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http://us.blizzard.com/blizzcast/archive/episode2.xml
Welcome to our second episode of BlizzCast! We have doubled the length of our second BlizzCast at the popular request of the community, which will begin with an in depth interview of Chris Metzen, our Vice President of Creative Development and creator of our original Warcraft, StarCraft, and Diablo storylines. In addition, Geoff Goodman, one of our World of Warcraft Designers will be elaborating on Magtheridon's Lair changes in Patch 2.4, which includes new itemization changes. Lastly, we are also adding a new community questions and answers section, to make sure your voices are heard and your questions are answered, by none other than the people making your favorite Blizzard games. Be sure to view the transcript to see all of the artwork.
Karune: Hello, Internet users. Welcome to our second episode of our BlizzCast series, designed, once again, to take you behind the scenes into the world of Blizzard. My name is Karune, the RTS Community Manager here at Blizzard. First up, we'll be interviewing Chris Metzen, our Vice President of Creative Development about the lore of Warcraft, StarCraft, and Diablo. On top of that, we'll be also bringing in Geoff Goodman, one of our World of Warcraft designers, to elaborate on the newest changes to the Magtheridon dungeon. Lastly, we'll also be answering questions from both the StarCraft and the World of Warcraft communities. Without further ado, we'll get started.
Welcome, Chris, to the show. In case you guys didn't know, Chris was also the voice in our intro bumper for BlizzCast series.
Chris Metzen: That's right. [ 00:17 ]
Karune: Pretty awesome. To start off, our first question. How challenging is it to develop and manage the lore behind three very distinct franchises: Warcraft, StarCraft, and Diablo? Do you find it jarring when you switch between them or does the variety encourage creativity as you change gears from one to another?
Chris Metzen: Interesting. That's two really good questions and I guess I'll just take the first part. How difficult is it to manage the lore behind the three franchises? I think if I was trying to do it by myself, it would be impossible and I'd make just a complete and utter mess of it all. At the end of the day, Warcraft alone is such a huge setting and such a big universe that there's no way any one person could manage all those characters and places and things. The team we built for World of Warcraft of quest designers and writers is just epic, so these days I get to work with a team of really talented people that really kind of breathe life into the setting.
A lot of my story stuff on Warcraft these days is coming from a very high level, conceptualizing zones and characters, especially looking forward to future expansions – expanded content – I'm really keen to get in there and kind of create the broad strokes of things and then it really goes to special teams. We sit down many times a week and really walk through quest lines and characters and see how it all melds with the art creation process. So that the story-telling of it all is much more of a group activity these days on the Warcraft front.
On StarCraft, it's definitely taken that turn as well. I'm still very involved at the scripting level, at the story-telling level – figuring out how the game moves forward and how it interacts with the cinematics and the whole ultimate linear progression, how that takes shape. But we've got a really amazing team these days, it's absolutely not just a one-man show.
On the original StarCraft, it was me and a guy named James Finney who was one of our designers at the time and we pretty much tag-teamed a lot of that story and pretty much defined how the story played out through that single-player campaign. This time around, our lead writer is a guy named Andy Chambers. He's a very good writer; he's worked in science-fiction a long time. We're working with the cinematics director, Nick Carpenter and we're all kind of jamming the story. It's much more of a team effort this time as opposed to the story coming from any singular spot. So, we kind of check-and-balance each other a lot and we're able to kind of draw on our common geeky love for films and science fiction in general. I think it's made the themes really pop this time. It feels like a much more grounded story this time around. I think the characters are a lot richer. I think the highs and lows they experience are just a lot more mature.
We've come a long way since the original StarCraft. We've matured as story-tellers; we've matured as a team. The instincts that define what we dig and what we don't in story-telling are much more honed at this phase of our lives. We were twenty-something back in the day; we're thirty-something now, so all that life experience is definitely playing into the themes we're bringing forward in StarCraft and the way we're handling them. It's really fun. It's been a really rewarding experience. As far as handling continuity, and the broad story for the Diablo franchise, I guess that we'll have to see how that takes shape. [ 00:58 ]
Karune: I think it must have been really crazy, especially working with all the different teams and all the different franchises. How do you think it has been to switch gears between the two or to really…working with each different team, your schedule must be crazy every day.
