(fyi you are under no obligation to answer this at all. thought i'd ask bc youre THE garrosh person (iconic!) and i dont recall seeing anything related to this? or mobile is being dumb) me + a friend on twitter were talking about garrosh and the stonetalon mountains questline and how blizz came out and said that apparently that whole questline was a mistake, yadda yadda. i was wondering if you did have any thoughts on that, even in general or like specifically @ blizzard or about garrosh's characterization during that zone.
hi, thank you so much for the question! I always like talking and answering questions about he. as such, this will be quite long...
here is the interview where alex afrasiabi declares stonetalon's creation as "miscommunication". personally, it's very hard to believe that among all the different teams necessary in a zone's completion—quest designers, quest writers, environment designers, prop designers, voice actors, QA, and so on—absolutely no one stopped at any point and went "hey, uh, what exactly is this that we're building here?" unless it's Marvel-levels of secretive where they filmed fake scenes or prohibited actors from reading the full script to allegedly prevent spoilers, or Oblivion-levels of convoluted where they compiled voice lines in alphabetical order, i figure that eventually someone somewhere down the line MUST have pieced together that all the blind mice had discovered an elephant.
that elephant in the room however, now in 2024, is afrasiabi himself. in the wake of all that had been revealed in the activision-blizzard lawsuit of which afrasiabi is a main offender, i think we now have more context for why cataclysm might have been a "pretty crazy time". i don't have any concrete evidence for this of course, but considering afrasiabi's track record a la sylvanas torching teldrassil, one has to assume that he simply took the reins on what he, personally, wanted for garrosh—"Garrosh was my guy"—and brute-forced it to make it happen. just as entire teams were beholden to sylvanas burning the tree—engineering quests, designing gear, animating and storyboarding and scripting and voice acting the Warbringers cinematic, not to mention the entirety of the following 2 expansions that hinged on that action—the labor for a throwaway zone like stonetalon is a drop in the bucket in comparison. stonetalon was probably finished in a handful of weeks. recording garrosh's voice lines probably happened in an afternoon.
i don't have any text-based evidence for this either as it occurred in an open Q&A session over discord, but ex-wow dev john staats also remarked that in the early days of wow's development, individual teams were kind of left to their own devices. it was really easy for devs to simply publish whatever they wanted into the game (innocuous things like the happy face under karazhan intended to be seen only by map designers, or the karazhan crypts with the infamous upside-down sinners). for instance, one employee was adamant about ogres becoming the fourth playable race for the horde until they decided on trolls, hence why ogres have several unique animations as well as a dance, all animated by the same one guy who was passionate about it. sometimes events and items were completed in single weekends; staats said a couple of dungeons (iirc stockades and rfc) were implemented this way. these topics might be touched on in staats' book The WoW Diary, but i dont have it.
i think cataclysm as a whole is a monument to blizzard's growing pains and to afrasiabi in particular bucking against the corporate restraints of wow's astronomical success. cataclysm is tonally abhorrent in a number of different ways and it's not always easy to point fingers at who is responsible for what, but it's undeniable the amount of leverage afrasiabi had. even if it wasn't him specifically, it's evidenced by both the details of the lawsuit and the game itself that certain elements of what was prominent in 00s gamer culture and the general "boy's club" wolf of wall street atmosphere at blizzard heavily influenced cataclysm's execution. the boys were resting on their laurels from the skyrocketing popularity and success of wrath, getting tv spots, mtn dew collabs, and so on, and felt empowered to infuse even more of their indulgences into their unstoppable juggernaut. wow had enough power in the industry to dictate what made a successful mmo and and who these games were "For", leading to a circuitous perpetuation of toxic masculinity by creating a game that catered to that kind of audience and thus propagating that mindset within it. no one could challenge WoW nor the people at its helm, be they industry competitors or blizz employees themselves.
at the same time, however, bobby kotick had just recently become CEO, simultaneously tightening the ship and imposing new structure as decorum slipped and hedonism flourished. the old guard lost some freedom to the demand for an overall throughline and schedule of what content to expect and commit to and when to release rather than the loose "jam sessions" of previous patches. as such, afrasiabi couldn't just drag and drop his blorbo wherever he wanted into their digital playground. he says others didn't get the memo, but he is probably the one who got the memo of "our fanbase of millions of players hates your idiot character and we would like to phase him out please" and disregarded it. he admits to wanting to turn garrosh around, and in his mind might view stonetalon as a last stand to prove the worth of his character, but it was in opposition of what was most likely decided upon at an executive level, a cog in a number of different turning cranks to get cataclysm done on time and off of shelves.
