BlizzCast Episode 2
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Karune: Well, I mean, going even further into Wrath of the Lich King, what types of stories the storyline that was already told in Warcraft III will be told in Wrath of the Lich King and also what types of loose ends that haven't been told or are going to be introduced in Wrath?
Chris Metzen: Right. A couple that spring to mind there's all sorts of stuff going on in Wrath of the Lich King it's big, conceptually, it's like if you look at Burning Crusade at a conceptual level: we're going into outer space. There's clearly a war between good and evil playing out in the greater universe. There's some sort of predestination of the orcs coming to Azeroth. Now we get to see their origins.
The Burning Legion, the Burning Crusade: it was huge on a conceptual level, right? Some would argue maybe too huge, right. Whatever happened to Gnolls and Kobolds. Suddenly, you're in outer space fighting angels. With Wrath of the Lich King, you almost get both. We come back to terrestrial Azeroth, so it's a little more back into the realm of gnolls and kobolds well, I'm not promising you'll see either of those in Northrend it's a little more palatable to classic fantasy. But at the same time, we're also pushing forward hugely on the setting. We're going to get into themes like the Titans and the creation of the world, the function of Azeroth at the dawn of creation. Why this planet? Why does this planet continue to be central to events? The whole dwarven storyline of them trying to plumb the depths of their origins and how that ties into the creation of the world. We're getting into a lot of cool new territory with the war of magic and the creation of the dragon flights what's their function in the world? How are they currently doing? At this phase of history, there's all sorts of big, broad themes playing out not the least of which are looking again at the Alliance and the Horde from an overall angle and just gauging (How're they doing, these days?) After the events of that first year of play culminating with I don't even know what it was Ahn'Qiraj, Blackwing Lair, Naxxramas, all the big event patches we put out which I kind of look at as Year One, and certainly with the Burning Crusade: both alliances sending expeditions into this burning, alien world and being flung into those events.
What are the stresses that have resulted over time because of those things? What are the discoveries? The discovery of the Mag'har in Outland: what does that do to the Horde? That Thrall's finally found his where's his head at? The Northrend events, Wrath of the Lich King kind of looks at each of these alliances and how these events have played out and shows you the new stress fractures, perhaps appearing in the upper echelons of leadership. There's new characters kind of coming to the forefront that may or may not challenge the status quo for both factions. There's all sorts of sweet everybody knows about death knights, but you know, we just had a meeting the other day about how they play out, about how the storylines of potentially Mograine and the Ashbringer and all those events in the Plaguelands: what was the point of all of that and how does it really play out? There's all sorts of little nooks and crannies like that, that Northrend really brings full circle, that the Wrath of the Lich King expansion really brings full circle. So, it's been really fun for me to be able to help steer the setting.
If we were making a comic book series every month, obviously, you've got to roll it out but while our expansion sets, they certainly don't roll out month by month, they are episodic, ultimately, so it's been really cool to push the setting forward and begin to bring some of these characters and points of history back to the forefront so that fans of the story of WoW can really feel immersed and that everything is cohesive and compelling, we hope.
