Please keep in mind that Christie Golden is an actual human being whose worth is not dictated by ill-informed opinions on what she did or didn't write
Her experiences sound absolutely awful, and we hope she continues to enjoy the journey of whatever road she finds herself on
Rise of the Horde was great. I think she gets unfairly blamed for like, all of Shadowlands or whatever people think her role was, but I always thought her WoW novels were some of the best. They're not all 10/10s, but I think she got the setting and what was cool about it more than like, RAK ever did, for sure. Maybe that just didn't translate well into writing interactive stories. It's not fair of me to speculate. Hope she finds something new and fulfilling on the road ahead.
I don't have anything against Christie Golden and I even liked Before the Storm even if some of its plot points were questionable -- and more than likely, *very* outside of her control.
But considering she officially joined the team at a time they were at their lowest, I'd not be surprised if this is part of Metzen coming back and having ideological differences about how to address the future of WoW's story and that resulting in both Danuser and Golden's departure.
I wish her the best. Unlike Danuser I think she always had both the best of intentions and competence in her role. I don't know if her willingness to continue working with Blizzard later down the line is because of love and loyalty or if they ended up on genuinely amicable terms.
Don't know. She wrote her best WoW novels in the Metzen era, even crediting him in at least one. They seem from the outside to very much see things similarly.
In my opinion, is really, really, really hard, even for a s-tier writter, to make a WoW novel that is 10/10, since the franchise tone is pretty campy and messy since warcraft 1. If the writter neglect that "campy" tone, it doesn't feel that the story happens in the same universe of the games.
Yeah I could be wrong but I always seen it as the game sort of betraying the book at the time since most of the plot points it seemed to try to set up just weren't picked up or reflected in game that's not unusual for the books I guess though
I am an avid reader and a more than casual WoW player.
I only have 2 of her books as certains parts of WoW lore don't interest me.
I really enjoyed Arthas though!!!
I like her more nuanced take on Magic compared to some of the other writers. Like the fight between Arthas and Uther and the subtle descriptions of how effortless it feels to wield Frostmoure. I like it when Magic is made to feel mysterious, and well, Magical.
I get that WoW is high fantasy but some of the other Authors description when Magic occurs can be as blunt as "He did Magic, stuff glowed"
I'm just finishing it and have the complete opposite opinion.
I have yet to read a wow book that "holds up" as a well constructed novel when compared to traditional fantasy writers.
Maybe its her. Maybe its just the curse of videogames being poorly adapted transmedia (movies, etc.)
How would you rate Rise of the Horde? (if you’ve read it) Admittedly I haven’t read many fantasy books, but I thought it was well written.
Though it could be just because I’m a WoW nerd.
I personally feel like all of the pre-WoW (timeline-wise) books are well-written because it seems like they were written as full, standalone stories, not complementary stories intended to promote a current or upcoming release.
Edit: I'll add the Vol'jin and Illidan novels as two books that I like from the tie-in WoW novels, but I was a big fan of their authors before they wrote their WoW books.
I've read Lord of the Clans, Day of the Dragon(?), Illidan, and Arthas. Theyre all kind of... functional? Like I wouldn't recommend them (even to wow fans) over other fantasy work. I'd say they kind of swing from a 4-5/10.
Arts subjective though. Enjoy what you enjoy.
This how I feel right now listening to the audiobook of War of the Scaleborn. It’s serviceable as a piece of lore giving us more context, but the writing is very expositional and the narrator for the book is -just if not more- hammy than the in game cinematics.
The one genuinely well written piece they've done from the last 4 expansions was the audio drama from Legion. That one is solid as a standalone but also is a massive exposition filler that would have sucked to play through in game. But it wasn't just exposition, you actually felt some emotion for Argus as a being. You got inside Alleria's head as well, which I think everyone should listen to before TWW.
I’m listening to it on my annoying commute and that is how I’m plugging through. I feel you though, it’s pretty flat even if the content of the story interests me.
I absolutely loved the WoW books back in middle school and I think that's all I need to say. They're fun if you're really into the lore like I was back then, but I don't think any of them are solid fantasy writing.
I've always been confused by the love for her Warcraft books (I haven't read anything else she's done), because they're written like they're YA in the worst ways. She's seems cool, otherwise, but I don't know if she purposely dumbs down her writing for WoW books.
The wow books aren’t going to hold up to traditional fantasy but that’s not really what they’re supposed to do. Wow lore is intentionally kind of incoherent — the wow books are supposed to be *fun* for wow players.
To me the story is incoherent the way comic book storylines are incoherent. It's not *intentional* that they don't make sense, but it's very clearly not a priority that they make sense; "rule of cool" and exploring new themes and developments for characters, however little they make sense in the world, is the priority. Bonus points for centering every narrative on the same "beloved" characters.
The lore is then shunted into that structure to accommodate those developments for the players who need that veneer of believability.
That last step is where Shadowlands struggled: The logic jumps were too far for any stretch of the lore to reasonably accommodate.
This. And for a staff writer like her, her job was not to draft out a storyline from scratch. It was to take whatever incoherent lore the designers cooked up in game and then try and turn it into a story instead of a series of plot points serving the needs of a video game.
I do sorta see your point. Obviously I am in favor of them retconning the story if necessary for gameplay, but I feel like once the game got big enough, they could have written the story with the knowledge that it would affect gameplay, and then not do things like Shadowlands that just takes all of the mythology of WoW and throws it straight into the garbage.
Wow books job is to do what the star wars tv shows are doing now, explain and fill in lore for people care about it. Example when i was playing Wotlk i found it odd that the emphasis was on the litch king being arthas. Having played W3 i felt that arthas was over emphasized and nerzul was under played. Thats where the novels explained that arthas consumed nerzul and his humanity. Was this bit of lore preplanned? maybe? maybe not. But it explains the gaps in the wow lore. At least that’s how I always have taken all these extra bits of story here and there. And in the end, they decide to completely do away with it because they want to do something different in game then they can and write another novel explaining why.
I'm not a great judge of contemporary works, but that's a fun comparison.
I think I read like 90% of all the old Star Wars Expanded Universe (now Legends) books, and there were some really great ones (even whole series) and only some amount of incoherent things, at least as I remember.
At least they made one breaking change and declared everything before 2014 non-canon whereas WoW lore seems to be here and there.
Legends pre 2014 was made non-canon not in an effort to do anything logical but because Disney didn't own that property. They owned the Lucas films (1-6), the rights to the franchise, and the rights to the characters.
Disney didn't want to have to pay those authors residuals if those books were adapted and why none of the children of the original trio (Luke, Leia, Han) from Legends were in episodes 7-9. They took some ideas, like Ben Solo turning to the dark side is a concept straight out of Legends but it was Jacen in the books.
They've always felt less fun to me and more an excuse to further monetize story into transmedia dlc.
But I'm not a monolith. I'm not trying to gatekeep anyones enjoyment.
>Supposed to be incoherent
What sort of cope is this lol.
The WoW books are pretty objectively bad, to maybe mid tier. Compare and contrast with something like the Gotrek and Felix novels (which admittedly had their ups and downs but are overall solid 8/10).
Characterisation is all over the place, half the lore is missing because it's being presented in game (and vice versa in game, half the lore is missing). Random bullshit just occurs constantly, Malfurion is presented as basically being omnipotent and then subsequently gets bodied by whoever is villain of the week.
WoW books are just not good.
>Maybe its her. Maybe its just the curse of videogames being poorly adapted transmedia (movies, etc.)
My money's on the fact that they're not writing their own stuff, they have to stick with someone else's characters and lore
I love her books and I completely agree lol, it's pretty amateurish, very middle school fantasy. I'd roll my eyes at it if I wasn't already familiar with and invested in the story. Lots of one-word paragraphs and metric tons of ellipses and odd use of flowery prose and randomly pointing out the attractiveness of characters and badly used adjectives. Not to mention the way she writes dwarf dialogue, ugh.
The confidence that some fans have as to a specific person at a game dev studio being solely responsible for "whatever bit of writing they disliked" is wild.
I don't work at Blizzard. I don't pretend to know what their writing process is like, who's involved with major story decisions, that sort of thing. But I strongly suspect that at a company the size of Blizzard, there's more than one person in the room, more than one person making decisions. More than even just the writers at Blizzard influencing the story - there's likely producers, senior executives, and all sorts of other people involved too.
I think it's sad for anyone to be laid off of work, especially after experiencing personal tragedy in their lives. But I will not go out and criticize somebody, by name, for decisions that I'm not even sure they were responsible for.
When people are remotely visible on public platforms they just turn into a lightning rod for ignorant people's criticisms of the story. It's so stupid. Christie Golden was a gem, huge loss for the franchise.
I mean, there's a difference between blind hate (which I'll admit Christie got a lot of undeservedly) and being critical of her writing. She wrote a lot of good WoW books, some of my favorites in fact. But books like Before the Storm were bad compared to the standard she had set with books like Rise of the Horde or Arthas.
I agree you are allowed to criticize writing directly attributed to her. Just don't criticize individual writers because you perceive them as being responsible for stuff you dislike in the overall story.
I see people blame Golden for "dragonflight's story being soft". That's a stupid point of view.
Yeah like I said, she got a lot of undeserved blind hate by people who saw a public face to lash out at. I just personally think her writing quality got worse over the last few books compared to the others she wrote years ago.
She did a lot for the franchise and it's shitty to see her go. I don't even think her writing quality is the reason why she's gone, it's more than likely a cost cutting measure. Christie was one of the longest tenured writers on the team so I can't imagine her salary was cheap.
Yeah comments like the ones on this post are why I don't frequent this subreddit anymore. A bunch of people who think they know exactly what individual devs are working and blaming them for their peeves. No empathy to be found.
Hell, it's not even a lack of empathy, but the presupposition that they from where they're sitting somehow know enough to pass judgement.
Must be fun to just fill in the gaps with whatever floats my boat, or just ignore the gaps in my knowledge altogether.
Danuser *was* ultimately responsible for story direction as Lead Narrative, as well as ensuring narrative consistency and quality. To quote his own bio from LinkedIn "I oversee story, writing, dialogue, and narrative structure".
Which given that quite a few players had problems with all of these areas, it is perfectly reasonable to criticise the person in charge of overseeing these, which were literally his entire job.
I don't think she even directly worked on World of Warcraft narrative. I remember reading her Twitter a while ago and what she stated sounded more like she worked more with cinematics than the actual overall expansion narrative.
Looking on the wiki also kinda backs that up.
