Afrasiabi left Blizzard?

[Super Kami Dende]

From what I understand, Steve Danuser is essentially the new Metzen (and also the new Afrasiabi, 2-in-1!) and the "keeper of the vision" for Warcraft. He will likely get a new title reflecting this more accurately soon.

Well, that's it for me and WoW I guess, considering how much of a hack Danuser is, I'll be glad to avoid Shadowlands and beyond.

[Gurahk]

He wanted Garrosh to be a great warchief and was one of the only writers to write him so back in Cataclysm.
By the way, is there any real confirmation of him leaving?

[SirCowdog]

good, i'm glad he's gone. can we have our flying mounts back? wasn't he the big guy who wanted to remove flying? good riddance.

What you're looking for is the interview with him about WoD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8P4xSFOj0M

At the 6:00 - 6:45 area of the vid you can clearly see from the tone of his voice, and the words that he chooses, that the no-flying thing was something he wanted.

To be fair, I don't know that he was "The Big Guy" behind it. But I have to guess that as someone in a leadership position(earned or not), his word would carry weight in the decision-making process of the time.

[Itori]

Ive became friends with a few ppl who worked as gms in blizzard for years and after they left or were laid off they can't stand to play blizzard product's anymore. They often talked of bad treatment and felt like they couldnt do anything but take the abuse or leave. I can only imagine how sour it is for the old guard that left and had to watch their former home crumble and burn.

[Eurhetemec]

lmfao WHAT?! I don't even know where to begin. All the lore she's written has been utter trash and further pushes the tired idea of "horde bad Alliance good". She also gave worgen TAILS for no god damned reason. I'm not "shitting on a random writer" and it has nothing to do with her gender. Not sure why you had to make it about gender. She's a SENIOR writer at Blizzard. Which means she actually has a good amount of pull. She's really not better at writing than some of the people at Blizzard. I actually think her writing is atrocious and her butchering of lore makes me hate her more. Notice how the lore went incredibly downhill after she was hired...hmmmmmm....

I don't notice that, no. In fact, it makes me wonder how long you've been playing WoW. The low point of lore and writing in WoW is Cataclysm, closely followed by WoD, but WoD wasn't actually a fuck-up of writing. Rather writers were having to desperately re-write and retcon the designer/director-level decision to change from being a time-travel expansion, which was the original plan for WoD, to become an alternate universe expansion, long after it had gone into production. I don't think you even know when she started, which was mid-Legion. I feel like gender does come in because other senior writers haven't got the same sort of shit Golden has, even though they're clearly less experienced and less competent, even when the writing has been total and utter juvenile trash like pretty much all of launch Cataclysm. Maybe not, maybe it's just fame though - she is better known, because she's written merchandised books for decades.

And people like you, possible even literally you, have also tried to claim Danuser is responsible for all the problems. Claiming the Sylvanas fixation is him, Nathanos is his "self-insert" and similar nonsense. So you can't have it both ways. You can't reasonably blame the boss AND then blame the people who work for him for doing what they're told re: lore direction. It my boss says we're doing X, I can say "Are you sure that's a good idea?" but ultimately it's a job, so I have to do what I'm told.

In terms of dialogue and small-scale story, BfA is better written than most previous expansions. That's not even really arguable. In terms of overall lore? Well, that's more subjective. Certainly SL seems to be well-written too and so far the lore seems to be solid. I think the biggest problem BfA had wasn't even lore or writing, it was presentation. The story was told in a disjointed way and wasn't easy to mentally integrate. That's a complex problem that doesn't come down to any individual, but ultimately the buck stops with the game director.

- - - Updated - - -

You may want to read the entire thread history before leaping tp conclusions. Specifically this post.

Not to mention that I'm pretty sure Afriasabi was one of the biggest people behind the push for WoW without flying back in WoD, in case you needed even more reason for me to dislike him.

So it's not that he's good. He's actually pretty bad from most accounts. I just believe there's a high likelihood of his replacement being worse.

