World of Warcraft: Chris Metzen on World Creation | Pyromancer Reacts



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37 thoughts on “World of Warcraft: Chris Metzen on World Creation | Pyromancer Reacts”

  1. I have been reading a lot more Cthulhu mythos, I never noticed the main god is named Azathoth who is sleeping. It sent me down a rabbit hole of connections to Warcraft. I knew the old gods were Lovecraft inspired, but I think the connections go much deeper than I ever realized.

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  2. I've been recently watching a bunch of the old interviews with the Vanilla WoW devs, one thing they talk about a lot is that Metzen was very flexible with the lore in WoW, the only things he had hard lines on was stuff that contradicted Warcraft 2 & 3, like he wanted a wild west dungeon in the Barrens before that later became Wailing Caverns & all sorts of stuff like that.

    Pyro mentioned the quests & how people just skip through them today, back when WoW launched the meta for MMOs was that you'd level through grinding mobs, WoW totally changed that with having a fully questable journey to max level (though some of the quests had to be added post launch), in fact when they'd get EverQuest guys in to test the game they'd ignore the quests & just run straight to grinding mobs & they didn't find it fun, so the devs would have to ask them to try the quests and when thry did that it became enjoyable.

    Also you see in this video how the quest text scrolls out, that was added to actually get the players to read the quests because it felt too flat to the devs when all the text popped up and you could hit accept immediately.

    Also I think the RPG books were decannonized much later on because the Me'dan plotline sorta spiraled outta control, I figure if you basically just discount that whole section & the stuff that ties to it, that the rest of it could be pretty fairly still canon

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  3. I know it is an old interview, and the images of the art and concept are really cool and fascinating. But one of the things that caught my eye and I couldn't help it, was that Draenor was labeled as The Red World.

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  4. I have to admit, there was a time in my life where I was not reading any quest text. And yes, at some point I even had an addon that automatically accepted all quests so that I didn't even have to click on the accept quest button.
    But during the last maybe five years I changed dramatical in this point. Today I will read every quest text, every book, every flavour text, even on quests I completed multiple times.

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  5. Yea the RPG books were canon until they acknowledged Me'dan as canon and that is why they had to go. But it's very clear things keep coming from the old sourcebooks. I suspect that when we're done with it all, Most of the RPG book stuff finds its way into canon content, even if the book itself is not.

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  6. Someone should to share this old info session with Chris Metzen as a reminder to why, his perspectives of world building and immersive storytelling are vital, now more than ever.

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  7. Chris = RPG, Ion= MMO.
    I hope Chris introduces more RPGs to retail. I love playing solo, role-playing through challenging and rewarding journeys across the world. I'm also tired of guilds, raids, and that one game aspect that squanders the incredible world-building of Warcraft by focusing all the dev resources on it.

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  8. There are Add ons to skip story? I guess this is like the people who scream through dungeon/raid content without looking at it. And there are Role Playing books? (I have just started collecting the books as we can). How can you play a game like this and not pay attention to the story? Forgive me for the somewhat obliviousness but WoW and D&D are the two games I've played. I do a lot more with literature due to my minor (English) and history (major), and my own reading and writing. I just don't "get" the idea you go into the world and not pay attention to what is around you.

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  9. 10:50 The first Command and Conquer game came out 2 months before Warcraft 2 in 1995, C&C had FMV cutscenes and CGI renders. C&C: Red Alert and C&C Tiberian Sun both came out before Warcraft 3 and both were driven by their own lore.

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  10. I own this dvd, came with the Vanilla collectors edition. I re watch it every few years, it’s great to go back and see how the roots of Warcraft still influence is future!

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  11. 10:22 Warcraft wasn't the only RTS to have a narrative driven campaign. At around the same time Age of Mythology was released. It was created by the same people who created Age of Empires, Age of Empires II Age of Empires III etc. which I played a lot of. Age of Mythology's campaign was narrative based. The main character was Arkantos. Through playing him, one played through Greek, Norse, and Egyptian maps fighting an evil cyclops character in the same way Arthas goes after Mal'Ganis.

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  12. Azeroth was born 20 years ago by our timeline, here soon it changes forever with The War Within and The Worldsoul Saga that will shape the playing field for the future. it is both an exciting and terrifying time, because this could either save WoW and put it back on top, or condemn it to a niche playerbase for the rest of eternity.

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  13. 14:20 – just wanted to say that i never skipped, only addons i ever used was a minimap back in Vanilla, SilverDragon (a Rare scanning Addon that alerts you to nearby Rares when they spawn.) Handynotes (helps with figuring out how to obtain stuff, find Midsummer Bonfires, etc.) AllTheThings (helps keep track of collectibles, great for collectors.) and TradeSkillMaster (TSM for short, helps with selling stuff on the AH.) i dont get Addons for anything else.

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  14. WoW has long needed a single0player mode to replace Epic charcter quests, or to replace the need for Out-Of-Game Novels.
    I would gleefully play as any of the Heroes of WoW to experience their story personally.

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  15. Why would I consider the RPG books not canon when they go (almost) perfectly in line with the old WoW?
    Blizzard only declared them non canon in 2015. Maybe it's their Activision era lore that's not canon but irrelevant fan fiction which has nothing to do with the original vision. That makes more sense

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  16. Why did he put VODs on Twitch behind paywall? I love how passionate he is about WoW, loved watching back every stream (eu pleb here) and all I see is "pay up" to watch VODs. Its just cringe ngl.

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  17. This puts into perspective what WoW actually was and that a whole bunch of the nostalgia bait that you see now about modern retail is a load of hogwash. Turns out that if anything, modern WoW is returning to its narrative roots than people think.

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  18. Hmm yeah in the lore forums where we were discussing during vanilla times, we treated the RPG as canon for all the discussions. At some point later, i'm not sure if in BC or Wrath they started to say that no, the RPG wasn't canon; but that really felt it was because they realized that it was going to constraint plans for the future in an MMORPG that was going to last a lot longer than they thought initially. Since then, yeah you can't trust anything that's said on the RPG, but that doesn't mean the RPG isn't the foundation they are still taking inspiration for a lot of things.

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