Warcraft general manager John Hight has revealed that Chris Metzen has returned to Blizzard, as creative advisor for the Warcraft franchise.
Hight shared this message on Twitter:
“Citizens of Azeroth,
It is with great joy that I announce Chris Metzer has joined the WarCraft Leadership Team as Creative Advisor. Chris’ focus initially will be on World of WarCraft, then his work will expand to other projects across this growing franchise.
Chris was one of the original team members working on the WarCraft universe back when it began in 1994, and we are so happy to be reuniting him with the world he helped create.
John Hight
General Manager, WarCraft”
At the time of Chris’ retirement last 2016, he was Blizzard’s Senior VP of Story and Franchise Development. He had simply cited a desire to focus on his family as the reason for his decision.
Chris Metzen’s name may not be as resonant as Shigeru Miyamoto’s, Todd Howard’s, or Dan Houser’s, but like them, he is one of the most influential creative and management figures in video games.
Metzen started his career in Blizzard Entertainment as an artist on WarCraft: Orcs & Humans. His sketches litter the manual for WarCraft 2: Tides of Darkness, but at that point, he was already dabbling with other creative roles, including story design and even voice acting. He was creative director at WarCraft 3: Reign of Chaos.
Metzen’s visual and storytelling styles helped define the signature aesthetic for Blizzard’s lynchpin legacy franchises, namely, WarCraft, StarCraft, and Diablo, including World of WarCraft. But he also helped steer the company’s new direction as creative director for Overwatch. To put it quite plainly, if you’ve played any of Blizzard’s major games in the last 25 to 30 years, you’ve played through one of Metzen’s stories.
One of Metzen’s last projects was the rare dud, the financially successfully but critically panned WarCraft movie. That project was plagued with many issues in production, and it may have been that, that prompted Metzen to go into early retirement.
If that were the case, now is as good a time for Metzen’s creative juices to flow again. The WarCraft movie is mostly forgotten, and may very well become a twinkle in gamers’ eyes, in light of the pending release of Nintendo’s and Illumination’s The Super Mario Bros Movie.
More importantly, there is renewed interest in World of WarCraft itself. The new expansion, World of WarCraft Dragonflight, introduces dragon steeds to the universe, and brings orcs and humans together in an unlikely alliance against a new, or I should say, old, threat to their existence.
For fans of Blizzard through the years, it promises the return of what made Blizzard games fun.
Source: Twitter via Video Games Chronicle