I just don't get why you think they'll be worse though. Just general pessimism/cynicism? If so, fair enough, but my experience of this sort of changeover is that it may well lead to improvement. I don't think we know who the replacement is, but it's hard to imagine someone with more experience and qualifications doing a worse job than Afrasiabi. Indeed, if what people think is correct, and Afrasiabi had little influence on SL (he appears not to be credited as Creative Director for it), maybe they don't even a need a separate Creative Director (depending on the structure it can be a very important position or a largely meaningless one). So maybe he won't even replaced?

- - - Updated - - -

Ive became friends with a few ppl who worked as gms in blizzard for years and after they left or were laid off they can't stand to play blizzard product's anymore. They often talked of bad treatment and felt like they couldnt do anything but take the abuse or leave. I can only imagine how sour it is for the old guard that left and had to watch their former home crumble and burn.

I know a couple of people who were CSRs (which is probably what you mean by GMs, but the fact that you say GM makes me a bit suspicious you're making this up or overstating your relationship with them) for Blizzard, and who both quit around 2010, and they had very similar stories re: being treated pretty poorly by Blizzard. So the idea that this is a new thing is pretty fanciful.

- - - Updated - - -

To be fair, I don't know that he was "The Big Guy" behind it. But I have to guess that as someone in a leadership position(earned or not), his word would carry weight in the decision-making process of the time.

I kind of suspect he was. At the time the changes happened, he was probably kind of at the peak of his influence, and I don't think we've seen anyone else really come out strongly in favour of no flying, they all seem to just say it's the approach they're taking. No accident, I suspect, that SL, the first expansion he allegedly hasn't had (as much?) influence on since WoD, seems to be likely to give us flying sooner and easier. As I've said before, I'd be unsurprised if we saw a different approach to flying in 10.0.

[blankfaced]

Ive became friends with a few ppl who worked as gms in blizzard for years and after they left or were laid off they can't stand to play blizzard product's anymore. They often talked of bad treatment and felt like they couldnt do anything but take the abuse or leave. I can only imagine how sour it is for the old guard that left and had to watch their former home crumble and burn.

Pretty much describing any grunt work/entry level/customer service job.

You can stay and endure the abuses of management and customers, or go somewhere else....and endure the abuses of management and customers.

[Kralljin]

Except for the art team. Those guys need a fat bonus every time they knock it out of the park...again.

Ever considered that perhaps a sizeable portion of WoW's budget flows into Cinematics and Art?

This may not be true for every company, but when a certain department or section seems to "carry" a product, they are quite often the ones that receive the most funds from upper management.

I read that by 2016, the WoW team was counting over 230 heads, i somehow doubt that a large share of those people are actually working on elements that influence the gameplay itself.

I'd rather have balance updates every month than X CGI cinematics or some unique art assets for raids that are being thrown away after the newest patch, but that's just me.

[Daronokk]

He wanted Garrosh to be a great warchief and was one of the only writers to write him so back in Cataclysm.

Sad. The only guy that understood.

[SirCowdog]

I just don't get why you think they'll be worse though.

As I said in my reply to MoanaLisa, mostly because of the Steve Jobs description of what happens to companies.

https://youtu.be/yfeWhYj5zkQ

But also because of a more recent video of Chris Kaleiki(who's been a wow dev for 13 years) describing some of the general philosophies and direction the company has been going. He tries really hard to be diplomatic, but you if you watch his body-language and read between the lines, you can see he's pretty unhappy about some unspoken things.

https://youtu.be/iznL9e12iYI

I know the whole "Activision Influence" thing has been way overblown, but I really do have to wonder if maybe things really are just moving into a more generalized corporatized, soulless profit-driven direction. Over the past few years we've seen a lot of pretty bad stuff out of the company side of Acti-Blizz. More cash shop stuff, lots of layoffs, Kotic getting raises, the focus on the mobile business, Blitzchung, the "charity" tournament fiasco, and a host of other minor things.