Chris Metzen: At this phase, I've actually cut a lot out of my schedule these days so I only have meetings every hour of the day, so that's good. I'm not double or triple stacked. For many, many years now, I've spent a lot of my time ping-ponging back and forth between different licenses every day. It's always a revolving door. But for me, for my specific personality – we're all wired very differently – I dig that. I dig changing gears all day long. You could be working in the same universe for a day but changing gears on ‘well, this is a level-design meeting,' ‘this is a quest/story meeting,' ‘this is purely VO-let's-get-our-characters-down-what-actors-are-we-hiring kind of meeting,' so, I like that. I like the up and down of the day and never really getting bored with things. It's always moving fast and there's always kind of – as the day goes on, there's always some new challenge that's kind of fresh… [ 04:44 ]
Karune: Do you find those ups and downs kind of influencing each other as far as inspiration?
Chris Metzen: Oh yeah. Absolutely. I think it keeps – as far as I go, as I interact with the special teams and the different groups, where my head may have been, in one hour, I walk into a totally different meeting and that energy's still burning off. Or I might just go ‘Gah, you guys just wouldn't believe what we just jammed out in that last meeting!' And they'll go ‘Well tell us!' They might not even care, the animators might not even care what a zone looks like but I'm so geeked up about what we were just doing that I'll wind up babbling to them about whatever we were jamming on. So, it kind of almost creates this educational process where everybody's in the loop and it's just a cool communication thing.
I like the up and down of it but, you can run into trouble sometimes where, if you're walking in from one game to another game, back-to-back creative meetings and come out of a StarCraft meeting with certain themes that were big in our minds and I walk in and ‘Guys, I had this idea for Warcraft blahblahblahblahblah,' and they're like ‘Woah, dude, that sounds just like…there's no laser guns in Warcraft!' ‘Oh, that's right!' So, sometimes you really have to change gears; your clutch can get a little fried, but I dig that kind of stuff and it's just been this way for years. I like being able to work on the different licenses and kind of keep, from an artistic level or a conceptual level, keep the old brain exercised. It's kind of cool to be able to jump around.
Sometimes, when you're focused on a single idea, day in and day out, for a protracted amount of time, it dulls a little bit. At this rate, the way my job is structured, I think it keeps me on my toes, you know what I mean? It keeps me sharp – I hope! My coworkers may not think that's entirely true because I also have a terrible memory – short term memory, I don't even have that. What were we talking about? [ 05:54 ]
Karune: For sure, I think the energy translates quite a bit to the story-line of the games. To talk about StarCraft in particular, how did that particular story-line get started with you?
Chris Metzen: You know, it's funny. What a lot of people may not know is we were actually – Nick Carpenter and I, the cinematics director, we were developing, for Blizzard, we were the young Turks many years ago. After we had published Warcraft II. Nick and I spun off and were working on a science-fiction concept for a game that was actually more of an action shooter. It involved pretty gnarly stuff like space vampires, kind of clans of them, and this really cool sci-fi setting.
At the same time, a separate development team, or the main development team at the time was developing science-fiction RTS. We had done Warcraft II and now we're interested in trying to do the next RTS outing in science-fiction. And early ideas like ‘well, let's blend them together man, we can do this kind of space-vampire-clan-thing and real-time-strategy.' We talked about that for a while and ultimately, that game fell through and as momentum really started picking up on the science-fiction thing, the group response is like ‘well, let's simplify this, right. People, they understand space-ships. They understand creepy, spidery aliens. They understand psychic brain aliens, right? So let's just cut down to the core motifs that are really classic in science-fiction. That's where we should start.' So we kind of threw away the world concept we were cooking and ultimately StarCraft just kind of took shape over time. It starts with, the way you build a world, it starts with tanks and fighter jets and just cool-looking alien shapes and ultimately that starts growing into a setting. Who's this? Where's that vehicle from? Who pilots this? I think the StarCraft setting really started taking shape at that conceptual level.
