Today on Twitter, Christie Golden admitted that she was layed off from Blizzard’s Story and Franchise team, less than a day before her nephew died of cancer.
https://x.com/ChristieGolden/status/1785022563833483623
Full text.
https://imgur.com/a/EXEhJqF
I don’t know if she ever mentioned being layed off before, but it doesn’t look like it from some of the replies.
Celebrating someone losing their job, classy.
You do realize that Christie didn’t write whatever she wanted to write, yes?
She wrote whatever Blizzard told her to write about, there will be no change in this regard.
You say this as if there ever wasn’t genericization going on.
This is staple Warcraft at this point, nothing has ever been more complex than ‘good guys’ vs. ‘bad guys’ in every given narrative, sorry to break it to you.
Not only that, but if you think Christie Golden is the person who is somehow behind this problem you are out of your mind and brainrotten beyond any point of return.
You don’t understand anything.
If you think there’s one person behind all these ‘problems’ you see in WoW’s story, you understand nothing about how this game is written.
The only thing that’s happened here is that you’ve lost your ‘bad writing’ scapegoat and need to find a new one.
Maybe you’ll go back to crapping on Metzen or something, almost be nostalgic to go back to that considering Cata Classic is coming out… It’ll be just like old times.
so she was fired? i wonder why.
I will say a lot of stuff involving baine jaina thrall anduin usually sucked balls and these were golden characters.
dragonflight was pretty good but it seems like everyone is fired. people said it was danusers babby and hes gone. so im not particularly positive if people are leaving as the story was looking up.
might explain some changes about stuff like the oathstones whatever the hell happened to that plot. if someone got fired I guess that might explain
Layoffs are the thing as bean counting CEOs try to bump up stock prices.
Golden was first approached to write for the Warcraft series in the late 90s and her first published work for it was Lord of the Clans in 2001. She would go on to write whatever novel she was commissioned to write, and later on was hired as a full-time employee.
This means a couple things:
1st off she didn’t decide which characters would be the focus of the stories she wrote. She was given a job to do with guidelines. War Crimes, for example, had to be written as the bridge between MoP and WoD. It had to include certain characters, and had to show the trial of Garrosh Hellscream. These things were not her decisions.
2nd it means she is no longer a full time employee, and could very well still be hired to write more works on commission in the future. This was how her working relationship with Warcraft was for the majority of her time writing for it.
Exactly. Her layoff date would make her part of the 1,900 employees cut by Microsoft back in January.
While I may not have agreed with the creative decision she took at times, I also understand that not all of those decisions were completely her own. Even if they were, it also isn’t right to “celebrate” someone losing their job. I hope that they continue to work with her on commission, or that someone else takes her up as a writer for their stories/needs.
This kinda sucks I enjoyed some of her novels specifically War Crimes.
I loved the comparison she does with Garrosh to Arthas, that entire line between Anduin and Garrosh was amazing.
Truly sad to see her go :^(
Also beyond terrible to hear what happened to her nephews. Cancer is the worse
Maybe dont say you are excited for someone losing their job who in the same post you were informed lost a loved one to cancer, all for the sake of some video games story to be “better”.
She can get another job, probably easier than I can.
Blizzard gave premises for books, then she got to write most of whatever she wanted within the premise, they let her get away with a lot.
She was. Anduin, Baine, Jaina, Thrall, those became her characters through her writings. The characters everyone has problems with, less so Thrall because his earlier characterization wasn’t made by her but even he had issues which people complain about. These characters were the focus of BFA and Shadowlands when she became part of the cinematic team. Anduin became a major character because she asked to write him in The Shattering, he wasn’t even planned for that book but like most everything else they gave her what she wanted.
I told you this when Danuser quit and I’ll tell you again, I don’t just go after whoever the current person is, I go after whoever I see are the people causing problems. I’ve been really excited for Metzen to be back, I’ve barely ever criticized him and I won’t so long as there’s nothing for me to complain about. This forum complains in every thread about the Horde, who caused these issues? Nobody? What a strange notion to think that the story doesn’t change with the people who write it.
There are characters she’s gotten to pick and choose for things, like with Anduin as I mentioned before. She got to pick Tyrande and Baine as the representing counsel in War Crimes. Baine who she has developed since The Shattering, one of the main characters Horde players take issue with. Then there’s Calia Menethil, which all Blizzard said was that someone had to be a Light Undead, she got to pick Calia to take that role. People on this forum act like they gave her strict guidelines for her books and they didn’t, they gave her an outline and that’s basically it.
It atleast means she won’t be part of making cutscenes now, and I guarantee you that starting with 11.1 there will be a change in tone for those.
Losing a family member to cancer has nothing to do with her losing her job, so I’m not going to let that be a shield.
Brainrot.
Take a step back into reality once and a while, yeah?
Not sure if you realize but looking for a job is a worse position than having one.
You don’t know how much she ‘got away with.’
You don’t know how detailed those outlines were.
Once again, you know nothing.