All of that doesn't really instill me with a sense of confidence that there's somehow going to be a mysterious shift towards more creative, innovative people filling vacant positions. Can you name any up-and-comers already working for Blizzard that you'd guess would be capable of turning the ship around?

I don't know. It's definitely possible things could get better for Blizzard. But nothing I've seen in the past few years really gives me any real indication that I should expect it. And I don't really understand how anyone who's been following the company side of things could make a strong case other than "I hope things get better".

I kind of suspect he was. At the time the changes happened, he was probably kind of at the peak of his influence, and I don't think we've seen anyone else really come out strongly in favour of no flying, they all seem to just say it's the approach they're taking. No accident, I suspect, that SL, the first expansion he allegedly hasn't had (as much?) influence on since WoD, seems to be likely to give us flying sooner and easier. As I've said before, I'd be unsurprised if we saw a different approach to flying in 10.0.

As I said just above: I've seen NO indication that would give me reason to expect any real shift in the design approach of WoW or flying. It's actually the opposite, with The Maw taking away mounts entirely, and requiring players to grind/farm just to get ground mounts back.

I suppose it could change. While Afriasabi may have had a lot of influence in the beginning, things like Pathfinder are entrenched in the overall design philosophy at this point. So I'm not going to hold my breath just because he's out.

[Shadowferal]

Has there ever been a retcon of the magnitude of WoD that didn't turn into crap?

[Darknessvamp]

Hey, I'm the Wowpedia editor who added this to Afrasiabi's page.

Alex confirmed to me in a private conversation that he had left Blizzard in June 2020, and has been semi-retired ever since. This is because we hadn't heard from him in a while (as others pointed out, he hasn't done any interviews in a while, and I haven't seen him at BlizzCon either, seemingly replaced with Steve Danuser on the Q&A etc.) so I got curious, and I had heard from a few developer acquaintances at Blizzard that he was "not around anymore", so I thought it was time to catch up.

I didn't ask for the exact reason he left as I didn't want to be too insensitive. I did ask if Blizzard planned to make an announcement at some point though, but he said he had no clue. I also asked if he planned to make any interviews himself, but he's not, at least not for now.

This was a couple weeks ago.
I shared this on the Wowpedia discord first because, since his LinkedIn was gone (and had been gone for a while), I obviously couldn't use my private conversation as a source on Wowpedia (we only accept publically available sources on the wiki, otherwise anyone could make up stuff like "my cousin is friend with Kotick!"). However a few days later I had access to his LinkedIn again, so I was able to use that link as a source (although it seems not everyone has access to his LinkedIn page?) in order to update Wowpedia.


From what I understand, Steve Danuser is essentially the new Metzen (and also the new Afrasiabi, 2-in-1!) and the "keeper of the vision" for Warcraft. He will likely get a new title reflecting this more accurately soon.

Thanks for giving a little more context on this. Oh man if bold turns out to be true, the future of WoW lore is looking mighty grim.

[Unholyground]

Activision-Blizzard, people need to stop disassociating the company that is making all of these people leave, it has become quite obvious they exert unacceptable pressure and expectations on all of their employees.

[rrayy]

good, i'm glad he's gone. can we have our flying mounts back? wasn't he the big guy who wanted to remove flying? good riddance.

He was the public face of it. However, he was far from the only dev with that mindset.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

Activision-Blizzard, people need to stop disassociating the company that is making all of these people leave, it has become quite obvious they exert unacceptable pressure and expectations on all of their employees.

Based off what exactly? Even with all the people who have left no one has said a peep about unacceptable pressure or even any thing close, at most we have people who wanted to get payed more but none who are complaining about pressure.

[Kyranna]

Afrasiabi was in the beginning of this fucked up century, the guild leader of Fires of Heaven in Everquest where he played a warrior named Furor Planedefiler. The guild was one of the most followed doing "cutting edge" content in that game. Everquest had pretty much nothing instanced, so all mobs were contested, first come first served (this had to do a lot with the decision of instancing everything in WoW). He was an extremely vocal and extremely rude dude who pleased himself and his audience (it was in the tens of thousands daily, big deal back then) by insulting every single decision done for EQ, as I said often belittling developers instead of just the game itself.