It wasn't the story-line, specifically, the linear flow of events, the overthrow of the Confederacy, Kerrigan, Raynor, the Protoss, the destruction of their homeworld. A lot of that stuff wasn't clear from the get-go. We were just making the broadest science-fiction universe we could and trying to make sure it really resonated with people. It was only in constructing the single-player campaign that James and I really started laying out the broad strokes of how the universe would unfold and what this moment in time was really defined by: the Confederate fall and ultimately the invasion of Aiur. So it's funny, little ideas that weren't there from the beginning: the whole character of Kerrigan didn't really exist until the middle of our construction of that first campaign. We knew we had Ghosts and the joke was – I don't know if this is common knowledge but I think it was Command and Conquer that had a character named Tanya, back in the day. She was kind of like an assassin, a badass. And we just had this conversation one day using a Ghost character on a map, like ‘ha ha, how funny', the whole ice-skater debacle was going on with Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan. ‘Haha, how funny, we'll make our super assassin named Kerrigan on this one map.' And it was a total throw-away character but as we started discussing it and really getting in to this character, we kept coming back to her; she had a lot of gravity. It really created a cool, kind of triangle of tension between Mensk and Raynor and this emergent Kerrigan character.
Ultimately, it was pretty late in the game when we decided that she would be betrayed and become the Queen of Blades. The Queen of Blades was never an original concept; it really came about just at that, kind of in the final stretch of that campaign. Just another testament to the fact that what we publish and what people really cling to isn't necessarily always defined from the beginning. You would think, looking at StarCraft, that that was one of the core concepts but actually it was kind of tacked in later. I think that's where we're strong as story-tellers; when you pop ideas like that in the middle of your plan, we tend to be able to jump on those ideas and weave them into the core plot and really make them feel like they've been there from the beginning. That's kind of the trick to it: can we flex fast enough with emergent ideas and really make them feel contiguous? [ 07:58 ]
Karune: Yeah, that stories kind of evolve into it rather than set things that you try to throw in. That's really awesome. I think that's different than how some other companies might handle it.
Chris Metzen: : I think that's a big part of video game story-telling, you know, you go out and write a movie script or comics are like this a lot. It typically relies on the actor to – pardon me, the writer to have conceived of the thing pretty clearly up front and then you begin to build the mechanical component of the game on top of existing plot-lines or characters. Certainly films are like that. You start with a script. Comics, you typically start with a script.
So, when we construct stories for video games, more often than not, it starts with a molten idea. Sometimes it's broad, sometimes it's not, but as part of this team dynamic, as the special teams get involved and as the designers and the writers and the artists all kind of start talking about this molten idea, it hammers it out further. It becomes clearer and clearer as you go. People respond to characters or themes more than others. Like, you know what, this idea is cool but it just isn't fun. It doesn't play well; it doesn't work in the context of the game. Or, someone might go ‘Hey, what about this character Kerrigan?' and we go ‘Woah, we should absolutely use that! I've got a crazy idea, let's turn it into an alien!' So you never know where those ideas are going to pop so the trick is stay loose and give yourself enough breathing room that you can use those ideas. That you can jump on them without derailing the train.
People typically worry about Blizzard, it takes us a while to get games out. It ain't ready till it's ready. That is obviously a benefit. But one of the things that also happens in our longer gestation period is we're just talking about this stuff all the time and it gives us a little bit of room and breathing space to really chew on some of these ideas that might pop that other companies, with a tighter development schedule, might not be able to chase. They might not be able to really weigh things like that that might pop because it'll derail the train. That's one thing I dig about the freedom we've been allotted all these years is that we're able to really chase those things down and explore.
[ 12:26 ]
Karune: So what do you think about the StarCraft II story coming many years now after you developed the StarCraft original story? What has kind of been the popping elements to get that back to the story?
Chris Metzen: The StarCraft II story. You know its funny, while I wouldn't say we had a lot of false starts, there were a lot of themes I really wanted it to be defined by when we began. And at this phase, some of those themes have fallen away. Some of them have become even clearer. Ultimately, we had a number of hanging plot threads after the first game. Obviously, you've got the huge thread of ‘Kerrigan's in charge of the zerg now. What's she doing? What's happening with our old buddies Mensk and Raynor? Where are they at? How do they play in to the future of this setting? How can we resolve this split between the Protoss civilization -the Light and Dark Templar? Will that be resolved? And ultimately, the larger mythology question of: why all this? Why now? The Protoss and the Zerg were created by some elder race as suggested – who is that race? And ultimately, was there a plan and a symmetry to all of these events that played out? Was it just random warfare or is there a bigger cycle of events playing out?' So those are a lot of the things we knew about right out of the gate.
