Mists of Pandaria: Chris Metzen interview Pt.1
From WoW Insider:
Chris Metzen, senior VP of Story and Franchise Development, the man behind the story of World of Warcraft, was gracious enough to sit down with WoW Insider for an interview at the Mists of Pandaria press event. Chris discusses Garrosh and the Siege of Orgrimmar, Varian Wrynn, neutral factions, older expansion races, WoW's newfound story freedom, and more.
WoW Insider: The big thing that really struck me from your talk at the beginning was this whole Garrosh thing, because that just seemed so bold. Did you have a longstanding plan to do that with Garrosh's arc, or did it just seem like the right thing to do for this particular expansion?
CM: I would say Garrosh remaining Warchief ... his term as Warchief was always going to be ... brief. Bringing him up, you know, Alex Afrasiabi created this character for Outland, hanging out in Garadar, and he was just written so well. I just went, "Wow, this character's really bitchin'. Let's leverage him forward, let's get him going." We always knew we would make him Warchief, but that would be a short reign. It's not his Horde. So what's totally funny to me is, as we've been talking about for the past couple of days and throwing it out to people and they were going, "W-what! You can't get rid of him! We love him!" As compared to two years ago, when people went, "What the hell were you thinking, Blizzard? This character sucks! You ruined my Horde! You ruined everything! What the hell are you guys smoking over there!" So it's been funny seeing going from absolute hate, recognizing fans are so incensed about it ... We're just spinning fiction, you know? We're spinning stories. We said, "This'll be good for the franchise. It's gonna be bumpy for a while, but it'll be fun."
You take the one thing that's so solid about the Horde -- Thrall -- and you pull him out, and you just watch what happens. It was a really fun ... I guess virtual social experiment to see how people would react, but it was also a story we wanted to tell. You know this guy was never meant to be Warchief forever. And so just seeing from the level of total hate to these days people going "What? We actually kind of like this guy!" It just says a lot about the WoW community, like, I know people don't always read quest text, or, like, the lore lore. There's deep lore and then there's just what's going on, and I love that a lot of players just seem really engaged with what's going on. And I love that, after eight years, people are still engaged.
So yeah, there's always been a plan for Garrosh and his tenure as Warchief, and where it goes after this is really, really interesting. I guess I can't really tell you yet, but I guess ultimately I didn't know this would be the expansion set where we did it -- I was hedging my bets against the next one, but -- the more we got into Pandaria and started balancing themes and decided where ultimately everyone (the Alliance and Horde) would go, the theme where there was this underlying war and the pandaren were just in the crossfire, that theme really just started to demand to be foreground as we started developing all the fiction for this expansion. And we started thinking, well, what's the ultimate expression of this? We don't have a Black Temple as such. Pandaria has its own mega end events and they're really satisfying, but they're very self-contained, it's a Pandaria issue. So what's the gear-up? What's the crazy, globe-shattering conclusion?
And again, it was an Alliance-Horde issue. And someone -- I don't remember who, and I wish I did because I want to give this dude a medal -- threw it out at a meeting and we all went, "Holy cow, that's the craziest idea." That's high-stakes warfare. That's not us sitting back on our haunches and going, "Uhhhh, what about some new continent? Aliens from Planet X or whatever?" Well, I guess we did that with Burning Crusade. You know what I mean, though; that's radical, it's highly emotional. It's a city we love.
Well, the city, right now, it's Garrosh. You look at the old Orgrimmar and it's wood and sticks ...
It's almost quaint, right?
Yeah, this almost ... pastoral look, compared to this new one, all red and black iron ...
A war machine! Yeah, I remember when we did that we got the art set from Borean Tundra and I was like (deep, guttural voice), "Yeah, I like that! Let's do it everywhere!" So yeah, I love that we turned on a dime and went "this is the truth of the story." It's not about Pandaria, and I hope that doesn't translate into sounding like we're not intensely passionate about Pandaria and the events that go down there. It's just a front, and the events that transpire there, and the way it crescendoes, it leads directly to the Alliance and Horde going crazy, like the things that we find and the truth that we find kind of kicks things into overdrive geopolitically. There's a power there that shouldn't fall into, uh, some people's hands. So you know, I guess I forgot what your original question was.
I'm pretty sure you answered it! It was just sort of like, was this a long game?
It was, yeah. WoW in general we have kind of a long game, a set of themes and arcs that we know will define the franchise over time. How they actualize per expansion, well, there's a little more grey space. And that really depends on how the design's going, how we feel at the time, how we're feeling about Warcraft, if it's what we want to build, what we want to play. Certainly it's affected by what we're playing, too, and sometimes you find the right spaces to pull on these massive overarching things and this was the right space for that.