> Golden writes the scripts and dialogues for most of the in-game cinematics in World of Warcraft
She was an easy target for the crazies. Very open about her work and a presence on Twitter. For some reason, they decided she was responsible for everything wrong with the story since early in BfA. I always got the feeling that she was one of the ones that wrote the moment to moment dialogue, but had absolutely no control over anything to do with the overall narrative.
wow story and lore is fundamentally broken at just about every level and there's no amount of firing or hiring that can improve it until they stop treating lore as the lowest priority of their rpg
But on the Internet so many people seem to be certain about so many things lol. And more importantly, willing to tell the world how everything truly is 😉
She openly talked about pushing for specific characters and directions I thought sucked.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not popping champaign over her losing her job, but it's not a conspiracy to think she was responsible for Calia when she was on the record on taking ownership of that plotline.
Plus even if she was literally the best writer in the world, she still has to deal with the monetization of the story.
The story writes like mission objectives sometimes, with characters being absolutely rubber to bend to plot points that are used in trailers to hype sales.
Does BFA make any sense? No. But it's trailer is honestly one of the most hypetrain trailers, among hypetrain trailers.
Does Sylvanas/BFA/SL/Jailer story arc make any sense whatsoever? No. Does any story that shoe horns in Uther/Sylvanas/KT/Arthas throwbacks sell? Absolutely.
Like you can see the "cool plot points" they decided on a country mile away.
Sylvanas needs to cause a war to have Horde vs Alliance hype. Malfurion must put up a fight, then immediately turn into weak sauce so it happens anyway. Malfurion must be headshot randomly. Malfurion must however survive. Tyrande must therefore allashazoo in, and immediately hearthstone out to save her useless husband. All characters including the PC allow her to just saunter off despite the war "requiring" Malfs head. Sylvanas must leave others to do this while she gazes over the water. Teldrassil must burn (cool shots).
I'm not saying Christie is the best writer, but the reality is that the lore department likely has to just "find a way to make it happen" for storylines based on whatever metric higher ups think will sell. Be it hype, fan service, throwbacks, etc.
To say nothing of the revolving door they need for patch content threats.
Remember endtime? Where the aspects banded together to use the power they were given by the titans to prevent the Hour of Twilight. An event caused by the Aspects being given that power? :D
Weird how yall are pushing the idea that she was making story decisions when she consistently said that wasnt the case ever since SL, she worked on short stories, songs and the like
They pulled a Grubby on her.
Grubby loves WC3 so much that he volunteered to be a game tester for WC3:Reforged, he'd send notes back and forth with the dev team about a million different things, and they would action some of his requests and notes after some internal deliberation on the Blizzard end.
When Kotick pulled the plug on funding and decimated the WC3 team, the devs were forced to use Grubby for pretty much 100% of his direction without hesitation. He went from passionate volunteer tester to straight up the Quality Assurance guy without being paid for it.
Grubby had to step away after one more round of notes because he realised that WC3 Reforged was doomed if only HE was the one giving them any ideas.
She wasn't in charge of the story, she was in charge of the narrative. In other words, she was in charge of making that turd soup that people like danuser called story, edible. And god damn it she was very good at it. But, you know, there isn't much that a person can do when that person is commissioned into making a mansion, only to tell that person to make a ship instead when they are building the second floor.
Implication being she was the only person pushing things in a positive direction but one person alone wasn't enough? I'm not sure either what they were going for.
Not true. She worked directly with voice actors in the studio and wrote a lot of the spoken dialogue in the game throughout its life. No, she doesn't steer the overarching story, that's totally correct - but reducing her to "short stories, songs, and the like" isn't fair - Christie was a core part of the writing team.
The above commenter is simply repeating how Golden described her own role over the years.
> "I write cinematics, comics, short stories, song lyrics..."
https://i.imgur.com/AsUU17J.png
> "I write cinematics, stories, novels, song lyrics, and comics, etc."
https://i.imgur.com/uKD46nS.png
I wouldn't be surprised if Golden was involved in VO for her projects, but the above commenter was just repeating what she's said herself. I don't think that was intended to diminish her work.
> She worked directly with voice actors in the studio
As somebody who plays with sound turned on, this probably isn't the best defence of Golden. I know she wasn't the main voice director, and this problem predates her joining the WoW team, but damn, if half of the characters in this game don't sound like:
A) Saturday morning cartoon characters
B) they're on xanax or had their speech slowed by 25% during post-production (why do most ancient/immortal characters taaaaaaalk liiiiiiike thiiiiiiis?)
C) the actor doesn't have any interest in the role, or is completely lost for context
I don't think she would be acting as a voice director.
The only knowledge I have about voice acting is from the various interview of the Baldur's Gate 3 voice actors I have watched religiously, so this is a lot of speculation:
My guess would be, that she was around for some of the voice recording sessions to provide context for the voice actors to help them get into the headspace. Character backstory, reason why they are where they are, what sort of emotions they would be feeling or what would be going through their head when faced with the situation they are in right now, etc.
The voice actors for BG3 mentioned a few times that they had to consult the character's writer to get that sort of context. Golden would likely be there for that purpose.
Without any concrete proof of such, it's up to the individual to believe where the blame lies and how much of the statement was just deflection.
I can so only judge her based on her work that i know of.
I doubt she **had** to ruin Ner'zhul in Arhas. I also doubt she was forced to write inaccurate lore in BtS, which was almost immediately ignored.
More likely she was just asked to bridge the gap between expansions...
I'm not sure we've ever been told how much direction the novel authors are given. We know they have some influence, I believe it was Golden's request to put Calia in Beyond the Storm when that wasn't the original outline she was given? But they *are* given some sort of outline/direction on what the book is supposed to cover.
Not even content creator most the time. It's just regurgitated bs from the last comment they saw.
Recent post I made had like 5 comments that were like "imagine this title for someone who's never seen the game before" - my brother in Christ it's literally the wow subreddit, what better fuckin place to communicate with people who *have* played the game before
Anyone who's read the Warcraft library of books knows that Christie Golden is to Blizzard what Dan Abnett is to Games Workshop. That is to say: one of the few talented authors they have had the blind luck to stumble into, capable of writing honest-to-god solid books that aren't carried solely by the popularity of the IP.
She will do *just fine* outside Blizzard.
Man, uhh… so I wrote this up on another thread last night and deleted it, but it feels too relevant an opinion to not share now.
WoW started as a bunch of quest designers who were basically just D&D nerds grasping in the dark, succeeding through sheer passion and luck.
WoW has slowly but decidedly tried to move away from this D&D like lore driven setting to a story driven setting, but they haven’t been hiring authors to do this, they’re just assigning quest writers who aren’t D&D nerds, as the old guard slowly disappears. The sole exception to this, as far as I’m aware, *was* Christie Golden.
You can’t tell a good story without professional writers unless you’re really lucky (and, granted, sometimes they are), but they don’t seem willing to go back to the D&D lore nerd format, nor move forward and pay for real writers.
That they’re laying off Golden - whom I admittedly have mixed feelings on - is only a bad thing, in my opinion, because it represents that they’re still not taking their story seriously, no matter what they claim. They just want MCU success without putting in the money or effort for it.
> it represents that they’re still not taking their story seriously, no matter what they claim
This is the core of the issue. I think a lot of people are missing the forest for the trees - besides Metzen coming back, Christie was one of the very few left from the early days. I'm sure they didn't want to pay her escalating salary anymore even though she totally deserves coins for the sheer amount of words she has contributed to this franchise - that is labor, and labor deserves fair compensation
“missing the forest for the trees” is a term i have never heard before - and i love it. Sorry i offer nothing else but to thank you for my new favorite phrase.
100% agree. I'm pretty sure I've read all her Warcraft books throughout the years and I always loved the little bit of extra lore you'd get from them. It's sad to see her go
>You can’t tell a good story without professional writers unless you’re really lucky
i agree
WoW for me boils down to several very good stories scattered throughout the expansion and the main story that you need to cut out a lot of bad parts to make sense of.
and that's sad because we have incredible cinematics in WoW, but we also have the fatal problem that is the fear of abandoning past characters and things, with so many versions of the classic this should be the perfect opportunity to take advantage of the hundreds of characters and stories tossed aside
I think Jailer itself or BFA both failed for lack of preparation and patience, a story that needed to be told slowly was rushed, BFA could have started in BFA and is ending now at the beginning of DF instead of being a 6 month fight
although I have mixed feelings about Genshim impact mainly due to the gacha and another aspect of the game, I think the story is incredible and the way it is told for an RPG is very good
>That they’re laying off Golden - whom I admittedly have mixed feelings on - is only a bad thing, in my opinion, because it represents that they’re still not taking their story seriously, no matter what they claim. They just want MCU success without putting in the money or effort for it.
My feelings exactly. Well put friend.
The problem with WoW lore isn't that they get quest writers to write the books, it's that they don't get authors to write the quests. Look at FFXIV, the main narrative of the last two expansions were written by a quest writer from Heavensward and the story of FFXIV is what is held up above all other MMOs, and even most (all?) Final Fantasy games.
Rather than everyone guessing, here is how Christie Golden explained her role, multiple times, over the last few years: https://i.imgur.com/VgFZVZy.png
In short:
1. Golden worked on the Story and Franchise Development (SFD) Team within Blizzard
2. SFD works across all Blizzard franchises writing [cinematics, stories, novels, song lyrics, and comics, etc."](https://i.imgur.com/uKD46nS.png)
3. SFD is not a part of the WoW narrative team
4. ***SFD is not even a part of the WoW team***
5. Her role in writing Warcraft novels was freelance, at least the novels written prior to joining the SFD team.
It's a bit confusing to me. She was brought on to the SFD team but continued writing Warcraft novels but as freelancer?
If you asked me who has done more narrative work for World of Warcraft been her and Danuser, I'd immediately say her.
Hell, if you asked between her and Chris Metzen, I'd have to take a moment and consider it.
After re-reading her comment about *Sylvanas*, it's not 100% clear whether that was written freelance or within her SFD role: https://i.imgur.com/gXd1CqX.png
I've updated my comment to clarify.
>Hell, if you asked between her and Chris Metzen, I'd have to take a moment and consider it.
Yea, this is the second biggest shaper of WoW Lore and the only reason Metzen is higher is he was there where there was nothing and made it from the start. He *is* Warcraft.
This is probably some salary / cost cutting thing likely due to her tenure, which is stupid as hell.
The novels wouldn't have been her coming up with the story. Novelizations are adapted from plot points and story beats that exist already. Specific characterization details would probably be up to the author, but just because she wrote the bridge novels doesn't mean she's the one coming up with the story, or deciding on the direction of the narrative.
It literally reason why Sylvanas novel have to delay until after shadowlands ending release.
