At the end of BlizzCon a few weekends ago, while eating Night Elf pizza with my guildmates, it came up in conversation that we had not seen kodo hide nor hair of one Chris Metzen at the show. Where was he?, we wondered. I had heard many other people ponder the same thing as I walked the halls over the weekend. It felt odd to not have him…anywhere.
Metzen, if you do not know, is a star in the world of Blizzard, particularly for Warcraft and Diablo. He’s an artist, writer, and voice actor who, among many other things, is known for portraying the popular orc character Thrall in the Warcraft franchise, and for providing significant creative and artistic direction on many of Warcraft 3 and WoW‘s most beloved moments, stories, and locations.
He’s also been, for many years, one of the beloved faces of BlizzCon. Here he is announcing the Mists of Pandaria expansion onstage in 2011 to wild enthusiasm from the audience:
Metzen retired back in 2016, but reappeared in 2022 as a creative advisor , transitioning to a larger role in 2023 as Warcraft executive creative director . And Metzen returned to the BlizzCon stage that same year to announce the “Worldsoul Saga,” a multi-expansion story arc that was set up as an epic conclusion to numerous ongoing narrative threads. All of these moves were met with great enthusiasm from the WoW audience; whatever your grievances were with the game, there was a period when it felt like with Metzen back at the helm, they would all be fixed in the coming expansions.
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