Speaking of the Alliance, people have been really interested in hearing about Alliance lore progression. We had Cataclysm, and that was about Thrall. There was obviously some Alliance stuff in the background, and you have Varian's issues coming up, stuff like the books -- but with the Jaina book and with Mists of Pandaria, what can Alliance fans look forward to?
We said at BlizzCon, there's a big marquee quest line coming up that takes great advantage of the scenarios that Dave and Scott were talking about today that adds this sort of new place between solo questing and dungeoneering. And we call it the Trials of the High King, and hopefully at the end of this thing, leading right up to the gates of Orgrimmar, Varian's really gonna find his feet and he's really gonna become ... You know, like when I look back at Warcraft past and I see guys like Uther and Lothar -- Stunning, Chris, how many vowels and "th" sounds can you throw into your names? I guess we're just lucky there weren't any apostrophes in there -- but I very much always wanted Varian to become like those characters, you know? He's a little younger than they are, but there's a stud in there, a rock inside that kid, that could be a better king than his daddy was, a better king than we've ever seen.
We started him like Garrosh, you know, weighted. He's pissed off and he's got this Wolverine overdrive kind of personality, and by design, you know? You can't just start him off perfect, there's nowhere to go from there. So I wanted him to be a little gritty, I wanted him to have some deep issues he could work out over time, and Pandaria, with this quest line, is where we finally see him work them out. And in the novel Wolfheart, and in the short story too, we've been seeing him work it out. We were working hard to dimensionalize him as a character. And the community only sees certain things that are evident at certain times.
They see the Wolverine.
Right, yeah. And he has acted like an asshole, much by design. But now it's time for him to pull it together, because the world is acting like an asshole, and it's all teetering on the brink. And he's gotta find that next gear and really become this king that all the Alliance races unequivocally tell, "Yeah, we will follow you to the gates of Orgrimmar and beyond." So I'm really really excited about Varian and about the Alliance in general.
Here's an interesting thing -- I'll go ahead and say this even though we haven't built the encounter yet so anything can change, just to illustrate what we mean by Varian's growth and his change of heart and the change to the way he fights. Everything we've set up at story level in this expansion is about why and how we fight, because you can go Garrosh style and beat the tar out of them and beat them so bad that it'll (goofy voice) "leave a hole in their racial memory"... you know, the grandkids are gonna out dizzy. You can fight war that way, but ultimately, you betray everything you were fighting to protect in the first place, which is the heart of this.
From WoW Insider:
Chris Metzen, senior VP of Story and Franchise Development, the man behind the story of World of Warcraft, was gracious enough to sit down with WoW Insider for an interview at the Mists of Pandaria press event. Chris discusses Garrosh and the Siege of Orgrimmar, Varian Wrynn, neutral factions, older expansion races, WoW's newfound story freedom, and more.
WoW Insider: The big thing that really struck me from your talk at the beginning was this whole Garrosh thing, because that just seemed so bold. Did you have a longstanding plan to do that with Garrosh's arc, or did it just seem like the right thing to do for this particular expansion?
CM: I would say Garrosh remaining Warchief ... his term as Warchief was always going to be ... brief. Bringing him up, you know, Alex Afrasiabi created this character for Outland, hanging out in Garadar, and he was just written so well. I just went, "Wow, this character's really bitchin'. Let's leverage him forward, let's get him going." We always knew we would make him Warchief, but that would be a short reign. It's not his Horde. So what's totally funny to me is, as we've been talking about for the past couple of days and throwing it out to people and they were going, "W-what! You can't get rid of him! We love him!" As compared to two years ago, when people went, "What the hell were you thinking, Blizzard? This character sucks! You ruined my Horde! You ruined everything! What the hell are you guys smoking over there!" So it's been funny seeing going from absolute hate, recognizing fans are so incensed about it ... We're just spinning fiction, you know? We're spinning stories. We said, "This'll be good for the franchise. It's gonna be bumpy for a while, but it'll be fun."
You take the one thing that's so solid about the Horde -- Thrall -- and you pull him out, and you just watch what happens. It was a really fun ... I guess virtual social experiment to see how people would react, but it was also a story we wanted to tell. You know this guy was never meant to be Warchief forever. And so just seeing from the level of total hate to these days people going "What? We actually kind of like this guy!" It just says a lot about the WoW community, like, I know people don't always read quest text, or, like, the lore lore. There's deep lore and then there's just what's going on, and I love that a lot of players just seem really engaged with what's going on. And I love that, after eight years, people are still engaged.
