I’m hoping that starts to get walked back. Like, yeah, it was a “Titan perspective” but it happens to be the correct perspective, too. Given the alternatives, I don’t think what they’ve got lined up could be considered all that bad.
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Metzen was there for everything the former persons “got up to” and certainly knew about Afrasiabi when he told the whole con how much he loved the guy, formally handing him the reigns.
I like Metzen, but I think he got out to avoid the coming storm and keep kind of clean from all that. Coming back now that the dust has settled and pretending not to have been a party to it.
There was no evidence to suggest any of that is the case. Basically wading into tinfoil hat territory and working against what few glimpses we’ve had into that whole debacle.
Your right. It’s pure speculation. But if the office was consumed by bro culture during the years referenced and Metzen ever stepped foot in the office…
He left because he was extremely unwell. He was in so much pain and having to deal with doctors basically telling him he wouldn’t ever be out of a bed again if he kept being remotely active…he had to step back, get ready for surgeries that could end his mobility if he didn’t heal correctly, and then do his recovery, physical therapy and take care of himself. He was on a lot of meds the last blizzcon he went to before his temporary retirement. He was barely coherent.
Alex, in my mind, took advantage of this. And Metzen trusted him.
Thrall and Garrosh. Just saying.
I don’t mean to bad mouth the guy. He’s a hero. He’s a gaming great. I genuinely don’t think he was part of “bro culture”
But if there was bro culture in the office for the years that he was there then he couldn’t not know about it.
Afrasiabi was there from the beginning. He wasn’t Metzen’s brother-in-law’s cousin that he brought in as a replacement. They plucked him from the top EQ guild (or something) to come in and consult on their MMO project.
So the imagined virtue I put on the voice of Thrall, makes me incredulous that the office culture was that bad. (That’s not to say that Alex didn’t do less public shady stuff to that poor girl)
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The idea that the sleazeballs who are longer there exploited Metzen when he was vulnerable does make more sense.
I agree. But now the toxic ones are gone (hopefully all of them) and Metzen’s back. I hope he’s got something good in mind for the Arathi.
We don’t really know who knew what, who did what, or what the day to day for anything was. We’re outsiders getting snapshots of the low points in a time when the rumor mill gets spun up into hyperbolic overdrive. Like, there were people in this community (note: plural, people) who thought the “cube crawls” from the allegations were people getting hammered drunk and physically crawling under cubicles to assault or harass people on a normal work day.
I just don’t see the value in inventing details based on a hunch and assigning them to people without having any facts to support it. The facts alone paint a sad enough picture imo without piling on some additional witch hunt.
I don’t disagree.
My original point was… from the time the game started to legion, it’s all Metzen’s lore. Metzen’s influence remained the whole time he was gone. Saying “that’s not Metzen’s lore” and ascribing story beats you don’t like to the persons named in the lawsuit is absurd. It’s convenient scapegoating. The lawsuit and the allegations have nothing to do with the lore and if Metzen was a part of it, that wouldn’t have any relevance.
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Ah. Yeah, I can at least mostly agree with that. I thought it was absurdly stupid to see people who have happily enjoyed characters and storylines for years suddenly convinced every story beat was rife with misogyny and could only have possibly been written by an alcoholic sex pest.
I think a helpful explanation for “it’s not Metzen’s lore” when drilling down onto what people are talking about is that they are unhappy with how Metzen’s lore is being changed, discarded, or shuffled. Chronicles will ever remain the biggest glaring example here, as the books intended to be the absolute, Word of God, foundational underpinnings of the IP at large were … unreliable narrator.
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Tbf, nailing down all the lore in a living and expanding fictional universe is ill advised to begin with. it was a sloppy cash grab.
It was an effort to avoid the inconsistencies that had plagued the franchise. Having no concrete frame of reference is like building a house on quicksand. There’s nothing for a fan to invest in with your story if it’s just going to arbitrarily change. Not respecting that kind of continuity leads to things like, for example, some garble-mouthed bald robot death god with a gaping hole between his loud and proud nipples who somehow orchestrated and masterminded everything we thought we knew while being imprisoned in a tower that he rules in Super Hell.