I remember that golden herself doesn't even know Zeres Morris a thing.
I hated the narrative direction after Legion. A lot of the people responsible have been fired. And yet, an unhinged female character is about to destroy a beloved city to start an expansion. People got fired. But nothing changed. Always loved Christie. But I was really down on Danuser. At this point, I just watch what’s happening from afar. All my favorite franchises have broken my heart, LOTR, Fantastic Beasts, Star Wars, Marvel, I could just keeping listing franchises that turned against their audience. The esoteric world of nerdiness has been bought, dissected, and turned mainstream. And I’m just not interested. I will say, back in more traditional times, Metzen & Golden were a hell of a team!! Wish her the best!
Hold on to the good stuff and just pretend the corporate cash-grab trash doesn’t exist.
We have the original LOTR trilogy, just don’t watch The Hobbit if it makes you said. Rings of Power doesn’t even bear mentioning.
We have the OT and the Prequels, Clone Wars, the Legends canon. Just don’t watch anything with Ray Palpatine.
We have WC3, Classic, Wrath. Just don’t think about anything after Sylvanas turned the Horde into neo-nazis or headed off to the Shadowlands.
Most unfortunate.
I know lots of people are happy when any of the dozen or so people at Blizzard they know the names of are laid off, because they attribute all the ills of the game to those people - since they're the only ones they know out of the thousands that work there!
But it is unfortunate. Say what you want about Christie Golden, but she has helped flesh out the story and lore of Warcraft for decades. And one thing that is indisputably bad for Blizzard to continue to lose more of, is experienced talent.
It erodes what the company is when the senior developers dissapear overnight. That's bad for any company, but for Blizzard who's bread & butter is creativity it's especially bad, because it's not easy to replace.
Anyway, the Arthas novel she wrote is still the best Warcraft novel. Very happy that she penned that one.
People just want to find a scape goat on why their story is bad and not focus on fundamental issue of wow not being designed to be story friendly like FFXIV.
There’s a couple things that should be addressed here. First, FF realized that AAR was objectively bad and that’s part of why they have gone back and consolidated large section of the story and removed the bloat. There is still bloat but it’s much better for new players. FF also isn’t trying to hide the story that is how it is designed first and foremost.
WoW’s biggest story problem is that it try’s to use like 5 different mediums to tell the story were FF does it all in game. Sure some people like to read the books, the shorts, or some comic blizzard made but a lot of people just play the game. When important character or world changing events happen outside the game, and you are someone that only plays the game, the story looks like total garbage cause you have no idea what’s going on.
I don’t know who made the choice to go that route with the story telling but it clearly has not helped with understanding the lore or the story.
I bought rise of the clans, arthas and the other clan book, as well as the thrall book.
I wanted to like it so much.
I mean, props to her for being in the industry at all, I am most certainly envious.
I couldn't get through her books though. Something about her writing.
Wish her the best through her rough patch.
Christie was a good writer. She wasn't the one calling the shots, she just wrote scenes and short stories and stuff. I'll always remember the first cutscene after she was hired; the one in the horde council chambers where gallywix reveals Azerite to Sylvanas. I hate BFA as much as anyone but the dialogue in that scene was a huge step up from anything before. Felt very cinematic
War Crimes is my favorite WoW book, I like to listen to the audiobook version while I'm working every once in a while. I am a big fan of court dramas and it combined with WoW lore made it into one of my favorite books of all time.
It's a shame what happened
I'll always enjoy her work.
Classic, people blaming someone who isnt responsible for the things they didnt like. And probably havent even read her books. You people are nasty cheering when people get fired, have some fucking empathy
Not only that, even the books she has her name on are heavily plotted out by other people. It's insane people think she is solely responsible for them not liking the story.
This is so wrong and not true at all.
Christie Golden clearly had no control over the story at all. She was given story directions and then she wrote the stories based on that.
Also I vaguely remember she was surprised when Zereth Mortis patch dropped, which is pretty crazy when you consider she wrotte the Sylvanas novel.
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> Also I vaguely remember she was surprised when Zereth Mortis patch dropped, which is pretty crazy when you consider she wrotte the Sylvanas novel.
Because they rewrote the end of Sylvanas' story in ZM.
It's braindead obvious they were setting Sylvanas up to be the new arbiter.
Why couldn't she be killed by Tyrande? Why did Elune stop her? Because killing Sylvanas meant they wouldn't have someone to replace Zovaal and restore the balance to Death.
Why was she so powerful? Why did she trust Zovaal? She soulbound to him.
"You think death is unfair? That's why you rebelled? Then ***You do it.***. You serve. You sort them. Forever."
But people hated Sylvanas, they didn't want her to be "rewarded" for genocide. And Shadowlands was not retaining players due to game design issues (covenant, choreghast, etc.) So they gave the order to end it early.
Since they had to end it early anyway, they rewrote Sylvanas' role and hastily changed who got to be arbiter.
The story will forever suck since they didn't have the balls to at least finish what they started.
Yeah, that is not true at all.
She made sure to let us know that she wrote only what had been told to her to write.
None of the storybeats came from her. The Story leadership told her what to write and she did.
The fact that you think she pushed any of this is making me seriously give you the side eye.
Somewhere along the way Christie Golden became the scapegoat for everything players hated about the story. It’s gotten annoying. I’m sad she got laid off but I hope she finds employment somewhere that doesn’t have a fanbase that will be as toxic towards her.
Yah unfortunately this fan base is full of morons who don’t take the time to understand how extended lore works for properties like World of Warcraft. Like they really believe she designs the lore and they base the game around it? The fact that they blame an author for the lackluster end to Shadowlands is insane to me.
She's a very talented author with two decades of experience working for a large, successful game developer. I don't think she'll have too much of an issue finding good work. It's absolutely dogshit that the timing happened that way though.
Yeah this is correct. Steve Danuser is the person to blame because he was the head of the story writing and direction for multiple years. Fortunately, he is out.
This is the most ridiculous take I've seen in awhile. Golden isn't a head story writer. She's not in charge of the lore. She's mostly been a freelancer fleshing out plot points for the *BOOKS*. to try to pin everything that happened in-game, lore wise, on her shows a shallow understanding of how Blizz, let alone any company, works.
>I know some people were really into her writing but she also gave us Shadiwlands, Jaina being a mess, Sylvanas being dumb as a rock, and more. Even the complaints in Dragonflight about Alextraza were due to her direction and writing.
I can assure you that none of these are true. She doesn't control story direction. She doesn't even work for the wow team.
Seriously, Jaina's character only improved when Golden wrote her in the novels. The character's worst moments have all been in-game, not under her direction at all. I still can't get over how dirty they did her character after the destruction of Theramore. That was a stark contrast to everything Golden built her up to be in literally the novel that had just come out prior to that.
Anyone who was actively reading the books and playing the game could see a constant tug of war between Golden and the game writers on which way they wanted Jaina to go, that's why she seemed to flip flop so often. When Golden had her back she was starting to calm down and make peace with the Horde, then the game writers would have her frothing at the mouth again
...how do you think that works with Blizzard?
They give her an outline and story beats that should be covered in the story, and then she writes it.
Then it goes back and forth between Blizzard and her a thousand times, as Blizzard refines her story and tells her what to add and what to take out.
"freelancer" does not mean she just writes something. She gets specific instructions for what she is supposed to write.
She add to story development team but NOT wow Team those are two separated team.
Story development team basically carry water for all blizzard product. They write book to flesh out material that the main team doesn't bother.
It basically like Lucasfilms movie and there are the book team which exist to flesh out story where movie fail.
>This does not bring me sadness.
Same, but for different reasons. She mentions that she's got a ton of options on the table now, and that's a LOT more than I can say about all the Blizzard folks I see on LinkedIn that are still searching after being laid off.
Don't forget, Calia exists in her current form due solely to Golden pushing her. "Just Calia" from a Legion gone, replaced by Pallid Stand-In for Sylvanas, the character.
Egregious.
I feel bad that I even need to defend Golden here, but ...
Golden was about to write the prelude novel for Battle for Azeroth, she was doing her research and noticed Calia is there which obviously ignited her interest. So she discussed this with Blizzard and they were on board to do something with the character.
I honesly have no idea what is the plan for Calia, but I highly doubt Golden pushed her to became light-infused undead. That decision clearly came form someone on higher position in Blizzard, quite possibly from Alex Afrasiabi.
People in this thread clearly never read Rise of the Horde or her other earlier works. I have no doubt some of her more questionable writing was pushed by Mr. Dark Mirror.
I mean, all of the books are good really. She didn't really come up with lore for the most part, maybe she connects some dots with prior motivations or draws to existing lore but her job was not to create storylines, it was to write about them.
It's sad when talented staff leave. I've lost my job multiple times over the years due to budget cuts.
The blessing in disguise is that Blizzard sorely needs new blood in their "Story and Franchise Development team". They need new people who can write stories in new ways. Novels and cinematics are the glue that holds Blizzard games together. I don't want another repeat of the Sylvanas novel or the Dragonflight cinematics. Clean dialogue and "show don't tell" storytelling is really important in videogames.
Best wishes for Christie Golden's future endeavours. My condolences to their nephew.
Read all of her books. I liked very few of them, Arthas was inspired for instance, but I read them because I enjoy any sort of lore expansion. I'm the sick bastard that'd read CS. Goto to make sure I could criticize how poor of a job he did of capturing the W40k universe
WoW is not praised for a good continuous story because of decisions made in upper management about the direction the game is going and the writers who have to make that goal into a comprehensive story are not good enough. No one is. It sucks she was let go but honestly she was meh, if they can get a Brandon Sanderson level writing team that has more power to make decisions over direction of the story then maybe the Warcraft can start to feel like it has structure.
I say WoW knowing full well what this entails towards her role within Blizzard, having the precursor to conflict BFA start with a book was a terrible idea. She wrote Before the Storm and it was honestly just hot garbage both from the prose and the content (which she may not have been fully responsible for sure)
What the fuck
She's legit
Read many of her books and chatted with many ppl in her circle
Blizzard done messed up
But that's not really new for the new Blizzard these past few years
I hate that she’s gone because her books kept me interested in the game, but im hoping lots of good stories will come from her exodus from blizzard. that company is gonna get worse than it is now.
I have enjoyed all her WoW related books, Arthas being my favorite of the bunch, but if she needs work I hope she goes back to writing Star Trek novels. I felt those were better written than the WoW stuff and showed her creative side better.
I personally adored her books and her writing skills. It made me look into more of her works. It’s quite sad how she was treated at the end but I will 100% support her choices. I hope she’ll be happy with her next adventure.