So yeah, there's always been a plan for Garrosh and his tenure as Warchief, and where it goes after this is really, really interesting. I guess I can't really tell you yet, but I guess ultimately I didn't know this would be the expansion set where we did it -- I was hedging my bets against the next one, but -- the more we got into Pandaria and started balancing themes and decided where ultimately everyone (the Alliance and Horde) would go, the theme where there was this underlying war and the pandaren were just in the crossfire, that theme really just started to demand to be foreground as we started developing all the fiction for this expansion. And we started thinking, well, what's the ultimate expression of this? We don't have a Black Temple as such. Pandaria has its own mega end events and they're really satisfying, but they're very self-contained, it's a Pandaria issue. So what's the gear-up? What's the crazy, globe-shattering conclusion?
And again, it was an Alliance-Horde issue. And someone -- I don't remember who, and I wish I did because I want to give this dude a medal -- threw it out at a meeting and we all went, "Holy cow, that's the craziest idea." That's high-stakes warfare. That's not us sitting back on our haunches and going, "Uhhhh, what about some new continent? Aliens from Planet X or whatever?" Well, I guess we did that with Burning Crusade. You know what I mean, though; that's radical, it's highly emotional. It's a city we love.
Well, the city, right now, it's Garrosh. You look at the old Orgrimmar and it's wood and sticks ...
It's almost quaint, right?
Yeah, this almost ... pastoral look, compared to this new one, all red and black iron ...
A war machine! Yeah, I remember when we did that we got the art set from Borean Tundra and I was like (deep, guttural voice), "Yeah, I like that! Let's do it everywhere!" So yeah, I love that we turned on a dime and went "this is the truth of the story." It's not about Pandaria, and I hope that doesn't translate into sounding like we're not intensely passionate about Pandaria and the events that go down there. It's just a front, and the events that transpire there, and the way it crescendoes, it leads directly to the Alliance and Horde going crazy, like the things that we find and the truth that we find kind of kicks things into overdrive geopolitically. There's a power there that shouldn't fall into, uh, some people's hands. So you know, I guess I forgot what your original question was.
I'm pretty sure you answered it! It was just sort of like, was this a long game?
It was, yeah. WoW in general we have kind of a long game, a set of themes and arcs that we know will define the franchise over time. How they actualize per expansion, well, there's a little more grey space. And that really depends on how the design's going, how we feel at the time, how we're feeling about Warcraft, if it's what we want to build, what we want to play. Certainly it's affected by what we're playing, too, and sometimes you find the right spaces to pull on these massive overarching things and this was the right space for that.
Speaking of the Alliance, people have been really interested in hearing about Alliance lore progression. We had Cataclysm, and that was about Thrall. There was obviously some Alliance stuff in the background, and you have Varian's issues coming up, stuff like the books -- but with the Jaina book and with Mists of Pandaria, what can Alliance fans look forward to?
We said at BlizzCon, there's a big marquee quest line coming up that takes great advantage of the scenarios that Dave and Scott were talking about today that adds this sort of new place between solo questing and dungeoneering. And we call it the Trials of the High King, and hopefully at the end of this thing, leading right up to the gates of Orgrimmar, Varian's really gonna find his feet and he's really gonna become ... You know, like when I look back at Warcraft past and I see guys like Uther and Lothar -- Stunning, Chris, how many vowels and "th" sounds can you throw into your names? I guess we're just lucky there weren't any apostrophes in there -- but I very much always wanted Varian to become like those characters, you know? He's a little younger than they are, but there's a stud in there, a rock inside that kid, that could be a better king than his daddy was, a better king than we've ever seen.
We started him like Garrosh, you know, weighted. He's pissed off and he's got this Wolverine overdrive kind of personality, and by design, you know? You can't just start him off perfect, there's nowhere to go from there. So I wanted him to be a little gritty, I wanted him to have some deep issues he could work out over time, and Pandaria, with this quest line, is where we finally see him work them out. And in the novel Wolfheart, and in the short story too, we've been seeing him work it out. We were working hard to dimensionalize him as a character. And the community only sees certain things that are evident at certain times.
They see the Wolverine.
Right, yeah. And he has acted like an asshole, much by design. But now it's time for him to pull it together, because the world is acting like an asshole, and it's all teetering on the brink. And he's gotta find that next gear and really become this king that all the Alliance races unequivocally tell, "Yeah, we will follow you to the gates of Orgrimmar and beyond." So I'm really really excited about Varian and about the Alliance in general.
Here's an interesting thing -- I'll go ahead and say this even though we haven't built the encounter yet so anything can change, just to illustrate what we mean by Varian's growth and his change of heart and the change to the way he fights. Everything we've set up at story level in this expansion is about why and how we fight, because you can go Garrosh style and beat the tar out of them and beat them so bad that it'll (goofy voice) "leave a hole in their racial memory"... you know, the grandkids are gonna out dizzy. You can fight war that way, but ultimately, you betray everything you were fighting to protect in the first place, which is the heart of this.
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