Chris Metzen will probably be returning to World of Warcraft to tackle a task on the MMORPG’s management crew, Blizzard has introduced. Metzen, who began with Blizzard as an artist in 1994 and spent 23 years with the corporate earlier than retiring in 2016, will work as a ‘inventive advisor’ on World of Warcraft, with plans to develop his function to different video games sooner or later.
Warcraft normal supervisor John Hight introduced Metzen’s return. “Chris was one of many unique crew members engaged on the Warcraft universe again when it started in 1994, and we’re so completely happy to be reuniting him with the world he helped create,” Hight wrote in a short assertion.
Metzen initially joined Blizzard in 1994 to work as an artist on Warcraft: Orcs and People, taking over story design tasks for the sequel, Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness. He’s contributed voice performing to quite a few video games in each the Warcraft and Starcraft collection, and was inventive director for Overwatch throughout its growth.
He’s additionally one in every of Blizzard’s most well-known personalities, and is credited with establishing and sustaining the corporate’s tradition and imaginative and prescient over his greater than twenty years there.
Metzen retired from Blizzard, together with a number of different senior builders, shortly after the launch of World of Warcraft’s Legion growth in 2016. He later defined in interviews that he had “burned out onerous” within the years main as much as the cancellation of Titan, one other MMORPG Blizzard had been growing.
“Chris’s focus initially will probably be on World of Warcraft, then his work will develop to different tasks throughout this rising franchise,” Hight wrote.