Pat Nagle

Patrick "Pat" Nagle is a game designer at Blizzard Entertainment who joined the company in 1997. He was one of the first two quest designers on the original World of Warcraft, alongside Jeff Kaplan, and wrote some of the earliest quests players meet in the human starting area. The fishing trainer Nat Pagle is named after him.

Career

Nagle started at Blizzard in 1997, according to his own account in Blizzard's 2019 "WoW Classic with Creators" video series. Over the following years he worked on games in the Warcraft, StarCraft and Diablo series before joining the World of Warcraft team.

Work on World of Warcraft

Nagle and Jeff Kaplan were the game's first two quest designers, and they shared an office. In a 2018 Kotaku article based on Kaplan's interview with the AIAS Game Maker's Notebook podcast, Jason Schreier described how the pair each took a prototype zone to fill with quests: Kaplan took Elwynn Forest and Nagle took the farmland of Westfall. Their first approach was to scatter a handful of quests around each zone and let players fill the gaps by exploring. When Blizzard staff tested the alpha, they complained that finishing a quest led nowhere. Kaplan, Nagle and Allen Adham took that feedback as a sign that the game needed far more quests linked into chains, which became the structure that shipped in 2004.

Nagle also wrote quests for Elwynn Forest. In his episode of "WoW Classic with Creators," he said the very first quest he designed for the game was Kobold Camp Cleanup, in which a new human character clears kobolds out of the camp near Northshire Abbey. Warcraft Wiki, citing a 2016 GameSpot interview with Kaplan, credits Nagle with many of Elwynn's original quests and with the Duskwood storyline around Stitches, the abomination that wanders down the road toward Darkshire.

Nat Pagle

The best-known reference to Nagle in the game is Nat Pagle, the fishing expert who camps on a small island off the coast of Dustwallow Marsh. Nagle explained in the 2019 Blizzard video that when Alex Afrasiabi was creating the original profession trainers, he asked whether he could name the fishing trainer after him. Nagle told him to do whatever he wanted, and the name stuck. He joked that the character is now far more famous than he is.

In patch 1.12 Nat Pagle gives the quest Nat Pagle, Angler Extreme, which asks an angler with at least 225 fishing skill to bring him four rare fish from around the world and teaches Artisan fishing in return. His name also appears on fishing gear such as [Nat Pagle's Extreme Angler FC-5000], a reward from Katoom the Angler's quest Snapjaws, Mon! in Stranglethorn Vale, and [Nat Pagle's Fish Terminator]. Warcraft Wiki also notes that one of Greatfather Winter's reindeer named in [Metzen's Letters and Notes] is called Nagle.

Hearthstone

Nagle later moved to the Hearthstone team, where he designed Tavern Brawls, the game's rotating weekly rule-change modes. He spoke about Tavern Brawl design at a BlizzCon 2015 Hearthstone panel, and in a 2019 interview with the Hearthcasual podcast he named Clockwork Card Dealer and The Dark Wanderer as his two favorite Brawls among those he had made. He described his own ideas as the "crazy and nutty" ones, balanced by fellow designer Joe Magdalena's more disciplined approach.

Return to World of Warcraft

By 2025 Nagle was back on World of Warcraft as a principal game designer, appearing in Blizzard's "Building Azeroth" video series that year. With World of Warcraft Classic and the upcoming World of Warcraft: Forever bringing the 1.12-era game back, the quests he wrote more than twenty years ago are once again many players' first steps in Azeroth.

Sources

• Pat Nagle, Warcraft Wiki
• WoW Classic with Creators, World of Warcraft (YouTube, 2019)
• WoW Classic with Creators Episode 4: Pat Nagle, World of Warcraft (YouTube, 2019)
• How World of Warcraft's Quests Came to Be, Kotaku (2018)
• The Story of Overwatch: The Complete Jeff Kaplan Interview, GameSpot (2016)
• Game Designer Pat Nagle Talks About Tavern Brawls Design, Hearthstone Top Decks (2019)
• Tavern Brawls and Open Q&A, BlizzCon 2015 panel recap, HearthPwn
• Building Azeroth: Dastardly Duos, World of Warcraft (YouTube, 2025)