We had many years to think about them, mull them around before we started official development on a project. After we've been in this for a while and we've really refined our story-telling process and our cinematic process, this game is much more cinematic than the previous game: we've got a lot of in-game sequences and the story mode space which we showed at BlizzCon last year. So it's been, just a tremendous experience to be able to really get closer to this universe. It's not just talking heads babbling at each other in ready-rooms anymore. You're really immersed in the tension and the drama and the story of it all. These characters are, the artwork, the voice-over and all that stuff, they're just more realized than we've ever really been able to do. It's just been tremendously rewarding to shape this thing and really see it take the shape beyond even what I had hoped for a few years ago.
You kind of have a sense of the story and your expectations and your hopes for it as a singular writer, but as the teams' gotten involved and as we've been jamming on it all these years, the inclusion of fresh voices like Andy Chambers and even old voices like Nick Carpenter, I think we're all doing the best work of our careers. It's funny, I've said a number of times. World of Warcraft kind of became the center of the Blizzard universe, pardon the pun, for many years. The game was so big, it demanded a tremendous amount of mind-share from us all. Even though other games were in development at the time. Certainly StarCraft II.
But now, it just feels like, with StarCraft II, as we're able to focus more and more, it feel s like the best work we've ever done. It's finally the story I really wanted us to tell. It's got a lot of heart, it's got a lot of depth, and, on top of it, it's just a rip-roaring wargame. It's badass. It's been very, very rewarding to see this thing take shape. Just getting back to that Blizzard of yesteryear where it's not all about WoW – don't get me wrong, I love WoW! But we're so much more than that and I think the world will see, when we pop with this thing that we haven't been idle.
[ 14:41 ]
Karune: And everybody's quite excited. Let's also use that to shift gears from Warcraft III. How did the story evolve from Warcraft III, an RTS game, jumping into World of Warcraft, the MMO?
Chris Metzen: I think at the end of the day, that you have to remember that we developed both of them concurrently. I was lead writer, creative director on World of Warcraft – sorry, on Warcraft III. Same thing; both. As we were developing Warcraft III, the call came down ‘hey, look, we're gonna try this MMORG thing. We're gonna build World of Warcraft.' Okay. We kind of built them from the conceptual standpoint at the same time, roughly. I knew what the Warcraft III story was, I knew what the new lands were, I knew what cultures were involved and ultimately where all the pieces on the chess board would be by the end of that, considering The Frozen Throne expansion. So as we were developing WoW, we knew where everything was, we knew what the broad themes were, and we were able to build on that snapshot of the world that Warcraft III left you with. So if that was your basis; now we can take those maps and those ideas and those art assets, that fundamental art direction and really launch off into a far broader setting.
At the end of the day, the boxed product of WoW was pretty static in terms of: it kind of re-introduces you to the setting, the world but it didn't have a real strong sense of linear story. That would come, I think, as we got into the Ahn'Qiraj patch event where Ahn'Qiraj comes out and suddenly, no matter where you were, Alliance or Horde, at the level you're at: suddenly, oh! There's an event happening! And the world is kind of bent towards this new episodic content where obviously, with the patches that followed and in Burning Crusade, we began to get back into more of a linear series of stories.
Burning Crusade is a definite chapter, it's a year in the life of this setting. And you could track all the events that played out, right. Wrath of the Lich King again is that next chapter, that next vital offering of events that are pushing this continuity forward where I think WoW is more of a snapshot. I think certainly pushed the continuity forward from Warcraft III but not in as dynamic a way as our current expansion sets are doing. I'm not sure if that answered your question, though.
[ 18:30 ]
Karune: Well, I mean, going even further into Wrath of the Lich King, what types of stories – the storyline that was already told in Warcraft III – will be told in Wrath of the Lich King and also what types of loose ends that haven't been told or are going to be introduced in Wrath?
