World of Warcraft: Midnight is clearly the work of Blizzard veteran Chris Metzen

The Blizzard veteran keeps a low profile these days, but there’s no mistaking his storytelling style

In 2023, Blizzard’s Chris Metzen took to the stage at BlizzCon to announce not one, but three World of Warcraft expansions: 2024’s The War Within, new release Midnight, and the forthcoming The Last Titan. It was a significant moment: a return to the spotlight for the fan-favorite Metzen, who had retired in 2016 but returned in 2022, first as a creative advisor and then as executive creative director of the Warcraft universe.

Metzen was part of an old guard at Blizzard, including names like Mike Morhaime, Frank Pearce, and Rob Pardo, who all left in the mid-to-late 2010s. He remains the only one of them to go back. Originally hired as an artist, Metzen became the studio’s storyteller-in-chief, central to building out the Warcraft, StarCraft, and Diablo universes and defining the studio’s trademark narrative style, heavily influenced by Metzen’s beloved Marvel comics: deep lore and conflict on a cosmic scale balanced with larger-than-life characters and soapy, relatable melodrama. (He’s also the voice actor for Warcraft’s orc hero, Thrall.)

Since that BlizzCon appearance, Metzen — once Blizzard’s most visible rockstar dev — has withdrawn from public view, declining interviews (I’ve tried!) and letting other members of the World of Warcraft team step into the spotlight. But his fingerprints are all over the Worldsoul Saga — and Midnight in particular.

The new expansion draws deep from Metzen’s bulging warchest of characters and lore, and also from World of Warcraft’s very real 21-year history. It’s a homecoming for WoW in the sense that it’s the first expansion since 2010 to center its new adventures on the old continents of Azeroth — the setting for the original 2004 release, and for much of the three strategy games that preceded it. Midnight reimagines an old starting area and raid dungeon as lush new adventuring zones and recasts the previously deserted Silvermoon City as a spectacular new capital. The vibes are nostalgic and classically Warcraft, bringing the location, geopolitics, and themes of classic World of Warcraft back into focus.

The storytelling, too, recalls the time when Metzen served as creative director and writer across almost every Blizzard game. Sometimes literally so: one quest features a flashback to 1995’s Warcraft 2. But his influence is also present in a concentrated focus on flawed heroes grappling with their complicated histories, as well as with the current existential threat facing Azeroth.

Arator, the half-elf son of two of Warcraft’s most storied heroes (Alleria Windrunner and Turalyon), is given a starring role and some family baggage to work through with his stoic dad. The Zul’aman questline foregrounds the Amani trolls’ new leader Zul’jarra reckoning with the legacy of her evil grandfather Zul’jin, a former raid boss in the game. Behind characters like these, a chorus of names that go back decades in Warcraft — including the blood elf regent Lor’themar, the undead priest Alonsus Faol, and Arator’s parents — comment and squabble and advance their political agendas. Midnight also avoids the pitfall of having Warcraft megastars like Thrall and Jaina Proudmoore turn up just to dole out quests; scarcity for some of these names adds to their mystique.

This kind of cogent, human-scale storytelling around Warcraft’s heroes — and indeed its villains — has been missing from WoW for a decade. The nadir of this era was 2020’s Shadowlands, in which an inexplicable, forgettable bad guy called the Jailer teamed up with Sylvanas Windrunner, the former elf hero and queen of the Forsaken who had been behaving so grotesquely out of character that the fanbase was in open revolt. Meanwhile, the famous heroes of Azeroth stood around looking confused and ordering the player to do something about it.

After Metzen’s return, The War Within started to claw things back with a campaign questline that saw the player shadowing Alleria and Alliance leader Anduin Wrynn as they hunted the new big bad, Xal’atah. Midnight finds Metzen the Warcraft DM back where he wants to be: in the thick of an epic narrative that stretches back centuries and far into the future, close to people with feelings as big as their destinies. It’s recognizable as the work of the man who wrote Arthas Menethil’s tragic fall from grace, or the doomed love between StarCraft’s alcoholic space marine Jim Raynor and spy-turned-mutant Sarah Kerrigan.

Playing Midnight, there can be no doubt that Metzen is back. Will the return of BlizzCon this year tempt him back onto the public stage, to preview the next phase of his eternal saga? We’ll find out in September.