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the other funny part is that blizzard will not force its writers to stick to canon, so a concrete frame of reference isn’t going to last long
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You do that internally.
What we are talking about is a book that was doomed to be irrelevant as soon as a better story came along, or that would hamstring all future writers in the name of book sales.
You make “The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia” after the Return of the Jedi is already on VHS. You release “The comprehensive guide to Middle Earth” but not before publishing The Hobbit. You don’t tell everyone “This is all the story to be told” before you are done telling the story, unless you need some extra cash really quick.
That’s not what Chronicle is, though. It’s just a grand history and foundational information for the setting. We’re talking about a book that launched near to the Legion expansion, so painting it as a premature cash grab just doesn’t track.
Its true, but Alex wasn’t brought on as a story guy. He was brought on as a quest designer. This does involve storytelling of a type, but the overarching storylines were largely mezten.
Things we know Alex orchestrated as he moved upwards? Sylvanas turning on everyone during the Wrathgate. He went on record saying that was his thing. Garrosh taking over the Horde and bombing Theramore. He wrote for a large portion of the Hordeside Kalimdor low level quests in Cata.
Metzen burned down the tree. Metzen had the rangers rise to avoid what was awaiting them in the afterlife.
All of that was Metzen (he said so). But his influence stopped right after the tree burned. So the disjointed plotlines of BFA are largely Alex.
Then Alex was head of story for Shadowlands. The main plot that was so awful? Where characters were slaughtered and made to look unthinkably evil? The one people begged to be able to skip? That was 99.9% Alex. The covenant plot lines? That was everyone else. That’s why those plot lines are so different in tone. He was fired before he did any work on dragonflight.
We know Mezten returned early in Dragonflight, not to control the main patch, but the later patches have his level of drama and interwoven plot, and we know he consulted for those.
So Alex had influence over two of the most disliked campaign plotlines in the games. Regardless of how bad a person he was, he was always creating storylines that people found deeply awful. If he’d been kept on, i dont think the game would have survived.
That’s revisionist
What he did, was offhandedly comment about the wrath gate in an interview, in a way that contradicted the 3rd person omniscient narrator in the post Cataclysm Undead starting zone intro cinematic. He demonstrated that he didn’t really know what they decided to go with as an explanation for that event.
I don’t know how to respond to this, because I feel like you’re not offering any explanation or evidence to the contrary. It’s an “argumentum ad nauseum” just saying over and over that it’s not a premature cash grab doesn’t make it so and it being released close to legion doesn’t mean it wasn’t done for profit.
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It should be noted that Chronicle is limited to stories that have already been told. The story in the chapters leading up to Cataclysm was written, the ink was dry, the book was closed. The past. There was nothing left to tell. It was all forward from there.
Metzen advertised it on Amazon with: “World of Warcraft: Chronicle is a series that attempts to codify, streamline, and clarify the history of Warcraft.”
That’s why Danuser cheated us out of our money when he declared that Chronicle is a story told by an unreliable narrator. We could’ve done without all the retcons and recontextualisations that then came with SL.
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Retcons and the ability to create them are valuable. It retroactively creates continuity.
They work best, when the story leaves some things un-clarified.
Naturally, it’s best to find things that are not necessarily explicit, and give a new perspective, but that only works if you don’t explicitly explain everything that may have been left unclear.
An example I like to use is the Marvel short “The Consultant” where they recontextualize the post credit scene where Tony Stark talks to General Ross about what we all probably correctly assumed was “The Hulk”. The short retcons that conversation to have been a clever ploy by SHIELD to use Tony Stark’s abrasive personality to squash plans to shoehorn Emil Blonsky into the Avenger initiative, without informing Stark about his actual purpose in that meeting.
It was a super clever bit of storytelling. It makes the post credit scene more interesting and fleshes out the narrative. It informs us about how SHIELD used Stark in a way that is consistent with what we knew about SHIELD and Stark.
If there was a book released that said “Tony Stark met with General Ross to recruit Bruce Banner for the Avenger Initiative” then that retcon would have been jarring and felt like crap so it’s better that such a book didn’t exist.
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