But even still, regardless of how much you liked her writing it doesn’t justify celebrating her getting laid off.
Don’t care about your weird WoW story conspiracy theory on why everything you don’t like is somehow Christie’s fault.
Neither Danuser nor Christie were ‘causing problems.’ And even if they were you wouldn’t know that.
You have nothing but parasocial conspiracies you made up to justify your dislike of these people.
You say you don’t go after whoever ‘the current person is,’ yet you always seem to…
Wonder why that is… never hear you talk about any other writers beyond those two…
Interesting.
Not Christie.
You’re a bad person.
Baine is a character who seriously required the attention he got in a lot of these books. Without the novels in which he is featured Baine is NOT a character. Like, seriously, straight up not a character at all. Also, who better to pick for someone to be a new undead than Calia? Whether you like it or not the guideline of “someone needs to be a light risen undead” isn’t exactly a guideline that’s going to lead to anything satisfying for anyone.
Also, as a sidenote, I think her choices for who to focus on in the Garrosh trial were excellent. Again, without moments like these forget about Baine being a character some people dislike he wouldn’t even be a character.
Seriously doubt it. I don’t think Blizzard was dissatisfied with her work, I think she was just one of the ones who got the axe because Microsoft was laying off people.
No one is born with a job unless they’re royalty. To think that everyone should keep the same job for life is a ridiculous notion.
I do based on what she’s said in interviews.
Again, not everything. But you sure are posting a lot for someone who doesn’t care.
Because I don’t have problems with them. Kosak and Afrasiabi had problems but haven’t been part of the company for years. Courtney Alameida is great, Madeleine Roux is amazing, loved what Michael Stackpole did in Shadows Of The Horde, didn’t like William King’s writing much but the majority has, and Robert Brooks should get more recognition than he has. The majority of WoW’s writers are good, the only other one I can think of that isn’t is Knaak.
Her clear Alliance favoritism is the primary problem.
No, you are. You attack people criticizing a video game’s story to feel better about yourself when you could be focusing your efforts elsewhere. There are more worthwhile causes to focus your attention on.
I agree, but that’s not the primary point. People say, “You can’t blame her she didn’t get to decide that!” The majority of the time she did. Anduin would not be the character he is today if not for her. When it comes to him hogging the spotlight, it’s because of her.
If Blizzard was dissatisfied with her work they’d have let her go a long time ago. I think a big problem in the story development team is that they’re all friends and they let that get in the way of their professional relationships. They rarely tell each other no. The story isn’t affected by feedback in the same way the rest of the game is, when other parts of the game go wrong the devs eventually admit what they did was a mistake. They rarely do this for the story, people say they’re sick of Anduin and the devs continue on as if everyone loves him, probably because they don’t want their friends to feel bad.
You’re actually incapable of understanding my point.
Which leads me to believe you have no foot in reality or you’re just too brainrotten about this person to think beyond basic hatred of someone who doesn’t even know you exist.
So based on narrative conspiracy around things you construed from some things she said in an interview meant to market a product.
Alright.
I don’t care about your dumb hatred.
I do care about what it means, though.
People’s hatred for this person is pathetic.
Wonder why.
Alliance-Horde favoritism doesn’t matter.
Not to mention that she’s written plenty of Horde characters, again, she doesn’t decide who she wants to write for or what characters to use.
She’s given the pieces, is told what they need to do, she writes pretty words and makes a narrative surrounding it.
You’re not criticizing a video game’s story.
You’re celebrating someone getting laid off because you’ve created a negative narrative surrounding them based on nothing but delusion.
So, you’re a bad person and also unable to construct a proper response without blatantly lying about what you’re obviously doing.
Or maybe you don’t know the difference, which makes you even worse off than I imagined.
Yeah no thats absolutely unhinged and disgusting.
Or just being an adult
It’s true though. Her personal tragedy has nothing to do with her being laid off. It has nothing to do with her work on the Story. She twisted them together to ward off criticism.
Those sort of manipulative tactics work on some, but not on everyone.
I think people can discuss her impact on the lore and the business decisions Blizzard made. Her injecting her personal tragedy like a shield is what is in poor taste.
Being excited about someone losing a job while being indifferent to their nephew dying of cancer because you dont like how she writes your 20-year-old video game stories is the furthest thing from being an adult.
Or maybe shes a normal human being with real emotions expressing a tragedy that affected her.
Absolutely wild dude, wild.
No it isn’t, though.
She created an update post to talk about what’s happening in her life atm.
Believe it or not, she does have fans and people who care about her as a person.
She gave a personal update as to what’s going on with her life, specifically why she wasn’t posting as often as she regularly was.
There was no political game here, man.
Don’t know why you think there is.
Letting your emotions control you so much is more of a childish trait.
Remember you are on a WoW forum…WoW is the priority here…not someones personal life. If you were on that persons personal Twitter…sure…whine all you want about it…but this here is the WoW forum and that takes priority and if people are excited about WoW possibly improving, then so be it…this is the place to share that excitement.