In his recent interview he talks about what it was like coming back to the development process and taking on the challenge of being creative director of an entire saga rather than the usual expansion-sized chunks. It’s an interesting interview and I recommend people watch for themselves but one thing stood out to me and I wanted to discuss it specifically.
When teased about having a “kill list” of characters and why Khadgar seems to be right at the top of said list he said, and I am paraphrasing but it’s pretty close, “the easiest thing to do when trying to punctuate escalating stakes in a narrative arc is to pull a George Lucas and blow up a planet or kill a beloved character.”
He said it as if that’s not exactly what they’re planning to do in two days time with destroying Dalaranagain like it’s a Death Star and likely killing off Khadgar too. That really stood out to me because unless he was being completely tone deaf it either means that he disagreed with that direction but by the time he came on board it was too late to pull it back, OR despite appearances and clear evidence to the contrary neither of the aforementioned spoilers are coming to pass.
I really hope he wasn’t on board with that decision and maybe tried to take the edge off it somehow because it really was absolutely terrible writing.
My opinion will sund biased but I will do it anyway.
Metzen will need time to put everything togeder in a acceptable way, because… (and I can be very wrong on what I will say) …everything was a complete and entire mess at his arrivel and he would never say this public.
So he came up with a Saga, that already tells the player (or tells me) “Hey look, we are going to fix this and be back on track but the mess is so big that we need to do it baby steps or we can mess everything again.”
The part of the interview that he says something like “hope the players understand this is the first part of a saga” told me that he got back, things were a complete mess, he cant just retcon everything (would not even be fair with the playerbase) and now he needs to patch things up and start the healing proccess, but the first step is always slow and carefull.
Back at Blizzcon he said “trust us we are not messing around”… I got the expansion a few seconds after that, I trust him 100%, I have been around since Warcraft Orcs and Humans, I love the franchise - and even if he cant deliver (for a reason or another) he was 100% sincere at that moment but sometimes things just go to different directions, like everyone, thats life, I mean I was a raider until WotLK, finished my college, got married, had kids, today I cant even run LFR some of the weeks and I wish the game became more and more casual, a word that I “hated” for 3 expansions.
So… anyway, it was good to see Metzen back, the interview was great and he can count me in.
To be fair, he did do the ‘look away and eye roll’ thing, suggesting to me what he said was in jest, not an actual thing. You watch, Khadgar will have narrowly escaped but he’s burnt out and in hiding until Xal forgets about him or just writes him off as a dead wizard.