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Warlords of Draenor makes a pretty deliberate story jump, can you explain what brought about the idea of this alternate Draenor as opposed to another new world present time? Why this particular threat?
I think it starts with Garrosh. When we first made Garrosh back in Burning Crusade, I remember Metzen and I sitting down – and I did Nagrand, Garrosh was my guy – and we were sitting down and thinking like, we wanted – at that point, even then we knew, in WoW's development we knew – we lamented the fact that we couldn’t bring the Warchiefs back in Burning Crusade, and we did it by proxy, by progeny. We went look, we can’t bring Grom back, but what if he had a son. And that son was Garrosh. So with that, we’re like okay, we’re going to do this, we’re not going to just do this lightly, he’s not going to just be some throwaway, he’s Hellscream’s kid. We’re going to make him something legendary. He’s going to have a fate, and there is destiny here, and we just need to figure out what that destiny is.
And originally, it was a much more heroic, redemptive arc for him, that would have potentially ended up with a strong Hellscream leader. But Garrosh became what was needed for WoW, from a story character development perspective.