afrasiabi says "there was a little bit of miscommunication on my part that kind of led to Garrosh going down another, darker path. So there's an interesting tidbit for you." i imagine this "miscommunication" to be along the lines of 'fine, people can hate him, but he stays'. i feel this is also why the team instantly leapt at the chance to permanently eradicate garrosh—along with anything else tainted by afrasiabi—after he was quietly fired in 2020. i would not be surprised if the team was essentially forced by contract or social pressure or otherwise to keep garrosh in the game as long as afrasiabi held the whip. again, this is all conjecture. i don't actually know what went on behind the scenes at blizzard.
unfortunately the end result is that, yes, thanks to stonetalon we DID end up seeing a garrosh that could have changed for the better, just as afrasiabi wanted, but ultimately would have been—"from a story character development perspective" (well said, alex. lol)—banal and redundant for wow. i assume afrasiabi just wanted his self-insert alongside metzen's (thrall), which is a level of meta that i do not feel like unpacking tonight. so while it does add a little more glimmer to the theory of garrosh as "the horde's arthas", stonetalon's impact mostly serves as fodder to stoke endless Garrosh Did Nothing Wrong ragebait on twitter.
much like arthas, what makes garrosh so compelling to the majority of (non-fascist) people who like him is his fall from grace. despite his efforts to free himself from the shackles of his lineage, garrosh steps in it over and over to a point where he is instead encouraged to deliberately emulate the legacy he had spurned and embrace his rage. knowing that a character has the capacity to be honorable and good and instead chooses with full conscience to be evil makes for a much more interesting character than a clueless crying fawn that clumsily ambles its way into becoming prince of gumdrop forest. of course it's more satisfying for afrasiabi to have his self-insert get both a rags-to-riches story AND 2.5 expansions' worth of gary stu headpats; for everyone else, gristle mcthornbody uncritically absolving the sins of the father and dunking on the cursed prophecy while flexing and spouting edgy one-liners as he overpowers and outsmarts everyone is downright cartoonish. it's the lecherous tiefling bard who wants to remain in the tavern to hit on npcs instead of engaging with the campaign your dungeonmaster created: fun for him, and an interminable bore to everyone else deprived of the adventure.
in afrasiabi's hands, there is no greater narrative to garrosh hellscream. he's a big buff warrior because afrasiabi wishes he were a big buff warrior. garrosh is a racist, sexist scumbag because afrasiabi is a racist, sexist scumbag. garrosh has tattoos of no specific shape or meaning because afrasiabi only has a superficial appreciation for tattoos as something badass and cool. he kills people and blows stuff up because that's alpha sigma tiropita and badass and cool. the history of the orcs and fel was retconned so that garrosh could be a Shiny. grom and thrall had a special bond all throughout warcraft 3, but here comes grom's secret son to usurp the title of #1 favorite orc!! and he's just like grom but actually he's even MORE cool and badass??? this is 'playing power rangers at recess'-tier character development. it is transparently afrasiabi's wish fulfillment independent of the ongoing storyline, which at minimum is not befitting of a multi-million dollar AAA gaming franchise.
the inverse to garrosh's story being a fall from grace is that it is a story of unmet potential which is, both in a doylist and watsonian sense, exactly the oedipal kind of destiny afrasiabi ushered in for his doomed character. garrosh was doomed from the start to be a lackluster simulacrum of grom, both in azeroth and at blizzard, grasping for nostalgia for the RTS days while actively refusing to engage with the culture and landscape of modern day WoW. the more afrasiabi meddled, the more it illuminated just how hollow his vision of this character was and the failure to reach the potential of the kind of character garrosh could be. afrasiabi says "Garrosh was my guy" but his own ego will forever prevent him from understanding all of the dimensionality to his character that he threw away. and this, too, in true afrasiabi fashion, is reflected in garrosh's character. his ego overshadows his ability to listen to the people around him and results in his inevitable, shameless downfall... because that's exactly what afrasiabi would do. did.
so, no, alex. garrosh is not your guy. he's mine. he's all of ours. because world of warcraft belongs to all of us. and because i engage with the character of garrosh hellscream within his narrative, i can look at the beginning and end of his story and say that stonetalon is canon. because despite the years of frustration and confusion, there is so much closure for me in knowing that the reason he sucks so bad is because his creator—grom, afrasiabi—abandoned him, his story, his soul. trying to pare him down and sand his edges and curdle him into something he was never meant to be. he was never meant to exist, and he shouldn't exist, and that's what makes him so irresistibly, infuriatingly compelling, and why i love him so. garrosh hellscream is the only character in the entire story, both within the narrative and without, from beginning to end, in any timeline or on any planet, who is acutely aware that he is not meant to exist.
