10 Convoluted Video Game Lores Even The Creators Don't Understand
6. World Of Warcraft
Blizzard's legendary MMORPG World of Warcraft has been going strong for over 15 years now, and no game would stay alive (or popular) for that long without a rich, vibrant world for fans to immerse themselves in.
With seven expansion packs having been released to date - and an eighth on the way - World of Warcraft boasts a depth of lore to rival even the most detailed series of fantasy novels, and so it's little surprise that those in charge of maintaining it have tripped themselves up on occasion.
Though Blizzard actually employs lore specialists to keep World of Warcraft's mythology consistent, the sheer vastness of the lore, spread across the game's expansions and dozens of novels and comics to date, makes it inevitable that mistakes are going to be made.
This hilariously came to a head at BlizzCon 2010, when during a Q&A with the game's Creative Director Alex Afrasiabi and one of its writers, Chris Metzen, a fan exposed a contradiction in WoW lore.
The fan mentioned that the new book "The Shattering" stated that Falstad Wildhammer would join the Council of the Three Hammers, yet Falstad was missing from the Cataclysm beta.
In a moment that became an instant meme, Metzen asked, "Isn't Falstad dead?," before the fan reminded him that, in fact, Falstad was very much alive and kicking, to the amusement of the assembled crowd.
Blizzard eventually fixed the issue and even commemorated the fan's knowledge by making him an NPC, knowingly named Wildhammer Fact Checker.
But this speaks to a wider issue that it's virtually impossible to keep track of everything in an ongoing game of this nature, even with Blizzard employing full-time lore keepers.
The game's current director, Ion Hazzikostas, stated in a recent interview that while working on the Cataclysm expansion, they were planning to have a red dragon, Krasus, show up. However, they had to scrap these plans when they realised that Krasus had died in a previous WoW book. Oops.