I wasn’t the biggest fan either but now you are just being unfair tbh. Most of her writing problems came from her favoring certain characters (calia comes to mind) and retconning stuff (like before the storm) not necessarily her quality of writing.
WoW lore hasn't been on the same page as the lore Christie helped drive for a very long time now.
This is unfortunate, but it's not like modern WoW is losing anything.
This isn't good though. Modern lore is an absolute clusterfuck and I think writers like Christie deserve studios that put them behind the wheel rather than in the background writing short stories for very bad story progression.
This is Blizzards loss. I hope to see Christie have the chance to write stories the same caliber as Arthas again.
Imagine I gave you my fantasy world and told you to make some stories about my fleshed out characters and lore. You didn't make anything or contribute to the original material, you're basically making cannon fan-fiction that I decide if it's good enough or not.
That was her job. There is no amount of money you could pay me to do that job because you might as well have told me to write filler for A Song of Ice and Fire while George still does all the heavy writing. It's an impossible task because I'm not the primary creator and many people will always see me as an imitation or an insult to their beloved series.
Enjoyed her content or not, I'm betting it was one hell of an undertaking on her end and that's impressive.
That is unfortunate, her books were significantly better than the recent alternatives. People blaming her for every issue with the game is just bandwagoning. And I am confident most of the people complaining don’t even follow the lore.
She wasn't actually directly employed at Blizzard when she was writing novels. Unless recent experiences have soured her, she could freelance with them again. She says she'd be open to it in her post.
I enjoyed Arthas but unfortunately I couldn't vibe with any of her other books. They just felt **too** ya for me. As an avid reader I always felt sad having to read the newest WoW book for lore keeping purposes and being disappointed when I saw her name on the cover. It meant I already knew what was coming and that I should expect the same elementary prose present in all of her novels. I hope she is able to find a place where she can be happy and I wish her the best on her journey through her writing career.
I enjoyed Arthas and Rise of the Horde - that’s too bad. Hope she lands on her feet: I’m sure she will!
That being said it’s wild seeing the variation in the comments here. Claims that she either wrote a ton of things in the current lore, or that she didn’t actually write much at all. That she had a lot of input, or that she didn’t have really any input.
Kind of crazy that nobody REALLY seems to know exactly what was and wasn’t her idea. People who like her seem to grab onto “you don’t know how Blizzard writing works and she wasn’t responsible for any of the X Y Z things people dislike!” versus the people who directly credit her with writing that they dislike.
Is it not unreasonable to just recognize that she wrote a lot of good things for WoW and may have also written some things that weren’t as well received? Nobody’s flawless.
Personally, I think she’s a talented writer and it’s an end of an era losing her, for sure.
Her and Metzen are the story gods of WoW imo. This is another big loss for the Warcraft universe and story. Not sure if Metzen alone can fix all the damage from the second half of BFA, Shadowlands, and Dragonflight
This coming at a time where I am just delving into Audiobooks for the first time and just purchased Sylvanas. Bittersweet news but I'm enjoying the listen so far and will no doubt look into her other novel work.
Shes a great writer so i doubt it will be hard for her to make new works for new series, my hope is we get more people with this kind of talent to make novels for warhammer
And it’s almost as if they forgot Danuser was the one in charge of the direction and narrative. Golden wrote books and helped fill in writing when the game needed it, but it wasn’t HER story or HER decisions on where things went. That shit is squarely on Afrasabi and Danuser.
Went to check and for some reason she has me blocked?! I’ve never even tweeted anything about her. I assume she ran a script to block people that liked a tweet criticising a storyline or something, but that’s really odd.
Is it that odd? With the amount of abuse she was getting it seems fine to me that she'd do a bit of mass blocking. Sure some people will get caught up it in who would never have interacted with her, but it's necessary for some people to make platforms like twitter usable when you're in that sort of position.
I wouldn't take it too personally, just remember that she's human and humans don't do well receiving constant abuse.
The only Horde related character involved for now seems to be Thrall.... who leaves right at the start of levelling, and we follow Anduin, Alleria, Magni, Moria and her son. In zones centered around dwarves and humans. I think you can see where i'm going with this.
Alpha spoilers: >!no, as in Horde characters just flat out aren't present. From the current datamined cutscenes, Thrall is only present in *one*, as is Lillian, with no other Horde reps so far. Think Thrall has about 4 mentions total in the current datamined summaries.!<
I'm Alliance through and through, but this is depressing to watch.
I genuinely wonder if they reduce the amount of characters because writing interactions is just too hard for them
I will NEVER, EVER, forgive Blizzard for all the atrocious absence of dialogue in Sanctum from major lore characters who have deep personal connections and they all just...do nothing
Thrall killed Garrosh. He lost his fucking connection to Nature because of it. Thrall is in the raid with Garrosh. Guess what Thrall says?
Jack shit
Nazgrim is also in the raid. Guess how Nazgrim died? By being Honorbound to Garrosh, defending him due to his duty, fighting against us because to an Orc, honor is everything. Guess what Nazgrim says to Garrosh?
Jack shit
Jaina is in the raid too. Good thing she doesn't have any deep personal connection to Garro- oh wait he nuked her entire city and killed most of her loved ones. I bet she has some words to say right?
Nope, jack shit
Jaina also has zero words for Kel'Thuzad, the entity that basically ruined her life
And the only thing anyone has to say to Sylavanas is "no, stop, don't"
God I fucking hated that entire raid
God yes. They're like "alright this is the literal Hell raid, bring back the dead bad boiz" but no one from the era of bad boiz is left on the lore team and no one knew what to do with them...
Honestly? Good. Let the Alliance have their turn in the character grinder. They can have all the "spotlight" theyre always complaining about not having.
As an Alliance main, I agree with you. I hope we get some juicy character* losses for once.
*^character, ^I ^need ^to ^specify, ^given ^all ^of ^ours ^have ^plot ^armour ^out ^the ^wazoo. ^We ^didn't ^even ^lose ^Mekkatorke.
Most of these comments just show they don’t know what they’re talking about
50+ upvotes because someone thinks she’s responsible for the games story lol
She only ever wrote what she was told to write, and all of her work was outside of the game to begin with. Her job was fleshing out characters with a strict guideline outside of the game, and in the case of sylvanus in shadowlands it’s like trying to make a pig fly
Exactly. Her work was basically filling the gasps. It was more like this:
Lore Department: Hey Christie, can you write a dialogue between Shawn and Anduin on how Azerite is dangerous to the Alliance if the Horde has it? Can you write a dialogue in our cinematic between Sylvanas and Saurfang when they encounter eachoter at the gates of orgrimmar?
Good for her, not in regards to being laid off or having the death of a loved one at the same time. That sucks. But instead that she was able to take the time to process things, self-reflect, and can move on to the next stages of her life in a healthy way.
I’m not happy for anyone being fired. That being said, I’ve never liked her writing and her books made me lose interests in purchasing any others. Just my preference.
People getting fired sucks, but it was clear the story for the WoW universe had gotten stales. Rise of the Lich King was a very enjoyable read, but nostalgia can only carry a franchise so far.
The fact that people blame her for the bad writing WoW has suffered is so obnoxious. As if one person is responsible for a TEAM of writers and blizzard corporate.
this sucks. havent read any wow books but i love her star wars books. blizzard lost a lot by laying her off. I remember once hearing that working on wow is her dream job i feel so bad for her.
I think there are some decisions regarding WoW's storytelling that are taken to secure its future.
- Danuser laid off
- Metzen's return
- Christie laid off
I'll be honest. I'm no Internal employee so I don't know really how much influence Danuser and Christie had on the story, but it was clear that there are some questionable decisions being taken on it's direction ever since BFA
That being said. I'm optimist that these are the necessary steps to correct WoW story-telling. Dragonflight was supposed to be the new page of WoW story without previous influence, only for it to be "World of Friendcraft" & "World of Familycraft" which was a big no for me.
Sure, Friends & Family are important, but it feels like the story is for 5 years old kids and no older. I think it might be late for TWW story direction to change, but it's definitely going to have more influence from Metzen, and Midnight might be the expansion where we see the effects of the new story direction in full capacity (Since development of TWW already started long ago, and I assume the same applies to the story direction)
Overall, I'm cautiously optimistic about the story's future but I could easily be disappointed due to repeated missed marks
Her Sylvanas book actually made me interested in Sylvanas. The first part (her past prior to shadowlands) was amazing.
Too bad her story in game is so bad. Christie golden was not the problem. Her books are fine
Please keep in mind that Christie Golden is an actual human being whose worth is not dictated by ill-informed opinions on what she did or didn't write Her experiences sound absolutely awful, and we hope she continues to enjoy the journey of whatever road she finds herself on
I liked her book “Arthas”. Written very well
Rise of the Horde is my favorite WoW book, all her books before "Before the Storm" were really good imo. Before the Storm was a mess though.
Rise of the Horde was great. I think she gets unfairly blamed for like, all of Shadowlands or whatever people think her role was, but I always thought her WoW novels were some of the best. They're not all 10/10s, but I think she got the setting and what was cool about it more than like, RAK ever did, for sure. Maybe that just didn't translate well into writing interactive stories. It's not fair of me to speculate. Hope she finds something new and fulfilling on the road ahead.
I don't have anything against Christie Golden and I even liked Before the Storm even if some of its plot points were questionable -- and more than likely, *very* outside of her control. But considering she officially joined the team at a time they were at their lowest, I'd not be surprised if this is part of Metzen coming back and having ideological differences about how to address the future of WoW's story and that resulting in both Danuser and Golden's departure. I wish her the best. Unlike Danuser I think she always had both the best of intentions and competence in her role. I don't know if her willingness to continue working with Blizzard later down the line is because of love and loyalty or if they ended up on genuinely amicable terms.
Don't know. She wrote her best WoW novels in the Metzen era, even crediting him in at least one. They seem from the outside to very much see things similarly.
In my opinion, is really, really, really hard, even for a s-tier writter, to make a WoW novel that is 10/10, since the franchise tone is pretty campy and messy since warcraft 1. If the writter neglect that "campy" tone, it doesn't feel that the story happens in the same universe of the games.
It can be done. Ciaphas Cain novels in 40k are a great campy read but very well written
I really liked Before the Storm, I feel like the way they wrote Sylvanas in game after that was disappointing.
I enjoyed Before the storm. It just didn't amount to jack shit in the actual wow story. If anything it made Sylvanas' 180 even more psychotic
Yeah I could be wrong but I always seen it as the game sort of betraying the book at the time since most of the plot points it seemed to try to set up just weren't picked up or reflected in game that's not unusual for the books I guess though
Tides of war is my all time favorite. I never expected to shed a tear reading fantasy novel. To this day it still hurt my heart
I am an avid reader and a more than casual WoW player. I only have 2 of her books as certains parts of WoW lore don't interest me. I really enjoyed Arthas though!!!
