The
floodgates on Mists of Pandaria have opened. Abilities, spoilers, and
questlines are pouring out from the beta testing of WoW’s next expansion
pack, and it’s easy to get lost in the details. We sat down with Vice
President of Creative Development and master of all things story at
Blizzard, Chris Metzen, to get back into the big picture by talking
about the big themes in the expansion’s story and what these crazy
little pandas have to teach us.
PC Gamer: So you dropped the big bomb last week, the siege of Orgrimmar and de-throning of Garrosh Hellscream. That’s huge, but it sounds like the launch content for Mists of Pandaria is going to be pretty peaceful, maybe even serene.
Chris Metzen, Vice President of Creative Development:
I wouldn’t call it serene at all. I’d just say it’s not as doom-laden
as recent chapters have been. There’s definitely high-octane content:
war is evident constantly, it’s just a different kind of war. I think it
was [Game Designer David] Kosak who kinda illustrated that it begins as
a proxy war.
The big hook to Pandaria is that as we roll up on the beach, all the
hate and violence we bring as Alliance and Horde really kind of begins
to make the Sha bubble up. And the Sha is something that’s been
contained for ten thousand years. It has been a very serene place, and
of course our shenanigans break it, heavily.
So there’s definitely some drama and high-octane hero time type
stuff, but there’s this underpinning of hope buried beneath it,
breathing up through it, which is definitely a different tone. Cataclysm
was relatively bleak. Lich King felt like it had a little more tragedy
inherent in it—we knew Arthas, we knew about his fall from grace. We
were wondering if he could be redeemed, if we could save him at the end.
So Pandaria has a different tone playing against the heaviness. This
one, by way of contrast, has a lighter tone, but it’s still pretty
high-octane.
PCG: It almost seems like we, as the players, are the villain
in this expansion. We’re going to this peaceful island as a corrupting
force. We’re causing the problem.
CM: I love that spin, I love that. After all these
years, you think about building expansion sets and moving this thing
forward… What’s really cool about WoW, I don’t know much about other
studios, but to some great degree, most of the guys on this team are
pretty old-school. Some of the designers left to go to the new [MMO]
we’re working on, but it’s still a very vital team.
All these years on, you push yourself to figure out, “What’s the next
step? How does this franchise play out over time? How do we keep it
vital?” The weird psychology of players bringing the problem with them
to a relatively untouched land was an interesting spin. You always hope
these things, as experimental as they are, play well. I don’t mean
necessarily in terms of design, but that people get it, and run with it,
and it feels engaging after all these years. It’s a real danger, right?
Running this long, you constantly have to look at how it feels. Is it
fresh, is it cool, does it feel like it’s moving forward in a satisfying
way?
Giant, dirty bunnies holding explosive kegs of beer: progress!
PCG: When you’re looking at how to do that, is it just a
matter of looking at where Warcraft has been, and then thinking of where
to go? Or are you looking at what other media and other games are
doing, what’s going on out in the world?
CM: I think it’s a little bit of everything. I’d
love to tell you we just have these hooks in advance. There’s plenty of
hooks in advance, don’t get me wrong—we’ve got ideas. But so often… I
had a big grinding hook for an expansion set, before the greenlight on
Pandaria got going, because Pandaria’s something we’ve talked about
forever. Before that greenlight went, we were thinking we would need to
go another way on this big grinding idea, all sorts of weird hooks, what
happens after Cataclysm. In a way, the greenlight for Pandaria trashed
all those plans, but there’s still some bits of those plans that are
useful moving forward. Many of those plans found a better voice through
the lens of Pandaria. I know that’s all very vague, but you never know.
The right idea could take many forms. With this thing being real time
and moving all at once with the community, creative decisions are
informed by any number of things. People wanted to see certain
characters come back, or see certain characters get their due. The
Alliance feeling like we’ve sold them out the last couple years, like,
“Alright, guys, we hear you. We can see how you’d make the argument. I
don’t think it’s true, but I can see the argument…” So let’s hedge the
bet, let’s give those guys some stuff to do.
