So⌠it seems like the Blizzard firings did extend to the Lore historians. Which led to one of the now former ones explaining what they were actually doing on Reddit.
Here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/1ae12t2/former_warcraft_historian_here_to_explain_what_it/
I found this thread here on the US forums, and this is basically me getting the same topic over here as well. So to startâŚ
The most important revelation wonât be a surprise, but⌠the historians had no power to correct lore mistakes, they just had to point them out. If a stubborn dev wanted to get his cool but lorebreaking quest in, they could. Or to quote the ex-historian:
at the end of the day even if theyâre writing lore that states Dwarves have always been born from eggs laid by troggs, I have no power to stop them from doing so. The best I personally could do if I felt particularly strong about it, is point it out to Danuser and say, âyo dawg, you aware of this?â
Apart from this they were pretty much responsible for creating any material on any lore topic so that the other devs had ressources at hand, and they consulted on the lore in meetings when requested. And they were apparently quite understaffed before the layoffs, so there is that as well.
Then there are some questions he answered, and which I ulled straight from the US threadâŚ
Q : So someone making a quest could effectively write fanfiction and just because its rule of cool it couldnât be overturned? Sounds a little disheartening for someone whoâs job it is to create and catalog a cohesive world.
A : I canât speak to the whole quest design process but I do believe that base level Quest Designers need to get their ideas approved at some level, but Iâm not sure who approves that and Lore is not a part of it.
From a strictly Lore team perspective though, sometimes yes, thatâs what it can look like from afar. If it has some sort of major lore issue, we can trigger another discussion on it, but Blizzard often prefers to treat lore as somewhat malleable rather than strictly concrete and would rather try to massage it than toss it or start over.
Q : Mentioning the Dragonflight Codex, Iâve got to ask. Alexstraszaâs page reiterated that the dragons lost their ability to reproduce after Dragon Soul. Was there any explanation on where all these Dragon Isleâs whelps came from?
A : So Iâm going to refrain from going into what the current canon is because I donât believe it had been properly decided (publicized) by the time I left and I donât know if anything has changed, especially since basically anything that wasnât said publicly can change any time.
What I will say is that I believe this to be a failure on my part. I believe I read the first draft very early after DF launch and my initial thought was âYeah, they canât lay eggs. Thatâs what Cata said.â Did some checking online and internally that said mostly the same and the community sentiment at the time was that âmaybe these DF eggs were left from the before times?â and I guess I just internalized that and rolled with it. Didnât realize the issue until much later, by which point Iâd forgotten I okayed it in the draft.
Q : Are the specific race data still canon from the RPG-books, like the ages and heights?
A : This is a good question. Generally we treat them as a separate canon from the games., similar to how we treat the film. However we have on occasion pulled from the RPGs when we felt they had something interesting we wanted to utilize. For RP purposes I would say âdubiously canon unless contradicted or reinforced by game loreâ.
Q : How did the writers justified the existence of the Void Elves, lore-wise?
A : Couldnât say sadly. Iâd guess âRule of Coolâ was part of it.
Q : Late to the party but I always wanted to know this: Is there a reason there is absolutely no defined population scales etc. In WoW? These seem to be purposefully never included in anything and Iâve always wondered why.
A : I donât have a definitive answer but my understanding is that keeping these things vague allows more freedom for Narrative and more freedom for whoever takes over the story next.
Q : Is there an opinion on the change to telling âbiased perspectiveâ books thatâs gone on in recent stories over objective lore sources? Either on the historian team specifically or the overall team. Iâve always wondered how much of that is a top level narrative decision that the team has to go with, or if itâs an overall shift that everyone appreciates.
A : Iâve kind of mentioned it elsewhere, but it allows authors more freedom to write the stories they want to write and not feel like they canât pursue a cool idea because of what someone wrote years prior.
So yeah, as you can see there is still a big focus on âallowing writers more freedomâ, so hard numbers and a firm stance on pretty much any part of world-building seem to be a no-no. Nothing new, Copeland said that years ago, but well, if anyone had expected this to have changed for the better⌠doesnât sound like it did.
Sounds to me like firing historians likely wonât have much of an impact on general consistency, but might lead to even more lore ignorance in the ranks of the devs.
Edit:
Oh, there was another fun one:
Why were the Class Halls abandoned story-wise?
Iâm not certain as I was in QA at the time. But my personal opinion is that rather than a narrative justification, it had to do with the extra work creating quests and story for each class required, as opposed to universal or faction based storylines.
And this one as well:
So if Iâm understanding this correctly, the Lore/Historian team is a separate team from the writing team?
Yes, the Lore team is separate from the various game Narrative teams. Weâre in Story and Franchise Development, which also contains the prerendered cinematics as well as the Books team and more. Most Historians handle more than 1 IP, but I was unique in that I was wholly dedicated to Warcraft. I could pretty easily communicate with WoW Dev and could freely walk into their space, but our everyday workspace didnât overlap.
