We’re getting a dragon expansion, so where’s Knaak?
He was my top favourite author back in the old days, and Day of the Dragon was my favourite novel.
Hopefully, Rhonin is coming back too some day.
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…bad news on that one. They killed Rhonin off with Theramore back in the 2012 novel. And Krasus in 2011. And it’s not exactly looking great for Malfurion right now… Pretty much every Knaak favourite character has been erased by now. So I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for Knaak to return.
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Knaak single handily did more damage to the night elves as a people then blizzard could ever hope to do
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He has to be better than the human potato that is Danuser.
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Not really comparable. Danuser is responsible for the entire game’s story, while Knaak was contained to the books(fortunately).
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Not exactly, though. Danuser’s position actually isn’t that high up. Sure, he is the highest-ranking narrative directer, but that just tells us, that it’s not necessarily the narrative team making the narrative decisions.
Well, if i remember correctly the only guy above him is the game director and while they likely don’t come up with the ideas on their own they’re none the less responsible for making them work. Altho i suspect at least the marketing guys have a substantial presence there too. (Given that Jailer’s whole vocabulary basically revolved around marketign tag lines)
I wouldn’t be so sure that it works that stricktly departemental, especially considering that Danuser never got the highest narrative position. He is the highest narrative designer, he did not get the position of creative director (which would have been Afrasiabi, whose planning was very much still relevant throughout Shadowlands), nor did he get promoted to narrative director, when Blizzard started to look for one. Either the leadership doesn’t trust Danuser as the one deciding the narrative direction of the game, or Danuser himself doesn’t want to decide it. Either way, that’s not the situation where I’d expect him to be the sole, or even the main, authority. Be it by choice, or because of lack of trust, he is only one voice at that table.
Now, he is a narrative designer, and I think we can fairly blame him for quite a few of the failures in execution we got in SL. But even there I think we need to acknowledge, that some of that will have been a mismanaged production shedule, instead of failed concepts. Fitting the story in the gutted patch cycle of SL and making it palpable is a skill that the dev team failed at, but which was never in Danuser’s job description.
I don’t really mean to defend Danuser. I wouldn’t mind him getting sacked, I’m just indifferent to it. But I think that trying to point at him as a culprit is making things to easy, while mostly missing the mark. Blizzard’s production was a wreck the last years, and Danuser was only a small part of that. I highly doubt he had the power to change half as much as most people here think he could, and getting someone to actually be responsible for the creative direction is much more relevant than getting rid of this ineffective middle manager.
When people point at Golden’s influence, I can at least see quite a few parts of the plot that smell of her, mostly in the current main cast of characters, who she pretty much invented in their current incarnations - just as Knaak might have done at one point. With Danuser I don’t get more than “general incompetence”. I can neither see his style, nor his vision at all. Just scrambling around.
We felt when Metzen left, because things changed. Did we really feel when Afrasiabi left?
Well someone has to do the job and Ion Hazzicostas is busy overseeing everything else so it kinda falls on his head anyway. I agree that many of the Shadowlands problems are not conceptual, however they are deeply foundational even before you get to the patch content, which is apparently what was condensed. We’ve already spoken at length about all the ways we’ve found the story to be lacking, in many threads so i believe you knwo how i feel about it.
As for Golden i’m inclined to believe them, when they say she was mostly responsible for dialogue in the cinematics more so than any real decision making, because all of the characters were absolutely wasted.
No, the job has to be done, it’s not just someone that has to do it. I am saying that this seems to be to a large part a case of lack of direction, which I credit to the whole team, since they didn’t actually hire a director. And when I see what probably resulted from too many bad cooks, I find it useless to point at one of these cooks, only because he has the chef’s hat.
He may not be the leader they need, but he is the one they’ve got. I see what you’re getting at, with the lack of strong leadership, which would make the whole pipeline a great deal messier affair, but what i’m referring to is that the biggest transgressions of the Shadowland’s story are foundational structural elements, which invariably are something that came from the top.
To visualise imagine construction workers got told to build a family house upside down.
He isn’t though. That’s my point. Leading isn’t his job, nor does he have the authority for it. They decided to go at it without a leader. Not just no strong leader, but no leader at all. If the state decides not to promote a General, we can complain that some Major can’t lead the army, but we’re complaining about the wrong problem.
His position is the Narrative Director, which by his own words, from his linkedin page is “Narrative Lead on the World of Warcraft franchise and its ongoing expansions. I oversee story, writing, dialogue, and narrative structure”.
Wait, when did that happen? As far as I know he is Lead Narrative Designer, which is below the Narrative Directer position they have been trying to recruit for. Which again is below the Creative Director position that Afrasiabi left.
Edit:
But seems you’re right, looking at his twitter. So… I guess he really did get that promotion within the last months. He didn’t have it during Shadowlands development, though.
Knaak is a hack who deserved to get fired. We need Kosak back. He gave us the best Sylvanas. Not to mention that Vereesa needs to die too.
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