PCG: Having Orgrimmar be the next big part, that’s gotta just fuel the fire, right?
CM: I have to think that the Alliance is going to
feel good about that. And there’s interesting ways to do that. There’s
very different reasons, by the end of this storyline, for both Horde and
Alliance to want this done. Garrosh will be an increasing bastard. And
there’s an interesting story there too.
I’m totally fascinated by how people will respond to this, because
what we’ve been hearing lately is… When we created Garrosh, and we put
him in the foreground with the novel The Shattering, we installed him as
the current Warchief, people were incensed. Horde players were just
pulling their hair out. “We can’t believe you would do this, are you
guys even paying attention at all?” And the messaging was, “Look, it’s a
long-term storyline, this is all going to play out in what we hope is a
very satisfying way. Please understand that it’s not arbitrary. We have
a plan here.” So it’s funny now: just since yesterday, talking to some
people in the hall from the previous press thing, people are saying,
“You can’t take Garrosh out! What the hell? Horde’s cool again!” It’s
amazing how everything flips.
So it’s fun that way. We find things in the characters, as
storytellers or whatever, where this is the logical path for the
character and we’re going to do this or that. But people respond to
things in such varying ways that it forces you to see things in
characters that you didn’t necessarily see before. You see that there’s
equity in directions for characters that you didn’t necessarily think
would be there. Garrosh is one of those characters where I can’t believe
that people love him all of a sudden. But it’s fun, right?
We’re all going to make it together through this storyline. And it
may not be the end of his story. But it’s gonna be a glorious moment.
Again, all I’m saying is, the Alliance and Horde definitely have
different motivations for this endgame scenario. There’s so much fiction
that spins out of that. It’s been really fun to conceptualize. I think
Pandaria… How strange is it, that it’ll wind up being one of the most
satisfying story chapters in Warcraft, in many, many years? Hopefully at
least as good as Lich King, which was in many ways a sequel to The
Frozen Throne.
But I think in some ways even more, because it’s not necessarily
standing on games previous—it’s not necessarily standing on legends from
the past. It’s just really dynamic in and of itself, and that’s very
exciting, especially after all these years, to still find these pools of
energy. Still finding these areas for dynamism within the fiction. I
think this thing could run indefinitely, as a game and as a fictional
undertaking. I don’t think anyone’s ever going to run out of ideas. But I
think that’s something that WoW has kind of uniquely these days. Not
necessarily in games in general, but in the MMORPG space. So many
players have come up with these NPCs and these characters like Thrall or
Arthas or whatever. We can move these characters around the board and
create a lot of emotionality and create a lot of engagement with people
who know these characters. Even if you’re not a hardcore story person,
or into the lore or whatever, you live in this virtual space, you know
who these people are, you’ve done quests for them and such. That’s an
amazing place to be, to be able to pull these levers and dials after all
these years and have it count.
Good ol' Arthas will live on in Blizzard DOTA, though.
PCG: At this point, you’re almost drawing from the community
knowledge that’s been built over the game. You don’t have to build the
lore and say, “Here’s a new character, here’s who he is, here’s why you
should care.” There are characters people have been playing with that
they’re already invested in.
CM: Both are happening at once. Now we’re talking
about Garrosh, right? Deposing him as this horrible tyrant. But like I
was saying, a couple of years ago, there was an audience that had no
idea who he was, and there was an audience that had a clue and didn’t
like him at all. So, we recognized that we needed to begin to go out of
our way to really create a lot of characters to get some investment in
down the road. I remember early on, we made Illidan the boss of the
Black Temple. We brought down Arthas at the end of Frozen Throne. We
killed Deathwing. We got a lot of guff on the net relative to, “You’re
burning all your characters! Who’s left to fight? Warcraft is done! We
don’t care, there’s no equity left, there’s no interesting characters
left.” You know what? That’s just utter bullshit. But to hedge the bet,
here’s some more. Here’s Garrosh, right?
