// KOTAKU — GAMING
Chris Metzen Wasn’t On The BlizzCon Stage This Year, And Everyone Needs To Chill Out About It
At the end of BlizzCon a few weekends ago, while eating Night Elf pizza with my guildmates, it came up in conversation that we had not seen kodo hide nor hair of one Chris Metzen at the show. Where was he?, we wondered. I had heard many other people ponder the same thing as I walked the halls over the weekend. It felt odd to not have him…anywhere.
Metzen, if you do not know, is a star in the world of Blizzard, particularly for Warcraft and Diablo. He’s an artist, writer, and voice actor who, among many other things, is known for portraying the popular orc character Thrall in the Warcraft franchise, and for providing significant creative and artistic direction on many of Warcraft 3 and WoW‘s most beloved moments, stories, and locations.
He’s also been, for many years, one of the beloved faces of BlizzCon. Here he is announcing the Mists of Pandaria expansion onstage in 2011 to wild enthusiasm from the audience:
Metzen retired back in 2016, but reappeared in 2022 as a creative advisor, transitioning to a larger role in 2023 as Warcraft executive creative director. And Metzen returned to the BlizzCon stage that same year to announce the “Worldsoul Saga,” a multi-expansion story arc that was set up as an epic conclusion to numerous ongoing narrative threads. All of these moves were met with great enthusiasm from the WoW audience; whatever your grievances were with the game, there was a period when it felt like with Metzen back at the helm, they would all be fixed in the coming expansions.
That is, of course, not how things actually work. Games are made by many different people, Metzen is a human being, and as is true in every MMORPG community, absolutely no one is 100-percent satisfied with anything at any given time. Even so, The War Within was very well-received, and Midnight has been…up and down at times, but largely fine so far. There’s a lot of anticipation for the big conclusion to the trilogy, The Last Titan, and there was seemingly an expectation going into BlizzCon 2026 that Metzen might reappear to show it off. After all, he had announced the saga. It felt like there was some level of ownership there.
Metzen did not appear at BlizzCon 2026. He did not show up onstage or in Q&As for World of Warcraft: Midnight or The Last Titan, and he did not appear for World of Warcraft: Forever. He was, as far as anyone knows, not on the show floor either (former president Mike Morhaime was spotted, though). Where was Metzen, then? This was a topic of some importance as the show closed, with many taking it as a sign that something was not quite right. Had he left the company? Was something wrong?
So Metzen got the bag and left? byu/LonelyIthaca inwow
Did anybody see or spot Chris Metzen? byu/MMORPGDev inblizzcon
I am here today to urge people concerned about this to calm down. Metzen is fine. He’s working on a new 5E campaign setting that he just announced a month ago. His voice can be heard in the World of Warcraft: Forever gameplay trailer and he still voices a ton of WoW‘s favorite characters. And he’s apparently been instrumental in developing the new Skyborne race for WoW: Forever, too, which may or may not be good news, depending on how you feel about them.
I have not personally spoken to Metzen, and Blizzard did not answer my request for comment on his whereabouts. But I’m going to take a wild stab at why he’s not onstage at BlizzCon: he probably doesn’t want to be. Not because he doesn’t love World of Warcraft or the fans or the community, but because in the past, when he has done so, it seems to have been very hard on him personally.