There is nothing better in this world than seeing poetic justice come true. At BlizzCon this past weekend during the WoW Quest Question and Answer Panel an avid WoW and lore aficionado now known as “The Red Shirt Guy” exposed an embarrassing error of omission in WoW: Cataclysm.
For me, this will go down as one of the greatest moments in MMO history up there with the in-game killing of Lord British in Ultima Online.
Here’s how it all went down…
After reading the Christie Golden book The Shattering: Prelude to Cataclysm he pointed out that Falstad one of the main dwarf leaders of Azeroth was missing in action from the Cataclysm beta:
Red Shirt Guy: Hello… I just finished reading The Shattering yesterday and I noticed something. It said that Falstad Wildhammer was going to be on the Council of Three Hammers, but in the beta it’s Kurdran Wildhammer, and Falstad is not in the game at all. What happened to him?
Chris Metzen: Isn’t Falstad dead? From the Day of the Dragon? No?
Red Shirt Guy: He survived and in fact and he was the leader of Aerie Peak in vanilla WoW and through Wrath of the Lich King.
Chris Metzen: Yeah, Alex…what’s up with that?
This question stumped both Chris Metzen and Alex “Furor” Afrasiabi. Eventually, Alex admitted he screwed up and to his credit said he’d fix the problem.
Here’s the video of the exchange which has gone viral on the Internet:
The Red Shirt guy is the hero of BlizzCon. It’s nice to see a lore nerd defeat the almighty Furor in his own dojo.
Blizzard should put the Red Shirt guy into the MMO somehow. Better yet, Blizzard should hire him!
-Wolfshead
Here’s a picture of High Thane Falstad Wildhammer currently residing in Aerie Peak in the Hinterlands:
You’re kidding me,right? Don’t think for a second that Blizzard actually gives a rip about their “lore.” They surely don’t.
Their snarky response says as much.
well it looks like they do give a flip cause the red shirt fan is now in the game roflmao =)
hahau got just got showed they fixed the problem and made this kid a character …..lol!!!! so much for not caring lol
Actually I was impressed by this, although I attribute the bit of a “stunned bunny” look for the speaker due to talking in front of so many thousands.
But to their credit I liked the banter between the two devs there, they were polite, humourous and said they would fix it.
From what I’ve heard and read the more junior devs non lore devs lacked these two’s polish.
Looks like “we will fix that” was serious: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=27509091494
Apparently, they made a change to the beta…
http://i.imgur.com/FRLiJ.jpg
Thanks for the link Jason! It’s nice to see they’ve decided to acknowledge the Red Shirt Guy in the Cataclysm beta. I hope they keep the Wildhammer Fact Checker once it goes live.
Nicely done Blizzard! 🙂