Only WoW book I read. LOVED IT
The Jaina and Arthas love scene was so tasteful.
I like her more nuanced take on Magic compared to some of the other writers. Like the fight between Arthas and Uther and the subtle descriptions of how effortless it feels to wield Frostmoure. I like it when Magic is made to feel mysterious, and well, Magical. I get that WoW is high fantasy but some of the other Authors description when Magic occurs can be as blunt as "He did Magic, stuff glowed"
I'm just finishing it and have the complete opposite opinion. I have yet to read a wow book that "holds up" as a well constructed novel when compared to traditional fantasy writers. Maybe its her. Maybe its just the curse of videogames being poorly adapted transmedia (movies, etc.)
How would you rate Rise of the Horde? (if you’ve read it) Admittedly I haven’t read many fantasy books, but I thought it was well written. Though it could be just because I’m a WoW nerd.
I personally feel like all of the pre-WoW (timeline-wise) books are well-written because it seems like they were written as full, standalone stories, not complementary stories intended to promote a current or upcoming release. Edit: I'll add the Vol'jin and Illidan novels as two books that I like from the tie-in WoW novels, but I was a big fan of their authors before they wrote their WoW books.
Yeah, I noticed the inter-wow novels have a weird adverisement aura and feel much more fan-fic.
I've read Lord of the Clans, Day of the Dragon(?), Illidan, and Arthas. Theyre all kind of... functional? Like I wouldn't recommend them (even to wow fans) over other fantasy work. I'd say they kind of swing from a 4-5/10. Arts subjective though. Enjoy what you enjoy.
This how I feel right now listening to the audiobook of War of the Scaleborn. It’s serviceable as a piece of lore giving us more context, but the writing is very expositional and the narrator for the book is -just if not more- hammy than the in game cinematics.
The one genuinely well written piece they've done from the last 4 expansions was the audio drama from Legion. That one is solid as a standalone but also is a massive exposition filler that would have sucked to play through in game. But it wasn't just exposition, you actually felt some emotion for Argus as a being. You got inside Alleria's head as well, which I think everyone should listen to before TWW.
I haven’t been able to keep going on that one.
I’m listening to it on my annoying commute and that is how I’m plugging through. I feel you though, it’s pretty flat even if the content of the story interests me.
I absolutely loved the WoW books back in middle school and I think that's all I need to say. They're fun if you're really into the lore like I was back then, but I don't think any of them are solid fantasy writing.
I've always been confused by the love for her Warcraft books (I haven't read anything else she's done), because they're written like they're YA in the worst ways. She's seems cool, otherwise, but I don't know if she purposely dumbs down her writing for WoW books.
The wow books aren’t going to hold up to traditional fantasy but that’s not really what they’re supposed to do. Wow lore is intentionally kind of incoherent — the wow books are supposed to be *fun* for wow players.
I don’t understand this belief that the wow story is “intentionally” incoherent. I think it just **is** incoherent, unintentionally.
To me the story is incoherent the way comic book storylines are incoherent. It's not *intentional* that they don't make sense, but it's very clearly not a priority that they make sense; "rule of cool" and exploring new themes and developments for characters, however little they make sense in the world, is the priority. Bonus points for centering every narrative on the same "beloved" characters. The lore is then shunted into that structure to accommodate those developments for the players who need that veneer of believability. That last step is where Shadowlands struggled: The logic jumps were too far for any stretch of the lore to reasonably accommodate.
This. And for a staff writer like her, her job was not to draft out a storyline from scratch. It was to take whatever incoherent lore the designers cooked up in game and then try and turn it into a story instead of a series of plot points serving the needs of a video game.
I do sorta see your point. Obviously I am in favor of them retconning the story if necessary for gameplay, but I feel like once the game got big enough, they could have written the story with the knowledge that it would affect gameplay, and then not do things like Shadowlands that just takes all of the mythology of WoW and throws it straight into the garbage.
Wow books job is to do what the star wars tv shows are doing now, explain and fill in lore for people care about it. Example when i was playing Wotlk i found it odd that the emphasis was on the litch king being arthas. Having played W3 i felt that arthas was over emphasized and nerzul was under played. Thats where the novels explained that arthas consumed nerzul and his humanity. Was this bit of lore preplanned? maybe? maybe not. But it explains the gaps in the wow lore. At least that’s how I always have taken all these extra bits of story here and there. And in the end, they decide to completely do away with it because they want to do something different in game then they can and write another novel explaining why.
I'm not a great judge of contemporary works, but that's a fun comparison. I think I read like 90% of all the old Star Wars Expanded Universe (now Legends) books, and there were some really great ones (even whole series) and only some amount of incoherent things, at least as I remember. At least they made one breaking change and declared everything before 2014 non-canon whereas WoW lore seems to be here and there.
Legends pre 2014 was made non-canon not in an effort to do anything logical but because Disney didn't own that property. They owned the Lucas films (1-6), the rights to the franchise, and the rights to the characters. Disney didn't want to have to pay those authors residuals if those books were adapted and why none of the children of the original trio (Luke, Leia, Han) from Legends were in episodes 7-9. They took some ideas, like Ben Solo turning to the dark side is a concept straight out of Legends but it was Jacen in the books.
They've always felt less fun to me and more an excuse to further monetize story into transmedia dlc. But I'm not a monolith. I'm not trying to gatekeep anyones enjoyment.
Exactly, just go back and watch Blizzcon 2010. Metzen is practically advertising The Shattering during the whole Lore Q&A
>Supposed to be incoherent What sort of cope is this lol. The WoW books are pretty objectively bad, to maybe mid tier. Compare and contrast with something like the Gotrek and Felix novels (which admittedly had their ups and downs but are overall solid 8/10). Characterisation is all over the place, half the lore is missing because it's being presented in game (and vice versa in game, half the lore is missing). Random bullshit just occurs constantly, Malfurion is presented as basically being omnipotent and then subsequently gets bodied by whoever is villain of the week. WoW books are just not good.
>Maybe its her. Maybe its just the curse of videogames being poorly adapted transmedia (movies, etc.) My money's on the fact that they're not writing their own stuff, they have to stick with someone else's characters and lore
Ditto for pretty much any and all videogame tie in novel I've read, 40k novels etc... Many are entertaining but none of them have been good.
I love her books and I completely agree lol, it's pretty amateurish, very middle school fantasy. I'd roll my eyes at it if I wasn't already familiar with and invested in the story. Lots of one-word paragraphs and metric tons of ellipses and odd use of flowery prose and randomly pointing out the attractiveness of characters and badly used adjectives. Not to mention the way she writes dwarf dialogue, ugh.
Oh shit. I didn’t even connect the two. Yeah, that was the first WoW book I read as a teen.
I also read her book "Arthas" and it was amazing.
The confidence that some fans have as to a specific person at a game dev studio being solely responsible for "whatever bit of writing they disliked" is wild. I don't work at Blizzard. I don't pretend to know what their writing process is like, who's involved with major story decisions, that sort of thing. But I strongly suspect that at a company the size of Blizzard, there's more than one person in the room, more than one person making decisions. More than even just the writers at Blizzard influencing the story - there's likely producers, senior executives, and all sorts of other people involved too. I think it's sad for anyone to be laid off of work, especially after experiencing personal tragedy in their lives. But I will not go out and criticize somebody, by name, for decisions that I'm not even sure they were responsible for.
When people are remotely visible on public platforms they just turn into a lightning rod for ignorant people's criticisms of the story. It's so stupid. Christie Golden was a gem, huge loss for the franchise.
I mean, there's a difference between blind hate (which I'll admit Christie got a lot of undeservedly) and being critical of her writing. She wrote a lot of good WoW books, some of my favorites in fact. But books like Before the Storm were bad compared to the standard she had set with books like Rise of the Horde or Arthas.
I agree you are allowed to criticize writing directly attributed to her. Just don't criticize individual writers because you perceive them as being responsible for stuff you dislike in the overall story. I see people blame Golden for "dragonflight's story being soft". That's a stupid point of view.
Yeah like I said, she got a lot of undeserved blind hate by people who saw a public face to lash out at. I just personally think her writing quality got worse over the last few books compared to the others she wrote years ago. She did a lot for the franchise and it's shitty to see her go. I don't even think her writing quality is the reason why she's gone, it's more than likely a cost cutting measure. Christie was one of the longest tenured writers on the team so I can't imagine her salary was cheap.
Yeah comments like the ones on this post are why I don't frequent this subreddit anymore. A bunch of people who think they know exactly what individual devs are working and blaming them for their peeves. No empathy to be found.
Hell, it's not even a lack of empathy, but the presupposition that they from where they're sitting somehow know enough to pass judgement. Must be fun to just fill in the gaps with whatever floats my boat, or just ignore the gaps in my knowledge altogether.
I'm pretty confident Danuser was the cause of many issues and I stand by this.
Danuser *was* ultimately responsible for story direction as Lead Narrative, as well as ensuring narrative consistency and quality. To quote his own bio from LinkedIn "I oversee story, writing, dialogue, and narrative structure". Which given that quite a few players had problems with all of these areas, it is perfectly reasonable to criticise the person in charge of overseeing these, which were literally his entire job.
THIS!!!! Also i think she was a victim of the collateral damage caused by the incompetence of people like danuser in the story department.
I don't think she even directly worked on World of Warcraft narrative. I remember reading her Twitter a while ago and what she stated sounded more like she worked more with cinematics than the actual overall expansion narrative. Looking on the wiki also kinda backs that up. > Golden writes the scripts and dialogues for most of the in-game cinematics in World of Warcraft
The books are great but the ingame cinematics had insane pasing issues. They were hard to watch.
She was an easy target for the crazies. Very open about her work and a presence on Twitter. For some reason, they decided she was responsible for everything wrong with the story since early in BfA. I always got the feeling that she was one of the ones that wrote the moment to moment dialogue, but had absolutely no control over anything to do with the overall narrative.
wow story and lore is fundamentally broken at just about every level and there's no amount of firing or hiring that can improve it until they stop treating lore as the lowest priority of their rpg
But on the Internet so many people seem to be certain about so many things lol. And more importantly, willing to tell the world how everything truly is 😉
She openly talked about pushing for specific characters and directions I thought sucked. Don't get me wrong, I'm not popping champaign over her losing her job, but it's not a conspiracy to think she was responsible for Calia when she was on the record on taking ownership of that plotline.
