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?
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.
After he left the company, Metzen did an interview with podcaster Scott Johnson about why he retired. The quotes that (correctly) circulated in the written news articles about his departure focused on his struggles with anxiety, panic attacks, and doubt, which grew and grew over the years until he needed to take a step back for his own wellbeing. But if you listen to the full podcast, Metzen also talks specifically several times about the ways in which that impacted his ability to appear in public. He says he’s really an introvert at heart, a homebody. And while he affirms that the gregarious persona he has at events is also a part of him, it was becoming more and more difficult to reconcile with his inner self the longer his immense work anxiety was allowed to continue.
At one point, he relates an experience he had in 2016, when he’d planned to take his kids to see Weird Al’s concert performance at that year’s BlizzCon after he’d already left the company. “I thought I was all good, and then the week it came up, it was about a week before, and I started wigging out again,” he said. “The panic came back, and I’m waking up in a cold sweat at night, and I just thought, ‘Holy shit, I thought I was getting over this.’ And I guess I wasn’t ready. So I felt so guilty, I had to tell [my kids], ‘Guys I can’t go. I can’t take you.’ Luckily their uncle took them to see Weird Al. But it was just the weirdest turn…things would come up, and my brain would just start spiraling on the two thousand things that could possibly go wrong, how would I get out of this situation? How would I handle this? …Just this Death Star on the horizon that never goes away.”
At another point in the podcast, talking about being in public places like the Hilton lobby during BlizzCon, or going up onstage to announce Overwatch, he says, “Some of it’s fear of public spaces, fear of being in front of people, fear of—in my weirdest moments, I was worried about, how good is security? I’m standing up there, what if…and this is totally irrational. What if someone’s really angry that we nerfed their shaman? And as crazy as that sounds, that’s the kind of stuff that would occur to me…what if I get shot? It would be a stupid place to get shot, or a perfect place to get shot. And that’s not me. It was just this weird fear thing that started coming up.”
It seems like Metzen’s retirement was good for him, and he’s in a better spot with all this now. I make no claims to knowing his internal life, but I truly hope he’s doing great! I suffer from anxiety too! I’ve been in that spiral and still go there semi-often! Not nearly as bad as he describes, but golly it stinks. It makes perfect sense to me why he’d be happy tooling away behind the scenes, drawing maps, making cool elves, outlining story beats, or whatever artistic work it is he wants to do and Blizzard wants him to do for it. Let the man chill, for God’s sake.
So I don’t take Metzen’s absence as a sign of anything in particular, good or bad, for WoW, and I don’t think you should, either. Maybe he’ll come back to a BlizzCon stage one day, if he feels like it, or maybe not. That’s his business, frankly. Blizzard has plenty of other spokespeople. I am particularly delighted by Holly Longdale’s rise of late as a spokesperson for Blizzard. I make no claims to knowing anything about her internal life either, but I like her: she comes off so well and so joyful up there, and her cosplay game is A+. But if tomorrow she decided she wasn’t up to doing all that again, that would also be fine.
Longdale is great. Hazzikostas is great. In fact, show me more devs! Bring more people up! Games are made by so many people! Not all of those people are public speakers, which is extremely fine, but I think it’s important for the community to remember that the fate of World of Warcraft does not, and absolutely should not, rest on the shoulders of one guy in the art and narrative department, or any one person. Metzen’s work will shape and enrich the future of World of Warcraft, as will the work of every other person on that team.
I’m intrigued by The Last Titan, and genuinely stoked for WoW: Forever. Most of all, I’m excited to see what these creatives all build together, regardless of who is up onstage presenting it to me.