So it’s fun, now, to see characters like him getting a lot of equity,
a lot of airtime. Tired old characters like Thrall or whatever still
have plenty of mileage in them. Even Varian, the human king—again, a
character that we introduced that has existed in continuity before, but
we conspicuously left him out of the shipping game. We did our comic
series and really attempted to build his character into something that
would have many miles in him. With Pandaria, we have this mega questline
that involves him, and him really becoming this great king, where all
the Alliance races say unreservedly, “I will follow this guy into the
gates of hell.” And they will. Or Orgrimmar.
It’s really fun to be able to see these themes taking shape after all
these years. They’re not necessarily standing on top of Warcraft games
past. Although I think there’s still a lot of rich potential in Warcraft
games past, I do love things coming full circle.
PCG: Are there new characters coming out of the Pandaren side
too? Are the Pandaren leaving the island to become some of those new
main characters too?
CM: Totally. There’s a number of characters. We
focused a lot of pepper on the Chen Stormstout character, who had
existed in previous Warcraft lore. But there wasn’t a whole lot to him,
to be honest with you, in the Frozen Throne campaign. It was really more
of a fun one-dimensional character. So there are a number of new ones
[like Aysa Cloudsinger and Ji Firepaw]. There’s a number of cool
Pandaren characters that step up. I think Chen, most notably, has a
strong arc throughout the course of the expansion.
Pandaria, as much as the Pandarens are evidenced all the way through,
it’s so much richer than just them. Looking back at something like
Outland, the Mag’har orcs, you had the Draenai obviously… In a lot of
ways—I don’t know if this is a true statement—but Pandaria isn’t all
that much about the Pandaren. They’re a really cool new element, but
they’re just an element. There’s so much more going on in that land and
with this mythology coming full circle. It’s something I guess I rail
against: people having the impression that it’s just about Pandaren, and
we’re just going to be holding hands and skipping with them through
five long levels. It’s not true. They definitely pepper throughout and
have a cool storyline, but there’s so much more going on there than just
them and their concerns.
This guy, however, definitely wants to hold your hand and skip with you.
PCG: They’re just one small group, but the expansions’s more about the larger themes, this evil and balance?
CM: It’s interesting… Take that psychological spin
earlier of, we’re the ones that bring the problem. The expansion set is
almost as much about us; what we brought and our character arc… How far
[the Alliance and Horde] go here, what they learn here, how close to the
brink we all get—that’s really the soul of the expansion set. The
pandaren just help facilitate that contrast and that soul-searching.
Like, “Why doesn’t everybody just relax? You’re riling everything up.”
In and of themselves, the Pandaren don’t really have an arc, as a
culture. They’re the steady-eddy middle ground kind of people.
PCG: Their role is to show us how extreme we are.
CM: Exactly. Because Pandaren don’t get super hot,
they don’t get super cold. They’re not emo, they’re super sane. They
don’t get violent. They’ll fight and they’ll fight well, they’ll fight
to win. But it takes a lot to make them angry. I don’t imagine they
fight in a state of anger; they fight in a state of need, thoughtfully,
and with gusto. But rarely out of anger. It’s been an interesting
culture to write.
Remember the Wrath Gate cinematic, from Lich King? We have a few of
those embedded throughout the expansion set, where big quest lines are
going down. We had a number of scenes with Pandaren characters that are
yelling at each other, but they’re yelling at each other just like
humans would. And I thought, “Guys, we gotta take a step back and really
think about these people and how they would handle a situation.” It was
fascinating to get into, because I don’t know that we… In building a
world like WoW, it’s not like a linear storyline, where you can really
get into the head of your characters. So often in WoW, characters really
facilitate plot and questing and things like that, so it’s just
fascinating to look at how these people would handle high-stress
situations. The deeper we got into it, it took on a fascinating
personality that’s ultimately unlike any of the factional races we have,
which all range from serene to whacked out of their minds. It’s just an
interesting experience working with Pandaren.
