We have been watching with some degree of fascination the Great World of Warcraft Purge of ’21 that’s come in the wake of Blizzard’s workplace scandal. WoW devs are seemingly scouring the game for anything that even has the whiff of controversial, demeaning, or slightly saucy content and altering it without mercy.
The latest changes include the replacement of an NPC that referenced an obscene metal band singer and two quests that referred to women as “damsels” and “babes.”
The NPC in question is George the Corpsegrinder (who is now Annihilator Grek’lor), a reference to Cannibal Corpse lead singer George Fisher. Fisher performed at BlizzCon 2011 alongside Blizzard employees but proved to be so obscene and offensive while verbally attacking opponents at the show that then-president Mike Morhaime was forced to make a public apology. His character remained in the game since Wrath of the Lich King, however, only being removed in this past week’s Patch 9.1.5 on the test realm.
Blizzard has previously said that it set up internal channels for developers to speak up about “content that doesn’t represent who [the devs] are as a team today,” which is presumably where the specific changes are being proposed.