The FoH forums were often home to posts from developers of the game, from Brad McQuaid, to John Smedley (later on director of the game) and several others, including Scott Hartsman that later on was game director for Rift. It was a very popular board and some discussions were pretty insightful for those interested in the game development processes back in the days.

I personally exchanged PMs with Hartsman after I commented on a curious coincidence: EQ2 and WoW launched pretty much at the same time at the end of 2004 and I played EQ2 because WoW in Europe didn't launch until February 2005 (and I came from EQ1): WoW has the Wailing Caverns dungeon near a place called Crossroads (as everyone here knows), EQ2 had the Wailing Caves dungeon near a place called Crossroads. He wrote me he couldn't believe the coincidence and we had a laugh over it.

Back to us: Kaplan was also officer of another prominent EQ guild, Legacy of Steel (not on the same server of FoH), where he played a rogue named Tigole Bitties (big 'ol T...). The guild leader of LoS was Rob Pardo.
From there came the Foror and Tigule references that you can find in WoW here and there (Ice cream vendor in the Shimmering Flats for example).

Kaplan was also quite influential in the EQ community, but he was a lot more fun and way less aggressive. I still remember memorable stories on his guild frontpage (his dog eating chocolate and he running to the vet in the night...). He had a way of telling stories and not be boring or obnoxious.

One day Furor or Afrasiabi if you prefer, posted on the FoH mainpage that he was invited by Pardo to visit Blizzard headquarters to see WoW in development and honestly his post on the homepage of FoH charged me up a lot and I think contributed enormusly to create a massive exodus from EQ to WoW even before it was published (it was during early stages of Alpha if I recall correctly). Consider that EQ had 500k players at its peak. He even wrote something along the lines of "Before reaching Blizzard HQs, I hoped some of the devs wouldn't hold a grudge, because I insulted a bunch of them in the past" meaning that some people working on WoW came from Sony Online Entertainment where they worked on EQ.

For what I remember Afrasiabi started as a quest designer, I believe he was behind the Forging of Quel'Serrar sword and some others prominent ones. What he did with his career I don't exactly know, nor the details of his private life when they emerged (I didn't care too much honestly, nor do I today).

I'm fairly objective in my gaming decisions, I don't mind who's behind: if a game is good, I'll play it until it's no longer fun, then maybe pick it up later again.

Great job bringing up something unrelated. Bad game design is bad game design.

There is 0 challenge anywhere to be found in current wow unless you do high level mythics or get to 2200+ later on in a pvp season.

[snip]

I agree, but expanding the audience has the benefit of larger budgets and better production quality, from graphics, to cinematics and so on and so forth. If you look for challenge, there are other games, but not MMOs, unless you like the artificially inflated M+ or Mythic raiding.
For me... well I look for something else, if I want challenge I go swear on some Dragon Soul game.

[Zyky]

https://wow.gamepedia.com/Alex_Afrasiabi

"After 14 years, he left Blizzard in June 2020."

https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-afrasiabi-2854201ab/

He was also scrubbed from Blizzard's linkdin entry and they have plenty of former employees still listed. Seems he might have been fired?

I can't tell you how I know, not that people will trust me as this is the internet(specifically mmo-c) but he was released because of Sexual Harassment back in March.

[Eurhetemec]

As I said in my reply to MoanaLisa, mostly because of the Steve Jobs description of what happens to companies.

The trouble with Jobs' ideas is that they were frequently wild fantasies with no basis in reality (c.f. his obsession with alternative medicine, long predating his illness), and his ideas about how companies operate seem to be a case of him extending specific experiences into generalities whilst entirely lacking the breadth of experience and/or research which would be required to do so. Believing him is essentially religious-style belief, faith-based rather than rational.