PCG: Is the Pandaren’s thoughtful mentality going to change
the Horde and Alliance? Are the Horde and Alliance just going to go
there, corrupt it, and then go back to what they were doing before?
CM: I guess the way I would answer that is…
Ultimately, for my part, I always come back to this one theme in
Warcraft. I think the core of Warcraft’s animus is cyclic. Because you
can only push racial hatred through so many products without it feeling
like the same old thing, and thus end. But the pillars of the franchise
are orcs and humans; it really is the Alliance and Horde by extension,
and it really is those two groups beating the brains out of each other
for an extended period of time. That’s always gotta be what Warcraft is
about.
But when they do it for too long, you need to shake it up every once
in a while. Which was evident in Warcraft III, the Reign of Chaos
campaign, where they unite at least for a time against the Burning
Legion. It’s nice to change it up every once in a while, and have these
moments where they recognize that the Russians love their children too.
Y’know, ultimately we’re all in it together. Everything that affects one
affects the other, everyone has kids to raise and societies to build.
In a franchise that’s based on war it’s nice to bring it back into
reality sometimes. Not our reality, but the truth that constant war and
violence doesn’t beget a lot of societal growth. It doesn’t beget a lot
of personal growth. You need to check that every once in a while.
This Pandaren and his cute little cub might beg to differ with you, Mr. Metzen.
Pandaria, the root theme of this expansion set, whether it’s the
boxed product or even better through the patches, which I almost want to
brand as a separate game event—this theme is critical to what Pandaria
is. We’ve spent so long fighting alien demons and broken planets in
Burning Crusade, the lord of death in Lich King, and the world literally
falls out under our feet. The Alliance and Horde have just been banging
against events and reacting to all these mega-level chapters. With this
one, they find themselves like, “Oh, yeah, I hate you. We had to deal
with all that stuff, but I hate you!” And that coming around again felt
like the right beat for this time in the franchise’s history, or ongoing
storyline.
It’s essential to that recognition of this societal hate, or racial
hate. Those moments where you get right up to the brink of absolutely
losing it, devolving into a conflict that will never end, and seeing
that there’s something of yourself in your enemy. Pausing to think about
how you fight, why you fight. That sometimes war is not always just,
sometimes our conduct in war, even if it’s a just war, may be out of
control. Remembering that you lose as much of yourself in conquering
your enemy with no restraint, you risk losing what you fought to protect
in the first place.
PCG: What you just described doesn’t seem like a mental
process that Garrosh is capable of. And that’s why he’s gotta go. Is it
the Alliance and Horde teaming up together? You mentioned, they hate
each other, but are they teaming up to take down Garrosh? Or they both
attack individually?
CM: I wouldn’t say that, I certainly wouldn’t say
that today. The raid will likely be bifurcated: there’s an Alliance
version of it and a Horde version of it. Now, whether certain Alliance
and Horde people will kinda… From across the battlefield, they’ll be
like, “This is on, right?” They’re going to need each other’s help in
some ways. I don’t want to spoil any of the cool beats we have planned,
but ultimately, both sides will recognize that this is a necessary
action and a just action. There might be little help-outs here and
there.
And the siege of Orgrimmar is preceded by a chain of events that gets
worse and worse and worse, that affects both sides. There are probably
points of interaction throughout the patches. I wouldn’t classify it
remotely as something like Warcraft III, where they’re literally
shoulder to shoulder. Those are very special kinds of moments, and this
is not one of those moments. It’s definitely a moment after the smoke
clears, after this event concludes, after the whole fiction of Mists of
Pandaria is concluded, that both sides will go, “Whew, wow, we got close
to it that time, we lost a lot of lives, but we were on the verge of
this thing just kicking into fifth gear. That could end the world.” So
there’s definitely a lot of points of interaction, but the Orgrimmar
raid is red or blue, and they both have very good reasons for wanting to
see that done.
90's Pool