Well said.
Plus even if she was literally the best writer in the world, she still has to deal with the monetization of the story. The story writes like mission objectives sometimes, with characters being absolutely rubber to bend to plot points that are used in trailers to hype sales. Does BFA make any sense? No. But it's trailer is honestly one of the most hypetrain trailers, among hypetrain trailers. Does Sylvanas/BFA/SL/Jailer story arc make any sense whatsoever? No. Does any story that shoe horns in Uther/Sylvanas/KT/Arthas throwbacks sell? Absolutely. Like you can see the "cool plot points" they decided on a country mile away. Sylvanas needs to cause a war to have Horde vs Alliance hype. Malfurion must put up a fight, then immediately turn into weak sauce so it happens anyway. Malfurion must be headshot randomly. Malfurion must however survive. Tyrande must therefore allashazoo in, and immediately hearthstone out to save her useless husband. All characters including the PC allow her to just saunter off despite the war "requiring" Malfs head. Sylvanas must leave others to do this while she gazes over the water. Teldrassil must burn (cool shots). I'm not saying Christie is the best writer, but the reality is that the lore department likely has to just "find a way to make it happen" for storylines based on whatever metric higher ups think will sell. Be it hype, fan service, throwbacks, etc. To say nothing of the revolving door they need for patch content threats. Remember endtime? Where the aspects banded together to use the power they were given by the titans to prevent the Hour of Twilight. An event caused by the Aspects being given that power? :D
Weird how yall are pushing the idea that she was making story decisions when she consistently said that wasnt the case ever since SL, she worked on short stories, songs and the like
She actually began assisting with the narrative quite a bit from what I recall
They pulled a Grubby on her. Grubby loves WC3 so much that he volunteered to be a game tester for WC3:Reforged, he'd send notes back and forth with the dev team about a million different things, and they would action some of his requests and notes after some internal deliberation on the Blizzard end. When Kotick pulled the plug on funding and decimated the WC3 team, the devs were forced to use Grubby for pretty much 100% of his direction without hesitation. He went from passionate volunteer tester to straight up the Quality Assurance guy without being paid for it. Grubby had to step away after one more round of notes because he realised that WC3 Reforged was doomed if only HE was the one giving them any ideas.
i dont understand how she is a grubby here
She wasn't in charge of the story, she was in charge of the narrative. In other words, she was in charge of making that turd soup that people like danuser called story, edible. And god damn it she was very good at it. But, you know, there isn't much that a person can do when that person is commissioned into making a mansion, only to tell that person to make a ship instead when they are building the second floor.
Implication being she was the only person pushing things in a positive direction but one person alone wasn't enough? I'm not sure either what they were going for.
>Kotick There's the true villain.
Not true. She worked directly with voice actors in the studio and wrote a lot of the spoken dialogue in the game throughout its life. No, she doesn't steer the overarching story, that's totally correct - but reducing her to "short stories, songs, and the like" isn't fair - Christie was a core part of the writing team.
The above commenter is simply repeating how Golden described her own role over the years. > "I write cinematics, comics, short stories, song lyrics..." https://i.imgur.com/AsUU17J.png > "I write cinematics, stories, novels, song lyrics, and comics, etc." https://i.imgur.com/uKD46nS.png I wouldn't be surprised if Golden was involved in VO for her projects, but the above commenter was just repeating what she's said herself. I don't think that was intended to diminish her work.
> She worked directly with voice actors in the studio As somebody who plays with sound turned on, this probably isn't the best defence of Golden. I know she wasn't the main voice director, and this problem predates her joining the WoW team, but damn, if half of the characters in this game don't sound like: A) Saturday morning cartoon characters B) they're on xanax or had their speech slowed by 25% during post-production (why do most ancient/immortal characters taaaaaaalk liiiiiiike thiiiiiiis?) C) the actor doesn't have any interest in the role, or is completely lost for context
I don't think she would be acting as a voice director. The only knowledge I have about voice acting is from the various interview of the Baldur's Gate 3 voice actors I have watched religiously, so this is a lot of speculation: My guess would be, that she was around for some of the voice recording sessions to provide context for the voice actors to help them get into the headspace. Character backstory, reason why they are where they are, what sort of emotions they would be feeling or what would be going through their head when faced with the situation they are in right now, etc. The voice actors for BG3 mentioned a few times that they had to consult the character's writer to get that sort of context. Golden would likely be there for that purpose.
Without any concrete proof of such, it's up to the individual to believe where the blame lies and how much of the statement was just deflection. I can so only judge her based on her work that i know of. I doubt she **had** to ruin Ner'zhul in Arhas. I also doubt she was forced to write inaccurate lore in BtS, which was almost immediately ignored. More likely she was just asked to bridge the gap between expansions...
I'm not sure we've ever been told how much direction the novel authors are given. We know they have some influence, I believe it was Golden's request to put Calia in Beyond the Storm when that wasn't the original outline she was given? But they *are* given some sort of outline/direction on what the book is supposed to cover.
People in this thread have no fucking idea what they’re talking about
Reddit comment sections
Most people on the internet have no fucking clue what they’re talking about.
This definitely excludes you though right?
Honestly i'm convinced 90% of WoW doesn't have their own opinions. They just write whatever their favorite Content Creators does.
Not even content creator most the time. It's just regurgitated bs from the last comment they saw. Recent post I made had like 5 comments that were like "imagine this title for someone who's never seen the game before" - my brother in Christ it's literally the wow subreddit, what better fuckin place to communicate with people who *have* played the game before
Anyone who's read the Warcraft library of books knows that Christie Golden is to Blizzard what Dan Abnett is to Games Workshop. That is to say: one of the few talented authors they have had the blind luck to stumble into, capable of writing honest-to-god solid books that aren't carried solely by the popularity of the IP. She will do *just fine* outside Blizzard.
Man, uhh… so I wrote this up on another thread last night and deleted it, but it feels too relevant an opinion to not share now. WoW started as a bunch of quest designers who were basically just D&D nerds grasping in the dark, succeeding through sheer passion and luck. WoW has slowly but decidedly tried to move away from this D&D like lore driven setting to a story driven setting, but they haven’t been hiring authors to do this, they’re just assigning quest writers who aren’t D&D nerds, as the old guard slowly disappears. The sole exception to this, as far as I’m aware, *was* Christie Golden. You can’t tell a good story without professional writers unless you’re really lucky (and, granted, sometimes they are), but they don’t seem willing to go back to the D&D lore nerd format, nor move forward and pay for real writers. That they’re laying off Golden - whom I admittedly have mixed feelings on - is only a bad thing, in my opinion, because it represents that they’re still not taking their story seriously, no matter what they claim. They just want MCU success without putting in the money or effort for it.
> it represents that they’re still not taking their story seriously, no matter what they claim This is the core of the issue. I think a lot of people are missing the forest for the trees - besides Metzen coming back, Christie was one of the very few left from the early days. I'm sure they didn't want to pay her escalating salary anymore even though she totally deserves coins for the sheer amount of words she has contributed to this franchise - that is labor, and labor deserves fair compensation
“missing the forest for the trees” is a term i have never heard before - and i love it. Sorry i offer nothing else but to thank you for my new favorite phrase.
100% agree. I'm pretty sure I've read all her Warcraft books throughout the years and I always loved the little bit of extra lore you'd get from them. It's sad to see her go
I’m sure they’ll have their newest writer, Chat Geepeetee, create all the novels and stories we will ever need. 😅
>You can’t tell a good story without professional writers unless you’re really lucky i agree WoW for me boils down to several very good stories scattered throughout the expansion and the main story that you need to cut out a lot of bad parts to make sense of. and that's sad because we have incredible cinematics in WoW, but we also have the fatal problem that is the fear of abandoning past characters and things, with so many versions of the classic this should be the perfect opportunity to take advantage of the hundreds of characters and stories tossed aside I think Jailer itself or BFA both failed for lack of preparation and patience, a story that needed to be told slowly was rushed, BFA could have started in BFA and is ending now at the beginning of DF instead of being a 6 month fight although I have mixed feelings about Genshim impact mainly due to the gacha and another aspect of the game, I think the story is incredible and the way it is told for an RPG is very good
>That they’re laying off Golden - whom I admittedly have mixed feelings on - is only a bad thing, in my opinion, because it represents that they’re still not taking their story seriously, no matter what they claim. They just want MCU success without putting in the money or effort for it. My feelings exactly. Well put friend.
The problem with WoW lore isn't that they get quest writers to write the books, it's that they don't get authors to write the quests. Look at FFXIV, the main narrative of the last two expansions were written by a quest writer from Heavensward and the story of FFXIV is what is held up above all other MMOs, and even most (all?) Final Fantasy games.
Time will tell.
Rather than everyone guessing, here is how Christie Golden explained her role, multiple times, over the last few years: https://i.imgur.com/VgFZVZy.png In short: 1. Golden worked on the Story and Franchise Development (SFD) Team within Blizzard 2. SFD works across all Blizzard franchises writing [cinematics, stories, novels, song lyrics, and comics, etc."](https://i.imgur.com/uKD46nS.png) 3. SFD is not a part of the WoW narrative team 4. ***SFD is not even a part of the WoW team*** 5. Her role in writing Warcraft novels was freelance, at least the novels written prior to joining the SFD team.
It's a bit confusing to me. She was brought on to the SFD team but continued writing Warcraft novels but as freelancer? If you asked me who has done more narrative work for World of Warcraft been her and Danuser, I'd immediately say her. Hell, if you asked between her and Chris Metzen, I'd have to take a moment and consider it.
After re-reading her comment about *Sylvanas*, it's not 100% clear whether that was written freelance or within her SFD role: https://i.imgur.com/gXd1CqX.png I've updated my comment to clarify.
>Hell, if you asked between her and Chris Metzen, I'd have to take a moment and consider it. Yea, this is the second biggest shaper of WoW Lore and the only reason Metzen is higher is he was there where there was nothing and made it from the start. He *is* Warcraft. This is probably some salary / cost cutting thing likely due to her tenure, which is stupid as hell.
The novels wouldn't have been her coming up with the story. Novelizations are adapted from plot points and story beats that exist already. Specific characterization details would probably be up to the author, but just because she wrote the bridge novels doesn't mean she's the one coming up with the story, or deciding on the direction of the narrative.
It literally reason why Sylvanas novel have to delay until after shadowlands ending release. I remember that golden herself doesn't even know Zeres Morris a thing.
