wow How Blizzard Maintains Warcraft Lore: Gameinformer Interview with Ion Hazzikostas

[Stan 5,020]

Gameinformer recently interviewed Game Director Ion Hazzikostas about how Blizzard maintains Warcraft lore. Did you know they had a team of WoW historians? Check out the highlights!

Check out Gamenformer for the full interview!

Interview Highlights

• Blizzard has a team of three lore scholars, Sean Copeland is the historian supervisor of the team.
• Their role is to field lore and research requests made by their internal dev teams, review publications, participate in creative sessions, and host lore seminars.
• WoW historians maintain language and pronunciation databases for specific phrases and terms.
• WoW covers plenty of languages: Eredun, Zandali, or Shath'yar (language of the Old Gods).
• One of the writers once requested pronunciation for the phrase: "Ak’agthshi ma uhnish, ak’uq shg’cul vwahuhn", which means "Our numbers are endless, our power beyond reckoning!"
• Alleria made a return in Patch 7.3 and it was up to the historians to track down every place where she was mentioned to ensure they don't do anything inconsistent.
• In Cataclysm, the final boss was Sinestra. They wanted a red dragon to come and join the players in the fight, ending with a sacrifice that would help players defeat the boss.
• It would have made sense to include Krasus in the encounter, but they realized he died in a book.
• Khadgar in the Warcraft Movie was much younger in the film than they had imagined him being at that point in time. In the Burning Crusade, he was depicted much older and had a long beard, so they decided to give him a new model.
• The goal with WoW Chronicles was to craft a cohesive and complelling guidebook that covers the entire history of the Warcraft universe.
• Copeland's team believes that continuity exists to enhance the story, not to tie the hands of creators.

[Frostbeard 9]

If they now could spend some resources making sure that said lore is not stale and predictable. While I will give the current story line some time, and the writers the benefit of the doubt, I think most charactes are simple and 2 dimentional. Alliance must do good. Horde must be self serving.

[jinsu2301 273]

14 hours ago, Stan said:

Khadgar in the Warcraft Movie was much younger in the film than they had imagined him being at that point in time.

They hadn't imagined him being that young?! Did they not read The Last Guardian??

I mean, it's not like Khadgar is an important character or anything, why bother learning his story...

/s

[Prophet001 543]

5 hours ago, Frostbeard said:

If they now could spend some resources making sure that said lore is not stale and predictable. While I will give the current story line some time, and the writers the benefit of the doubt, I think most charactes are simple and 2 dimentional. Alliance must do good. Horde must be self serving.

smh

 

Just go away if you're not happy.

The complaining is droll but the complaining combined with the abiding is near unsufferable.

Nobody is forcing you people to stay here.

[ChaosDecides 30]

12 minutes ago, Prophet001 said:

smh

 

Just go away if you're not happy.

The complaining is droll but the complaining combined with the abiding is near unsufferable.

Nobody is forcing you people to stay here.

So you can enjoy an echo chamber?

[Prophet001 543]

27 minutes ago, ChaosDecides said:

So you can enjoy an echo chamber?

Ya'll schizo's gone far far far past "feedback".

[Alkasar 55]

In my opinion....

Including alternate timelines, time travel and reviving every iconic character twice is not a good way of maintaining the story.

It is an awesome game though.

[Frostbeard 9]

19 hours ago, Prophet001 said:

smh

 

Just go away if you're not happy.

The complaining is droll but the complaining combined with the abiding is near unsufferable.

Nobody is forcing you people to stay here.

Did you have an actual argument to bring to the debate? Or is strawmen and namecalling in a southern twang all you can muster? 

I never stated that the game was bad. I stated that the story is simple. To be fair it has always been simple, and the novels have been average fantasy. Blizzard does after all need to consider the vast difference in is audience.  Considering the resources they put into making a consistent game story wise, its suprising that the quality of the writing is so average.

[Prophet001 543]

4 hours ago, Frostbeard said:

Did you have an actual argument to bring to the debate? Or is strawmen and namecalling in a southern twang all you can muster? 

I never stated that the game was bad. I stated that the story is simple. To be fair it has always been simple, and the novels have been average fantasy. Blizzard does after all need to consider the vast difference in is audience.  Considering the resources they put into making a consistent game story wise, its suprising that the quality of the writing is so average.

This story isn't even close to simple.

Did you read the article at all? What other fantasy genre has such a team maintaining just its story? If there are any, there are none that I know about.

I'm just tired of whingers. It's like being married to some morbidly obese spouse that hates themselves but thinks the real source of the problem are all these other outside factors. There's nothing wrong with the story.

...and attacking the debater instead of the debate is ad hominem not straw man.

[Guest]

12 minutes ago, Prophet001 said:

Did you read the article at all? What other fantasy genre has such a team maintaining just its story? If there are any, there are none that I know about.

 

Having such a team means absolutly nothing itself.

LucasFilm always said there was a department for making sure that there was continuity in Star Wars.

There were stories that were claimed to be canon and such things.

Well, that was just bullshit-talk.

Maybe they had such a department. Maybe they hadn't.

Doesn't matter, because there was absolutly nothing like a continitiy in Star Wars lore.

 

I have no idea if that is the case in WoW. But just the fact that there are people who claim they look after the story doesn't mean a thing.

If the story is comparable to Starcraft 2 or Diablo 3 the story and the characters are horrible.
But maybe the story and characters in WoW are a lot better then in SC2 or D3.

[PatrickHenry 293]

On 8/17/2018 at 7:25 AM, WedgeAntilles said:

But maybe the story and characters in WoW are a lot better then in SC2 or D3.

...the story in warcraft existed YEARS prior to either game's initial launch, 2 and 4 years about, respectively.  
"better" being subjective, and in my opinion it is, its just better and significantly more vast, overall.