But also because of a more recent video of Chris Kaleiki(who's been a wow dev for 13 years) describing some of the general philosophies and direction the company has been going. He tries really hard to be diplomatic, but you if you watch his body-language and read between the lines, you can see he's pretty unhappy about some unspoken things.

Okay, but being unhappy and deciding to go make a WoW-killer is something Blizzard employees have been doing since LITERALLY day 1 of WoW. Half the people who made Red 5 and Firefall were unhappy senior Blizzard employees (some allegedly unhappy because of Afrasiabi, topically!). That was day 1, or thereabouts.

I know the whole "Activision Influence" thing has been way overblown, but I really do have to wonder if maybe things really are just moving into a more generalized corporatized, soulless profit-driven direction. Over the past few years we've seen a lot of pretty bad stuff out of the company side of Acti-Blizz. More cash shop stuff, lots of layoffs, Kotic getting raises, the focus on the mobile business, Blitzchung, the "charity" tournament fiasco, and a host of other minor things.

I don't see any real evidence for any recent change here. And this whole idea that Activision are more "soul-less" and "profit-driven" than Vivendi were is completely and totally unsupportable. As bad as Activision are, they're not a patch on how bad Vivendi were, who literally took vast amounts of WoW's profits and just used them to prop up failing investments in aging French power plants and so on.

All of that doesn't really instill me with a sense of confidence that there's somehow going to be a mysterious shift towards more creative, innovative people filling vacant positions. Can you name any up-and-comers already working for Blizzard that you'd guess would be capable of turning the ship around?

I know there've been a couple of people who impressed me, but I can't remember names. One of them was an Asian dude. Sorry, that's all I got. Diablo 4 got the Witcher 3 creative director, which could be interesting, but obviously that's not someone who could work on WoW at this time.

I don't know. It's definitely possible things could get better for Blizzard. But nothing I've seen in the past few years really gives me any real indication that I should expect it. And I don't really understand how anyone who's been following the company side of things could make a strong case other than "I hope things get better".

I've been following the company side of things and I don't see the people who've left, leaving, as a bad thing. That's I guess the main difference here. I think a lot of the people who left were talentless hacks who were there because they were in the right place at the right time, not because they were uniquely skilled and creative individuals. The 100% complete lack of anything of value (or much of anything at all) produced by them after leaving really strongly supports my opinion, I would suggest. It's pretty clear evidence. Obviously future brilliance could refute it, but I'm skeptical.

As I said just above: I've seen NO indication that would give me reason to expect any real shift in the design approach of WoW or flying. It's actually the opposite, with The Maw taking away mounts entirely, and requiring players to grind/farm just to get ground mounts back.

I suppose it could change. While Afriasabi may have had a lot of influence in the beginning, things like Pathfinder are entrenched in the overall design philosophy at this point. So I'm not going to hold my breath just because he's out.

I dunno if they'll disappear overnight. I think, OTOH, there's a lot more chance they'll disappear in time.

Re: the Maw, that objection seems pretty bizarre to me. If you're unwilling to accept anything except 100% flying 100% of the time, WoW is not the game for you, and literally never has been. A better future for the game than either "no flying until X" or "100% flying 100% of the time" would be a more varied and nuanced approach, which would potentially include zones like the Maw, but also zones which were flying from day 1.

[dcc626]

Afrasiabi was in the beginning of this fucked up century, the guild leader of Fires of Heaven in Everquest where he played a warrior named Furor Planedefiler. The guild was one of the most followed doing "cutting edge" content in that game. Everquest had pretty much nothing instanced, so all mobs were contested, first come first served (this had to do a lot with the decision of instancing everything in WoW). He was an extremely vocal and extremely rude dude who pleased himself and his audience (it was in the tens of thousands daily, big deal back then) by insulting every single decision done for EQ, as I said often belittling developers instead of just the game itself.

The FoH forums were often home to posts from developers of the game, from Brad McQuaid, to John Smedley (later on director of the game) and several others, including Scott Hartsman that later on was game director for Rift. It was a very popular board and some discussions were pretty insightful for those interested in the game development processes back in the days.