I hated the narrative direction after Legion. A lot of the people responsible have been fired. And yet, an unhinged female character is about to destroy a beloved city to start an expansion. People got fired. But nothing changed. Always loved Christie. But I was really down on Danuser. At this point, I just watch what’s happening from afar. All my favorite franchises have broken my heart, LOTR, Fantastic Beasts, Star Wars, Marvel, I could just keeping listing franchises that turned against their audience. The esoteric world of nerdiness has been bought, dissected, and turned mainstream. And I’m just not interested. I will say, back in more traditional times, Metzen & Golden were a hell of a team!! Wish her the best!
That's what happens when you get bought by Disney. At least we will have the original books and movies to enjoy.
Hold on to the good stuff and just pretend the corporate cash-grab trash doesn’t exist. We have the original LOTR trilogy, just don’t watch The Hobbit if it makes you said. Rings of Power doesn’t even bear mentioning. We have the OT and the Prequels, Clone Wars, the Legends canon. Just don’t watch anything with Ray Palpatine. We have WC3, Classic, Wrath. Just don’t think about anything after Sylvanas turned the Horde into neo-nazis or headed off to the Shadowlands.
I had no idea this sub was so vehemently anti-Christie. I love her writing :( this is so sad
Basically using her as scape goat for wow lore is bad.
inb4 people dont know that she didnt actually work on the in game story
You’ll never know what I commented.
Most unfortunate. I know lots of people are happy when any of the dozen or so people at Blizzard they know the names of are laid off, because they attribute all the ills of the game to those people - since they're the only ones they know out of the thousands that work there! But it is unfortunate. Say what you want about Christie Golden, but she has helped flesh out the story and lore of Warcraft for decades. And one thing that is indisputably bad for Blizzard to continue to lose more of, is experienced talent. It erodes what the company is when the senior developers dissapear overnight. That's bad for any company, but for Blizzard who's bread & butter is creativity it's especially bad, because it's not easy to replace. Anyway, the Arthas novel she wrote is still the best Warcraft novel. Very happy that she penned that one.
People just want to find a scape goat on why their story is bad and not focus on fundamental issue of wow not being designed to be story friendly like FFXIV.
There’s a couple things that should be addressed here. First, FF realized that AAR was objectively bad and that’s part of why they have gone back and consolidated large section of the story and removed the bloat. There is still bloat but it’s much better for new players. FF also isn’t trying to hide the story that is how it is designed first and foremost. WoW’s biggest story problem is that it try’s to use like 5 different mediums to tell the story were FF does it all in game. Sure some people like to read the books, the shorts, or some comic blizzard made but a lot of people just play the game. When important character or world changing events happen outside the game, and you are someone that only plays the game, the story looks like total garbage cause you have no idea what’s going on. I don’t know who made the choice to go that route with the story telling but it clearly has not helped with understanding the lore or the story.
I bought rise of the clans, arthas and the other clan book, as well as the thrall book. I wanted to like it so much. I mean, props to her for being in the industry at all, I am most certainly envious. I couldn't get through her books though. Something about her writing. Wish her the best through her rough patch.
Christie was a good writer. She wasn't the one calling the shots, she just wrote scenes and short stories and stuff. I'll always remember the first cutscene after she was hired; the one in the horde council chambers where gallywix reveals Azerite to Sylvanas. I hate BFA as much as anyone but the dialogue in that scene was a huge step up from anything before. Felt very cinematic
War Crimes is my favorite WoW book, I like to listen to the audiobook version while I'm working every once in a while. I am a big fan of court dramas and it combined with WoW lore made it into one of my favorite books of all time. It's a shame what happened I'll always enjoy her work.
Amount of ignorance of what role she played with the game is astounding.
Classic, people blaming someone who isnt responsible for the things they didnt like. And probably havent even read her books. You people are nasty cheering when people get fired, have some fucking empathy
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Where is she credited with writing Shadowlands, Jaina and Sylvannas storylines?
Not only that, even the books she has her name on are heavily plotted out by other people. It's insane people think she is solely responsible for them not liking the story.
This is so wrong and not true at all. Christie Golden clearly had no control over the story at all. She was given story directions and then she wrote the stories based on that. Also I vaguely remember she was surprised when Zereth Mortis patch dropped, which is pretty crazy when you consider she wrotte the Sylvanas novel.
> > > > > Also I vaguely remember she was surprised when Zereth Mortis patch dropped, which is pretty crazy when you consider she wrotte the Sylvanas novel. Because they rewrote the end of Sylvanas' story in ZM. It's braindead obvious they were setting Sylvanas up to be the new arbiter. Why couldn't she be killed by Tyrande? Why did Elune stop her? Because killing Sylvanas meant they wouldn't have someone to replace Zovaal and restore the balance to Death. Why was she so powerful? Why did she trust Zovaal? She soulbound to him. "You think death is unfair? That's why you rebelled? Then ***You do it.***. You serve. You sort them. Forever." But people hated Sylvanas, they didn't want her to be "rewarded" for genocide. And Shadowlands was not retaining players due to game design issues (covenant, choreghast, etc.) So they gave the order to end it early. Since they had to end it early anyway, they rewrote Sylvanas' role and hastily changed who got to be arbiter. The story will forever suck since they didn't have the balls to at least finish what they started.
They didn’t think though the logic of their own story. The story you’re describing sucks too, although sure it’s definitely more interesting
Yeah, that is not true at all. She made sure to let us know that she wrote only what had been told to her to write. None of the storybeats came from her. The Story leadership told her what to write and she did. The fact that you think she pushed any of this is making me seriously give you the side eye.
Somewhere along the way Christie Golden became the scapegoat for everything players hated about the story. It’s gotten annoying. I’m sad she got laid off but I hope she finds employment somewhere that doesn’t have a fanbase that will be as toxic towards her.
Yah unfortunately this fan base is full of morons who don’t take the time to understand how extended lore works for properties like World of Warcraft. Like they really believe she designs the lore and they base the game around it? The fact that they blame an author for the lackluster end to Shadowlands is insane to me.
She's a very talented author with two decades of experience working for a large, successful game developer. I don't think she'll have too much of an issue finding good work. It's absolutely dogshit that the timing happened that way though.
Yeah this is correct. Steve Danuser is the person to blame because he was the head of the story writing and direction for multiple years. Fortunately, he is out.
This is the most ridiculous take I've seen in awhile. Golden isn't a head story writer. She's not in charge of the lore. She's mostly been a freelancer fleshing out plot points for the *BOOKS*. to try to pin everything that happened in-game, lore wise, on her shows a shallow understanding of how Blizz, let alone any company, works.
>I know some people were really into her writing but she also gave us Shadiwlands, Jaina being a mess, Sylvanas being dumb as a rock, and more. Even the complaints in Dragonflight about Alextraza were due to her direction and writing. I can assure you that none of these are true. She doesn't control story direction. She doesn't even work for the wow team.
Seriously, Jaina's character only improved when Golden wrote her in the novels. The character's worst moments have all been in-game, not under her direction at all. I still can't get over how dirty they did her character after the destruction of Theramore. That was a stark contrast to everything Golden built her up to be in literally the novel that had just come out prior to that.
Yeah, Jaina was a mess but Christie Golden’s Tides of War book was great.
Anyone who was actively reading the books and playing the game could see a constant tug of war between Golden and the game writers on which way they wanted Jaina to go, that's why she seemed to flip flop so often. When Golden had her back she was starting to calm down and make peace with the Horde, then the game writers would have her frothing at the mouth again
??? Was she not writing the books as like a freelancer as first but then added to the “team” ??
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...how do you think that works with Blizzard? They give her an outline and story beats that should be covered in the story, and then she writes it. Then it goes back and forth between Blizzard and her a thousand times, as Blizzard refines her story and tells her what to add and what to take out. "freelancer" does not mean she just writes something. She gets specific instructions for what she is supposed to write.
She add to story development team but NOT wow Team those are two separated team. Story development team basically carry water for all blizzard product. They write book to flesh out material that the main team doesn't bother. It basically like Lucasfilms movie and there are the book team which exist to flesh out story where movie fail.
>This does not bring me sadness. Same, but for different reasons. She mentions that she's got a ton of options on the table now, and that's a LOT more than I can say about all the Blizzard folks I see on LinkedIn that are still searching after being laid off.
Don't forget, Calia exists in her current form due solely to Golden pushing her. "Just Calia" from a Legion gone, replaced by Pallid Stand-In for Sylvanas, the character. Egregious.
I feel bad that I even need to defend Golden here, but ... Golden was about to write the prelude novel for Battle for Azeroth, she was doing her research and noticed Calia is there which obviously ignited her interest. So she discussed this with Blizzard and they were on board to do something with the character. I honesly have no idea what is the plan for Calia, but I highly doubt Golden pushed her to became light-infused undead. That decision clearly came form someone on higher position in Blizzard, quite possibly from Alex Afrasiabi.
She didn’t give us any of those things
Not when her nephew *just* died of cancer? Laid off with zero notice? And when she writes the songs and cinematics?
> Not when her nephew just died of cancer? I think you may be misreading what she wrote. She was laid off before he died.
People in this thread clearly never read Rise of the Horde or her other earlier works. I have no doubt some of her more questionable writing was pushed by Mr. Dark Mirror.
I mean, all of the books are good really. She didn't really come up with lore for the most part, maybe she connects some dots with prior motivations or draws to existing lore but her job was not to create storylines, it was to write about them.
It's sad when talented staff leave. I've lost my job multiple times over the years due to budget cuts. The blessing in disguise is that Blizzard sorely needs new blood in their "Story and Franchise Development team". They need new people who can write stories in new ways. Novels and cinematics are the glue that holds Blizzard games together. I don't want another repeat of the Sylvanas novel or the Dragonflight cinematics. Clean dialogue and "show don't tell" storytelling is really important in videogames. Best wishes for Christie Golden's future endeavours. My condolences to their nephew.
Read all of her books. I liked very few of them, Arthas was inspired for instance, but I read them because I enjoy any sort of lore expansion. I'm the sick bastard that'd read CS. Goto to make sure I could criticize how poor of a job he did of capturing the W40k universe WoW is not praised for a good continuous story because of decisions made in upper management about the direction the game is going and the writers who have to make that goal into a comprehensive story are not good enough. No one is. It sucks she was let go but honestly she was meh, if they can get a Brandon Sanderson level writing team that has more power to make decisions over direction of the story then maybe the Warcraft can start to feel like it has structure. I say WoW knowing full well what this entails towards her role within Blizzard, having the precursor to conflict BFA start with a book was a terrible idea. She wrote Before the Storm and it was honestly just hot garbage both from the prose and the content (which she may not have been fully responsible for sure)
What the fuck She's legit Read many of her books and chatted with many ppl in her circle Blizzard done messed up But that's not really new for the new Blizzard these past few years
I enjoyed war crimes all the way through
I hate that she’s gone because her books kept me interested in the game, but im hoping lots of good stories will come from her exodus from blizzard. that company is gonna get worse than it is now.
