'World of Warcraft has existed through the entire evolution. We've found that storytelling inspirations are much different than they are to day.
'It would be fair to say that the way the story felt in Vanilla was much more of a hyperbolic fantasy, comic book-esque story. That was exactly right for the time, it was successful and people gravitated towards it.
'As a decade or more has gone on, the sensibilities of the audience have gravitated more towards thoughtful, compelling narratives, and we've been able to start to evolve and follow suit and start telling those more with this game.'
With the 2.5D videos, which started a few expansions ago, Blizzard likes to tell some of a character's history, and try and connect the players to the characters a bit more.
'We wanted to continue that,' he said. 'These characters that are going to be really prominent, telling a bit more of their internal thoughts. So we were able to do the Jaina one and the Sylvanas one, and there's one more coming.
'I think in terms of the Old Soldier cinematic we released, that was something we'd never done before. The high fidelity CGI, pre-rendered cinematics, they're usually only relegated to one per expansion, the introduction. We just had an opportunity to make another one, and this seemed like the right place to do it.
'We had seen the big intro at Blizzcon, and this is the night before. It's immersive and gives you a little more insight into those characters, that was a lot of our thought. We knew that some players were gonna feel exactly the way Saurfang was feeling, some players are going to feel like Sylvanas, and we wanted to use that story as a vehicle to remind them, this is war.'