I personally exchanged PMs with Hartsman after I commented on a curious coincidence: EQ2 and WoW launched pretty much at the same time at the end of 2004 and I played EQ2 because WoW in Europe didn't launch until February 2005 (and I came from EQ1): WoW has the Wailing Caverns dungeon near a place called Crossroads (as everyone here knows), EQ2 had the Wailing Caves dungeon near a place called Crossroads. He wrote me he couldn't believe the coincidence and we had a laugh over it.

Back to us: Kaplan was also officer of another prominent EQ guild, Legacy of Steel (not on the same server of FoH), where he played a rogue named Tigole Bitties (big 'ol T...). The guild leader of LoS was Rob Pardo.
From there came the Foror and Tigule references that you can find in WoW here and there (Ice cream vendor in the Shimmering Flats for example).

Kaplan was also quite influential in the EQ community, but he was a lot more fun and way less aggressive. I still remember memorable stories on his guild frontpage (his dog eating chocolate and he running to the vet in the night...). He had a way of telling stories and not be boring or obnoxious.

One day Furor or Afrasiabi if you prefer, posted on the FoH mainpage that he was invited by Pardo to visit Blizzard headquarters to see WoW in development and honestly his post on the homepage of FoH charged me up a lot and I think contributed enormusly to create a massive exodus from EQ to WoW even before it was published (it was during early stages of Alpha if I recall correctly). Consider that EQ had 500k players at its peak. He even wrote something along the lines of "Before reaching Blizzard HQs, I hoped some of the devs wouldn't hold a grudge, because I insulted a bunch of them in the past" meaning that some people working on WoW came from Sony Online Entertainment where they worked on EQ.

For what I remember Afrasiabi started as a quest designer, I believe he was behind the Forging of Quel'Serrar sword and some others prominent ones. What he did with his career I don't exactly know, nor the details of his private life when they emerged (I didn't care too much honestly, nor do I today).

I'm fairly objective in my gaming decisions, I don't mind who's behind: if a game is good, I'll play it until it's no longer fun, then maybe pick it up later again.



I agree, but expanding the audience has the benefit of larger budgets and better production quality, from graphics, to cinematics and so on and so forth. If you look for challenge, there are other games, but not MMOs, unless you like the artificially inflated M+ or Mythic raiding.
For me... well I look for something else, if I want challenge I go swear on some Dragon Soul game.

a friend of mine raided in FOH back in their glory days. until he sold his account on ebay and made more than he made in a year at work. ah, the good ole days.

[SirBeef]

What you're looking for is the interview with him about WoD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8P4xSFOj0M

At the 6:00 - 6:45 area of the vid you can clearly see from the tone of his voice, and the words that he chooses, that the no-flying thing was something he wanted.

To be fair, I don't know that he was "The Big Guy" behind it. But I have to guess that as someone in a leadership position(earned or not), his word would carry weight in the decision-making process of the time.

There is a lot of bad hed did to WoW. Despite not being a class designer he and Kaplan had tremendous input into Warriors being the only tanking class. His disdain for other non warrior tanks in EQ was legendary and it bled into WoWs ultimate design. Despite Paladins and Druids clearly able to tank dungeons while leveling and Paladins having a tanking spec, all tier sets made them healers and useless as raid tanks.

He and Kaplan are two that I won't miss.

[SirCowdog]

Ever considered that perhaps a sizeable portion of WoW's budget flows into Cinematics and Art?

This may not be true for every company, but when a certain department or section seems to "carry" a product, they are quite often the ones that receive the most funds from upper management.

I read that by 2016, the WoW team was counting over 230 heads, i somehow doubt that a large share of those people are actually working on elements that influence the gameplay itself.

I'd rather have balance updates every month than X CGI cinematics or some unique art assets for raids that are being thrown away after the newest patch, but that's just me.

I'm sure the art team does get a large amount of money. Is it enough to somehow effect or take away from development in other areas? I'd find that difficult to believe, given the overall size and wealth of Blizzard.