“Our story rooms are dojos. They’re sacred places.”
While Blizzard has had some controversial news as of late, it says it doesn’t allow any negative feedback to influence any facet of the stories it tells through its games.
As reported by VG247, Blizzard’s Director of story and franchise development George Krstic spoke at Reboot Develop and discussed how Blizzard’s “story rooms are dojos. They’re sacred places.”
“Specifically with World of Warcraft, our creative director Alex [Afrasiabi] said a wonderful thing,” Krstic said. “He said our story rooms are dojos. They’re sacred places. And we try to tell a story as best we can and to make our players as happy as we can. But we try not to let the negativity enter the dojo,”
“You’ve got to clear your mind, focus your mind and do good work. Do we listen to our players and our fans? Absolutely. But also we try not to let that distract us from our end goal of the expansion or the new patch. We have a plan. We are listening. But also those voices can get pretty loud out there.”
As for the negativity, Blizzard faced a huge backlash when it announced Diablo: Immortal at BlizzCon 2018, especially when many were hoping and wishing for a Diablo 4 caliber type of reveal.
Blizzard also faces some backlash from trolls who have a problem when it fills its games with diverse characters, stories, and points and view, including those in the LGBTQ community like Soldier 76 and Tracer.
“Internally as storytellers we’re crafting narrative now for a global audience and our team needs to reflect that,” Krstic expained. “Our team comes from various backgrounds, various point of views and I really love that in our rooms it’s not all one voice and we’re not all one people,” he said.
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Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN who loves this stance by Blizzard. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst.
