WoWCast Developer Chat: A New Era of Warcraft Storytelling

Blizzard has released a special edition of WoWCast, featuring Associate Game Director Morgan Day, Cinematic Narrative Director Terran Gregory, Associate Design Director Maria Hamilton, and Community Manager Bethany Stout, sharing their enthusiasm for the story and world-building soon to come with the launch of The War Within!

Investing in the World and Story

Terran Gregory

I feel that we've set the bar really high, and we want to meet those expectations, and even exceed them. Really trying to create something in the vein of the essence of Warcraft, or the best of Warcraft, bringing that to the forefront. The ways we're going to do that is really investing in our world and story.

We always say world and story are some of the most critical parts of the appeal of World of Warcraft, but what does that really mean? You know, our world is a character. It's fleshed out through all means of small stories, big stories, but we want people to be invested in our characters. We want them to go on the adventure with them, to learn more. I believe we have some really compelling stories with some of our most-known characters, some of our lesser-known characters, and some new characters that we're going to meet along the way.

Anthropophobic Nerubians

Maria Hamilton

We have a really funny local story, a really funny sort of take on what would happen if you encountered a Nerubian who had a fear like arachnophobia, but they're terrified of bipedal creatures, because they don't have enough limbs and it's just creepy and it freaks them out! And there's so many more examples, the team really had a great time building out these cultures and these stories.

There are stories that tell more about zones themselves, tell about the cultures in those zones, tell about the places, different individual, smaller characters. We've provided those in slightly greater number than we have in the past, and we're making sure that we're using some of our new features as well to help tell the Read more on wowhead.com