World of Warcraft Lore Nerd Wins Blizzcon

Greg Tito

PR for Dungeons & Dragons
Sep 29, 2005
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World of Warcraft Lore Nerd Wins Blizzcon

During the question and answer portion of a panel at Blizzcon, a young kid lobbed a lore question that Blizzard's lore-guru Chris Metzen couldn't handle.

There is an abundance of fans of World of Warcraft who take the lore very seriously. Not only will these fans belabor the details of the world history that Vice President of Creative Development Chris Metzen created, they can also sometimes catch him on a few points. During the Quest and Lore panel this weekend at Blizzcon, one such fan threw a question at Metzen for which he had no answer.


"Falstad Wildhammer will be on the Council of Three Hammers, but in the [Cataclysm] beta it's Kurdran Wildhammer and Falstad isn't in the game at all," the fan began. "What happened to him?"

Metzen then asked, "Isn't Falstad dead from Day of the Dragon?" referring to a novel set before WoW's timeline.

The kid replied confidently, "No, he survived, and in fact he was the leader of Aerie Peak in vanilla Wow through Wrath of the Lich King."

Metzen had no response to that other than to pass the buck to Alex Afrasiabi, the Lead World Designer for Blizz, "Yeah, Alex what's up with that?" The team promised that they would fix the lore error.

This young fan's voice is just precious, and he scores points by catching Metzen on some incorrect information.

I don't know your name, Red Shirt Kid, but you just won Blizzcon. Congratulations!



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Vaccine

New member
Feb 13, 2010
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With a game as huge as WoW, this can happen time to time.

But props, haha.
 

XT inc

Senior Member
Jul 29, 2009
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The developers so wanted to go, " look kid who the fuck cares, there's only so many ways we can devise to explain why you have to kill or collect stuff, he didn't get on the council because his sole job in life now is to give out a quest to collect 3 and a quarter inch blades of grass out of a volcano, good enough for ya?"
 

thenumberthirteen

Unlucky for some
Dec 19, 2007
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I'm surprised the Devs didn't just say "He was killed by Gnomes" or something to cover their asses. Like how Games Workshop just washed over the removal of an entire race from 40K, and eventually just said "The Tyranids ate them all".

I miss Squats
 

Phantomess

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Sep 19, 2009
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binvjoh said:
All hail the red-shirt-guy!
Tee hee, he's a redshirt... those game devs are gonna find him...

But good on him for calling them out. It's a good thing.
 

ionveau

New member
Nov 22, 2009
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XT inc said:
The developers so wanted to go, " look kid who the fuck cares, there's only so many ways we can devise to explain why you have to kill or collect stuff, he didn't get on the council because his sole job in life now is to give out a quest to collect 3 and a quarter inch blades of grass out of a volcano, good enough for ya?"
respect

Also what are they going to do now? change the name of the NPC?

oh ya i have more useful lore for this guy http://www.history.com/ people say you can actually apply it to life
 

Eri

The Light of Dawn
Feb 21, 2009
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I really wish people who exemplify the stereotype of basement nerd would not go to cons. Not even this guy specifically, I watched blizzcon and I was embarrassed by a few who showed up.
 

cobra_ky

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Nov 20, 2008
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This is just the latest entry in a long list of things Metzen has forgotten about Warcraft lore, The biggest was <a href=http://www.wowwiki.com/Metzen_on_lore>the Eredar origin story he himself wrote. He also forgot about Gilneas for a long time (which they're finally fixing in Cataclysm.)
 

Arec Balrin

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Feb 26, 2010
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Some people will ridicule him, but just think of this...

Somewhere out in the multi-verse is a bunch of nerds taking account of the human story, us in our universe. The things we do, the things we value; they know of this and catalogue it in comics, films and books. Some of them even have conventions where dorky alien kids point out continuity errors in our universe.

9/11 troofer-ism: all the result of a few continuity errors since corrected. The fake moon landings, simply the result of an ill-advised retrospective nerf to space-travel. I mean if it wasn't for some geek pointing out that nothing mystical or magical ever actually happens for real in our universe(in their universe all religions are true and so is magic: atheists and natural philosophers are crazy fundamentalists and cranks), then the world will actually end in 2012.

Lucky for us, there is a geek somewhere making sure our universe is consistent. We owe it to other universes like the Warcraft one to do the same.