Presenter: World of Warcraft: The Adventure Continues panel. Your panelists are Alex Afrasiabi (Creative Director), Tom Chilton, Brian Holinka, Dave Kosak, and Chris Metzen (Senior VP Story & Franchise Development).
Kosak: Hello, hello, hello BlizzCon. Guys I am… I am so excited! I’m so excited to be here just to meet the fans and the costumes – guys you outdo yourselves every year. I got to tell you, you guys make this the most fun gaming convention I’ve ever been at, hands down! Thank you so much.
Alright so we’re going to talk about Warlords of Draenor. So if you were on an earlier panel, I think we blew through two hundred PowerPoint slides in like 60 minutes or something. It was a little much, we kind of ran out of time. For this panel we wanted to want to slow down a little bit, take it easy.
We are going to talk about just a few topics. What we’re going to do is we are going to talk about the heart of this expansion, our values sort of the soul and why, most importantly why Draenor is absolutely the next place to take the Warcraft franchise.
Alright, so let’s get my PowerPoint up here, because I’m a big fan of PowerPoint.
(Audience laughs)
Okay so recap, how did we get here? How did this all began? We asked ourselves what if, what if you take, you take this guy, Garrosh Hellscream. Now we know about Garrosh, we know about his values, we know what’s important to him; we know yeah, yeah we know the kind of horde that he wanted.
What if someone gave him a golden ticket maybe certain bronze dragon that you might have met on the Timeless Isle to go back and make the Horde that he wanted. What if he stops the orcs from drinking the blood of Mannoroth, stops them from becoming the fel green-skinned, possessed, barbaric Horde that we know from the past.
Makes that one little change, what do we get? We’re still getting a Horde alright. We’re getting a little something like this we called the Iron Horde. There they are.
We’re going to talk a little more about these bad asses a little bit later but I need to give you a quick nickel tour there. There’s Kargath Bloodfist there on the left, Blackhand is looming above him. If you play the RTS games these names are familiar. Now before maybe they were inch high unit on an RTS screen; but now we’re going to get to meet them. We’re going to get to smell their breath. We’re going to get to really interact with these guys.
Now a couple things to note. So Garrosh, he’s not the main villain of this expansion, I want to make that clear. He is going to set things in motion and then they are going to spiral out of control, which is kind of awesome. The other thing to note is that they are coming for us. He’s not manipulating some other time. He’s trying to open a portal to our present to take vengeance on the Alliance and Horde that deposed him. He is angry; he has got an axe to grind. These guys are coming for us.
So we like this idea because it gives us, it does a couple of great things for the game for us, right? First of all this threat, this kind of threat these bad asses coming through a portal to eat our faces and eat the faces of our unborn children, this is exactly the kind of threat that WarCraft is all about. This gets our franchise back home. This gets us really, this is what Warcraft is all about, is about War and craft. We like that. The other thing we really like about this is that he gets us here, it gets us to Draenor and we are going to spend some time talking about Draenor and why this is such an amazing world but first… What did I miss. What else we want to talk about to these guys before I move on? Boom, I am going to keep going.
Draenor. What do we love about Draenor? So this is the place I steeped in WarCraft lore. It’s the home world of the orcs; and if you play Draenai, you know that the Draenai kind of adopted this as a homeworld. They lived here for a couple hundred years. This is an amazing place. It is a place of mythic scale, mythic scope. It is a savage world, it’s a primal world, it’s untamed.
As Chris said at the other panel, it’s not like the Seven Kingdoms where there are all these kingdoms after kingdoms that have built over time. This is a prime world, this is a savage world. These are clans fighting for dominance. We call it a world of giants.
This world real eats your face and this is one of the main themes that comes across. And I am going to apologize because we are going to use the word savage a lot. We always are talking about a savage world. This is a savage place and that gives us a great theme to really dig into. It gives us a great place to have these really heroic adventures. This is a savage world.
How do you cope with a world like this? How do you cope with a world where to escape slavery these guys would cut off their own hand and attach a weapon to it? Like these guys are hardcore. How do you cope with that? Do you become a savage yourself? Or do you kind of bond together with your family, your clan or your faction as kind of a bulwark against this savage world? What’s this world going to do to us? That’s one of the questions that we get to ask and that we get to explore with all the adventures that you’re going to have here.
What about the Draenei. The Draenei land on Draenor and you know it’s fair to say they are kinda living in a bubble. They were living separate from these savage world. This savagery is going to bust open their walls. It is going to come pouring into their Cities. How they are going to react? What are they going to do? Are they going to become savages themselves? Are they going to come together? We get to explore Draenei in sort of their crucial turning moment and we haven’t really been able to explore that yet. So that’s pretty exciting.
This is the Frostwolf clan. Frostwolf is Thrall’s home clan. Horde is going to get to spend some time with the Frostwolf clan. You know when we find them; they’re not really running on all cylinders. They are not really working together. They really need to kind of get some of their stuff sorted out so that they can come together and fight off the savagery themselves.
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