Chris Metzen: Right. A couple that spring to mind – there's all sorts of stuff going on in Wrath of the Lich King – it's big, conceptually, it's like – if you look at Burning Crusade at a conceptual level: we're going into outer space. There's clearly a war between good and evil playing out in the greater universe. There's some sort of predestination of the orcs coming to Azeroth. Now we get to see their origins.
The Burning Legion, the Burning Crusade: it was huge on a conceptual level, right? Some would argue maybe too huge, right. Whatever happened to Gnolls and Kobolds. Suddenly, you're in outer space fighting angels. With Wrath of the Lich King, you almost get both. We come back to terrestrial Azeroth, so it's a little more back into the realm of gnolls and kobolds – well, I'm not promising you'll see either of those in Northrend – it's a little more palatable to classic fantasy. But at the same time, we're also pushing forward hugely on the setting. We're going to get into themes like the Titans and the creation of the world, the function of Azeroth at the dawn of creation. Why this planet? Why does this planet continue to be central to events? The whole dwarven storyline of them trying to plumb the depths of their origins and how that ties into the creation of the world. We're getting into a lot of cool new territory with the war of magic and the creation of the dragon flights – what's their function in the world? How are they currently doing? At this phase of history, there's all sorts of big, broad themes playing out – not the least of which are looking again at the Alliance and the Horde from an overall angle and just gauging “How're they doing, these days?” After the events of that first year of play culminating with – I don't even know what it was – Ahn'Qiraj, Blackwing Lair, Naxxramas, all the big event patches we put out which I kind of look at as Year One, and certainly with the Burning Crusade: both alliances sending expeditions into this burning, alien world and being flung into those events.
What are the stresses that have resulted over time because of those things? What are the discoveries? The discovery of the Mag'har in Outland: what does that do to the Horde? That Thrall's finally found his – where's his head at? The Northrend events, Wrath of the Lich King kind of looks at each of these alliances and how these events have played out and shows you the new stress fractures, perhaps appearing in the upper echelons of leadership. There's new characters kind of coming to the forefront that may or may not challenge the status quo for both factions. There's all sorts of sweet – everybody knows about death knights, but you know, we just had a meeting the other day about how they play out, about how the storylines of potentially Mograine and the Ashbringer and all those events in the Plaguelands: what was the point of all of that and how does it really play out? There's all sorts of little nooks and crannies like that, that Northrend really brings full circle, that the Wrath of the Lich King expansion really brings full circle. So, it's been really fun for me to be able to help steer the setting.
If we were making a comic book series every month, obviously, you've got to roll it out but while our expansion sets, they certainly don't roll out month by month, they are episodic, ultimately, so it's been really cool to push the setting forward and begin to bring some of these characters and points of history back to the forefront so that fans of the story of WoW can really feel immersed and that everything is cohesive and compelling, we hope.
[ 20:55 ]
Karune: Very nice. I think that most people are hanging at the edge of their seats right now about all of the Wrath of the Lich King stuff. Our last question: how did the events of the Sin War Trilogy fit into the Diablo universe and why was this an important story to tell?
Chris Metzen: At the most basic level, apart from the story of it, in terms of just how the product came to be at a publishing level, we were talking with our partners, PocketBooks, a couple of years ago. “Hey, let's do trilogies per license; for each of these three licenses.” My first instinct was, “hey, killer! Let's use go back and those trilogies to really give people a sense of the origin of each of these series.” Thus, with Warcraft, we did the War of the Ancients which was the definitive, first conflict of Azeroth that really set the stage for everything happening in the current age. StarCraft as well, with the Dark Templar trilogy, even though it was spun with the protagonist kind of reliving history in his mind, it really gave you a sense of the mythology of the Protoss and the events that really echo in the current day, in the pre-staging to StarCraft II.
With the Sin War as well, while we didn't want to get into ‘time-travel' or ‘character reliving history in his head' – it's more of a straight look at ancient events – I think I may be roasted for this, it happened about a thousand years before Diablo I, and really, the Sin War trilogy was meant to take a snapshot of the Diablo world as it was and really show you the events and characters that set in motion everything that plays out in the present day.
Karune: Well, I think that's all the questions that we have for today so thanks a lot, Chris, for joining us.
Chris Metzen: Certainly. Thanks a lot! [ 24:57 ] |
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