it's lack of emotional sophistication and exposition. It's meant to be on par with a really cool saturday morning cartoon series. And many of you are using a scale of criticism here that's just way too harsh and unforgiving as if we're expecting a grand work of literary genius on par with it's popularity. The genius is in the simplicity and the summation. Not the sophisticated narrative and intriguing layers of exposition. It's more an appreciation of editing than embellishing and evolving. It's lightning in a bottle. It's shiny. It's colorful, and it glows.

This idea Warcraft 3 was some peak of quality I think simply comes from it being the first time they really put as much effort into telling a full story, but they've just been telling the same basic story over and over again. If any one of these stories was told in place of WC3's as the original, however the hell that would work without it establishing the history the world is based on, people would probably still be lauding it as much as they praise WC3. MMOs are notoriously difficult for gaming companies to tell stories with, but I think that comes from a timidness and trepidation on the game designer's part, as every added detail and choice you give a player in game's with a complicated learning curve like this risks overwhelming or boring the uninitiated and the apathetic who just want some mindless entertainment via repetitive tasks and rewards.

[Pyromelter]

I think it's undeniable that the story, and atmosphere that Metzen brings to the table is pretty good, but what about after him? Can the franchises Blizzard has created survive with out his contributions?

I reject the assumption made in this statement.

George Lucas set the table pretty well, then he pretty much trashed the most beloved science fiction story with the worst pieces of garbage in the history of science fiction. Lucas then made the smart decision to hand off the property to a guy who hopefully knows what he is doing (JJ Abrams), or at least couldn't do any worse than Lucas.

Pretty much a bunch of manatees punching idea balls could do better than the absolute shlock that has been wow since 2009. The comparison of star wars to wow is extremely apt imo - if metzen was smart he'd get the video game version of JJ Abrams to right this sinking ship.

[Khorm]

The Warcraft story is now boring. They've given both of the factions the same view points, values, beliefs, fears and wants.

[longtimelurker]

It looks like he realized Blizzard was going down like the Titanic. He just caught on quickly and is jumping ship. WoW is its own WoW killer.

[Deleted]

He is good and he's been around since early days of the main 3 franchises. But remember that Sam Didier (and other people Like Mickey Nelsson) been around since the early days as well and been present in the story part of these games as well.

[jkbostic]

Given the way the story has progressed since Wrath....I kind of think that Bliz may be better off without Metzen. When it comes to purely new cool creative stuff, we got to see Deathwing, and the world of Orc-craft. Not saying I could do any better, but I truly believe someone out there who is a true writer/storyteller/author would do a better job. Anne Stickney from BlizzardWatch comes up with some great stuff for example.

Maybe I'm a little disappointed with the time travel/alt universe introduction to the lore, but I think Bliz may be better off without him.