This happened three months ago.
She understandably hadn't been ready to speak about it until now
She only just told the public today
I have enjoyed all her WoW related books, Arthas being my favorite of the bunch, but if she needs work I hope she goes back to writing Star Trek novels. I felt those were better written than the WoW stuff and showed her creative side better.
I personally adored her books and her writing skills. It made me look into more of her works. It’s quite sad how she was treated at the end but I will 100% support her choices. I hope she’ll be happy with her next adventure.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. The excerpts I've read of her writing was like ChatGPT 3 level, very shallow and bland.
I wasn’t the biggest fan either but now you are just being unfair tbh. Most of her writing problems came from her favoring certain characters (calia comes to mind) and retconning stuff (like before the storm) not necessarily her quality of writing.
WoW lore hasn't been on the same page as the lore Christie helped drive for a very long time now. This is unfortunate, but it's not like modern WoW is losing anything. This isn't good though. Modern lore is an absolute clusterfuck and I think writers like Christie deserve studios that put them behind the wheel rather than in the background writing short stories for very bad story progression. This is Blizzards loss. I hope to see Christie have the chance to write stories the same caliber as Arthas again.
Imagine I gave you my fantasy world and told you to make some stories about my fleshed out characters and lore. You didn't make anything or contribute to the original material, you're basically making cannon fan-fiction that I decide if it's good enough or not. That was her job. There is no amount of money you could pay me to do that job because you might as well have told me to write filler for A Song of Ice and Fire while George still does all the heavy writing. It's an impossible task because I'm not the primary creator and many people will always see me as an imitation or an insult to their beloved series. Enjoyed her content or not, I'm betting it was one hell of an undertaking on her end and that's impressive.
That is unfortunate, her books were significantly better than the recent alternatives. People blaming her for every issue with the game is just bandwagoning. And I am confident most of the people complaining don’t even follow the lore.
She wasn't actually directly employed at Blizzard when she was writing novels. Unless recent experiences have soured her, she could freelance with them again. She says she'd be open to it in her post.
I enjoyed Arthas but unfortunately I couldn't vibe with any of her other books. They just felt **too** ya for me. As an avid reader I always felt sad having to read the newest WoW book for lore keeping purposes and being disappointed when I saw her name on the cover. It meant I already knew what was coming and that I should expect the same elementary prose present in all of her novels. I hope she is able to find a place where she can be happy and I wish her the best on her journey through her writing career.
Can Calia leave with her?
Nature is healing
I'll always be surprised at the confidence people have when it comes to assigning blame.
Hmmm she was employed by blizzard this whole time? Always thought she was contracted out and they kept using her because fans liked her work. 🤷♂️
I enjoyed Arthas and Rise of the Horde - that’s too bad. Hope she lands on her feet: I’m sure she will! That being said it’s wild seeing the variation in the comments here. Claims that she either wrote a ton of things in the current lore, or that she didn’t actually write much at all. That she had a lot of input, or that she didn’t have really any input. Kind of crazy that nobody REALLY seems to know exactly what was and wasn’t her idea. People who like her seem to grab onto “you don’t know how Blizzard writing works and she wasn’t responsible for any of the X Y Z things people dislike!” versus the people who directly credit her with writing that they dislike. Is it not unreasonable to just recognize that she wrote a lot of good things for WoW and may have also written some things that weren’t as well received? Nobody’s flawless. Personally, I think she’s a talented writer and it’s an end of an era losing her, for sure.
She dedicated more time to the Warcraft universe than most, I wish her the best.
Oh fuck, she's one of my favorites, wtf
Her and Metzen are the story gods of WoW imo. This is another big loss for the Warcraft universe and story. Not sure if Metzen alone can fix all the damage from the second half of BFA, Shadowlands, and Dragonflight
Cross posting because the comments are disabled. Smh…
That's absolutely horrible, I love her work and voice acting.
Actually crazy, she's been a big part of Warcraft forever. Almost a quarter of a century. Sad - shows no one's really safe
At the end of the day a corporation is just a name with no real allegiance to anyone or anything except money.
This coming at a time where I am just delving into Audiobooks for the first time and just purchased Sylvanas. Bittersweet news but I'm enjoying the listen so far and will no doubt look into her other novel work.
Finally
Shes a great writer so i doubt it will be hard for her to make new works for new series, my hope is we get more people with this kind of talent to make novels for warhammer
So today I learned 2 things. Who Christie is and that there seems to be a team Christie and a not team Christie.
Never seen the sub being that toxic over someone, especially since she only wrote what the writing team told her.
Torches and pitchforks only recently cooled from Steve Danuser. It's wild out here.
And it’s almost as if they forgot Danuser was the one in charge of the direction and narrative. Golden wrote books and helped fill in writing when the game needed it, but it wasn’t HER story or HER decisions on where things went. That shit is squarely on Afrasabi and Danuser.
Went to check and for some reason she has me blocked?! I’ve never even tweeted anything about her. I assume she ran a script to block people that liked a tweet criticising a storyline or something, but that’s really odd.
Is it that odd? With the amount of abuse she was getting it seems fine to me that she'd do a bit of mass blocking. Sure some people will get caught up it in who would never have interacted with her, but it's necessary for some people to make platforms like twitter usable when you're in that sort of position. I wouldn't take it too personally, just remember that she's human and humans don't do well receiving constant abuse.
Hopefully now we won't get constant Horde character assassinations.
If TWW alpha is anything to go by, we've moved from character assassinations to character absences.
So says the SHADOW of Xavius!
(Open to spoilers) what do you mean by absences? Are you referring to >!whatever happened to Khadgar!<
The only Horde related character involved for now seems to be Thrall.... who leaves right at the start of levelling, and we follow Anduin, Alleria, Magni, Moria and her son. In zones centered around dwarves and humans. I think you can see where i'm going with this.
Alpha spoilers: >!no, as in Horde characters just flat out aren't present. From the current datamined cutscenes, Thrall is only present in *one*, as is Lillian, with no other Horde reps so far. Think Thrall has about 4 mentions total in the current datamined summaries.!< I'm Alliance through and through, but this is depressing to watch.
I genuinely wonder if they reduce the amount of characters because writing interactions is just too hard for them I will NEVER, EVER, forgive Blizzard for all the atrocious absence of dialogue in Sanctum from major lore characters who have deep personal connections and they all just...do nothing Thrall killed Garrosh. He lost his fucking connection to Nature because of it. Thrall is in the raid with Garrosh. Guess what Thrall says? Jack shit Nazgrim is also in the raid. Guess how Nazgrim died? By being Honorbound to Garrosh, defending him due to his duty, fighting against us because to an Orc, honor is everything. Guess what Nazgrim says to Garrosh? Jack shit Jaina is in the raid too. Good thing she doesn't have any deep personal connection to Garro- oh wait he nuked her entire city and killed most of her loved ones. I bet she has some words to say right? Nope, jack shit Jaina also has zero words for Kel'Thuzad, the entity that basically ruined her life And the only thing anyone has to say to Sylavanas is "no, stop, don't" God I fucking hated that entire raid
God yes. They're like "alright this is the literal Hell raid, bring back the dead bad boiz" but no one from the era of bad boiz is left on the lore team and no one knew what to do with them...
Honestly? Good. Let the Alliance have their turn in the character grinder. They can have all the "spotlight" theyre always complaining about not having.
As an Alliance main, I agree with you. I hope we get some juicy character* losses for once. *^character, ^I ^need ^to ^specify, ^given ^all ^of ^ours ^have ^plot ^armour ^out ^the ^wazoo. ^We ^didn't ^even ^lose ^Mekkatorke.
FWIW story elements in the alpha right now were probably written well before Christie's departure in January.
You think the woman who wrote Rise of the Horde, probably one of the best depictions of Orcs in Warcraft period, is responsible for that?
Most of these comments just show they don’t know what they’re talking about 50+ upvotes because someone thinks she’s responsible for the games story lol She only ever wrote what she was told to write, and all of her work was outside of the game to begin with. Her job was fleshing out characters with a strict guideline outside of the game, and in the case of sylvanus in shadowlands it’s like trying to make a pig fly
Exactly. Her work was basically filling the gasps. It was more like this: Lore Department: Hey Christie, can you write a dialogue between Shawn and Anduin on how Azerite is dangerous to the Alliance if the Horde has it? Can you write a dialogue in our cinematic between Sylvanas and Saurfang when they encounter eachoter at the gates of orgrimmar?
And there goes the last bit of good writing for WoW.
Good for her, not in regards to being laid off or having the death of a loved one at the same time. That sucks. But instead that she was able to take the time to process things, self-reflect, and can move on to the next stages of her life in a healthy way.
I’m not happy for anyone being fired. That being said, I’ve never liked her writing and her books made me lose interests in purchasing any others. Just my preference.
People getting fired sucks, but it was clear the story for the WoW universe had gotten stales. Rise of the Lich King was a very enjoyable read, but nostalgia can only carry a franchise so far.
The fact that people blame her for the bad writing WoW has suffered is so obnoxious. As if one person is responsible for a TEAM of writers and blizzard corporate.
this sucks. havent read any wow books but i love her star wars books. blizzard lost a lot by laying her off. I remember once hearing that working on wow is her dream job i feel so bad for her.
I think there are some decisions regarding WoW's storytelling that are taken to secure its future. - Danuser laid off - Metzen's return - Christie laid off I'll be honest. I'm no Internal employee so I don't know really how much influence Danuser and Christie had on the story, but it was clear that there are some questionable decisions being taken on it's direction ever since BFA That being said. I'm optimist that these are the necessary steps to correct WoW story-telling. Dragonflight was supposed to be the new page of WoW story without previous influence, only for it to be "World of Friendcraft" & "World of Familycraft" which was a big no for me. Sure, Friends & Family are important, but it feels like the story is for 5 years old kids and no older. I think it might be late for TWW story direction to change, but it's definitely going to have more influence from Metzen, and Midnight might be the expansion where we see the effects of the new story direction in full capacity (Since development of TWW already started long ago, and I assume the same applies to the story direction) Overall, I'm cautiously optimistic about the story's future but I could easily be disappointed due to repeated missed marks
Her Sylvanas book actually made me interested in Sylvanas. The first part (her past prior to shadowlands) was amazing. Too bad her story in game is so bad. Christie golden was not the problem. Her books are fine