Blizzard Entertainment Interview

In this article-style interview conducted shortly before BlizzCon and its flurry of announcements, Eurogamer had the chance to talk with the developer’s VP of creative development Chris Metzen, on subjects such as their MMO’s fiction and the upcoming Diablo III. Here’s a sampling:

“It is a little weird these days,” he admits. “It’s hard at this scale, with that many eyes on your product, that many different skews of humanity, kids from all over the world… A story beat that works well in North America may not translate all that well, and I don’t mean that facetiously, to China. And as a dumbass kid from California, I certainly am not cosmopolitan enough to know what all these paradigms are.”

Inevitably, Blizzard ends up surrendering a degree of control to players who think they own the game world (they certainly rent it), or facing a backlash when they don’t. “It’s hard to not let that sometimes steer you in a way: well, I guess my instinct as an artist is that we go left, but the community sure seems to want this idea to go right. And that’s a very strange space to be in,” Metzen says.

“Sometimes you go right for the community, and sometimes you draw a line in the sand and go, f**k it, we’re going left. You just have to hope that people stick with you, even through patches of content that they’re not entirely thrilled with.” And the feedback can be brutal. “The smaller per cent of truly vocal fans on the internet that just rip everything you do to pieces… Sometimes it hurts, and you’re left to conclude, like any artist in any medium, boy, I guess they really didn’t get it.”

At this point, one is left to wonder whether the community “will get” Mists of Pandaria or not.