So in a recent Rapid Fire interview with Game Informer, Jeff Kaplan suggests there’s an easter egg in Overwatch that hasn’t been found yet, that refers to a quest he made when he worked on World of Warcraft (@6:34):
In another separate official Blizzard video Jeff did recently reprising his work on World of Warcraft, he talks specifically about one quest he created in his early days that would probably become his legacy: The Green Hills of Stranglethorn quest, where players basically collect pages of a book by Hemet Nesringway (an anagram of Ernest Hemingway, Kaplan’s favorite author).
So I looked around Blizzard World and if you leave attacker’s first spawn room and head left, you’ll see the “Lost and Found Vikings” area, basically a lost and found for the park. If you jump behind the counter, you’ll see lying up against the wall a specially textured green tome lying against the wall, titled “The Green Hills of Stranglethron by Hemet Nesringway” (if somebody could link the picture properly that would be nice):
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However, apparently somebody already found this a year ago (reddit user pascalbrax) and posted about in on Reddit, as it basically confirms Jeff exists in the Overwatch universe and therefore is canon in lore:
Saying there’s an easter egg that no one has found is an odd claim right out of the gate, since he wouldn’t know exactly what’s been found and what hasn’t, unless they collect analytics specifically related to the egg. Whether that book is what he was talking about or not is impossible to say for sure, but it does seem likely.
Maybe I’m just dumb(er than I think I am) but in what possible way does this mean Kaplan exists in lore? Wouldn’t it just mean that Nesingwary exists in lore? Or wouldn’t it mean that Stranglethorn is a real location in lore, making WoW and Overwatch take place in the same universe?
Or is it supposed to be that Nesingwary IS Kaplan?
I think the idea is that if WoW’s Green Hills of Stranglethorn quest exists in the Overwatch universe, by extension its creator (Jeff Kaplan) must also exist. We know Mike Morhaime is commemorated in the Starcraft section of Blizzardworld, but it’s not clear that necessarily all Blizzard devs existed at some point in the Overwatch universe, so seeing something specifically connected to Jeff Kaplan in the game suggests that he’s also canon in the Overwatch universe.
…Unless somehow in the Overwatch universe, this Stranglethorn quest was created by somebody else, like a Keff Japlan or something lol.
To me, that means that either the WoW universe is a fictional story told by characters in the Overwatch universe, or they both exist in the same universe.
But even in that case, I figure the author would still be Nesingwary, not Kaplan. Unless Nesingwary is supposed to be an in-universe representation of Kaplan.
I guess the question is: in the Overwatch universe, is “The Green Hills of Stranglethorn” considered fiction or non-fiction?
I always assumed Blizzworld existed outside canon anyway.
I would guess that “The Green Hills of Stranglethorn” book, as it exists sitting in the lost and found, is just merchandise, so it saying it’s “by” Hemet Nesingwary is just tongue-in-cheek because he’s the in-game character who wrote the book in WoW, even though it was all a quest written by Jeff Kaplan.
Kinda like how “The Princess Bride” is by the fictional “S. Morgenstern” when it was all actually written by William Goldman.
No, it means he exists in our universe. But if the book “The Princess Bride by S. Morgenstern” showed up as an easter egg in Overwatch, then it would mean that William Goldman exists in the Overwatch universe too, as the actual author behind the book “The Princess Bride by S. Morgenstern”. Does that make sense?
LOL no you’re not dumb , it is admittedly a little weird to think about, is open to various interpretations and requires a few assumptions about authorship to make it work out.
Every game developer who has ever made the claim “There’s still an Easter Egg left to be found” is usually full of BS. Some do this because they want players to play the game again, some do it because they want to seem clever by “hiding an unfound Easter Egg”, and some do it because they’re just misinformed and underestimate the abilities of people who have nothing better to do than scour every inch of a game. A famous example of this is Bethesda, when Todd Howard claimed there was an Easter Egg that no one had found yet in Fallout 4, causing people to go back through Fallout 4, again, just to find it, only for I think it was Pete Hines, this year, claiming it had been found without elaborating on what it actually was.
Well, Blizzard exists in Overwatch lore, as evidenced by the existence of Blizzard World and D.va’s D.va’s dad’s professional StarCraft experience.
It stands to reason that the people who have worked at Blizzard in real life would in turn have worked at Blizzard in Overwatch lore. There’s no particular reason for it to be a different Blizzard or have different employees, considering that the products are all the same, other than Overwatch not existing as an old video game within its own world, of course.
Interesting, I guess we will need confirmation but what if there was another Easter Egg that he was referring to that hasn’t been found yet but has similar characteristics?
“But they were all of them deceived, for another Easter Egg was made to rule all Easter Eggs”
It could be this quest. It could be another. Didn’t he say in the interview to wow classic that he did a lot of quests in westfall?
Anyway, as others have said, it is impossible to know if anyone found this easteregg or not.
I mean it could be that someone wrote on japanese on a japanese fanpage of overwatch about the easteregg and blizz just did not google for it… or whatever.
On a sidenote, I think it is so cool that he was on the WoW team before. Its weird to see a face of someone who created things I play for years. Before ow I did not know Jeff…
He has like a 1 million dollar reward or something too.