Some people speculated his departure considering his silence at Blizzcon.
It’s official now : https. :// altertime. es/steve-danuser-dejo-blizzard-en-noviembre-del-pasado-ano
do you think the story will improve now that Metzen is back at the lead ?
Metzen gave us Medan, SC2 and D3.
The lead they need is someone educated in history and knows to write fictional worlds and how it’s history is connected and evolves as well as someone who knows how to write fun and engaging characters.
Something wow have pretty much never had.
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What we need is a complete reset and a change of story direction. Changing direction after all that has happened would just led to confusion and be completely out of the blue.
Reset the timeline back to vanilla, or better yet Warcraft 3. Then build up the world around it. Get rid of these continent-to-world ending threats of the week ffs.
It is hard to imagine it can deprove any more than what we have already got.
If I were to have a guess, it will get better, Getting an F is better than getting an E after all.
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What we need is someone that ignores the handful of twitter lunatics that have taken over the US lore forums.
But since Blizzard is situated in California, expect more trashy writing, I guess?
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Medan and D3 were still far better than anything SL or BFA could be. While having a mid story, there had at least a soul.
Also I really liked Starcraft 2 so…
And I disagree Wow had great lore moments despite big failures like BC or WOD.
You also seem to not realize that the main strength of Wow wasn’t even its story in itself but the feeling of the world in which we adventure.
As long as the plot is concise and solid I’m fine. Also Sylvanas kept out of Worldsoul saga, she should be benched for a few expac.
Regarding Danuser, regardless of how I feel about him, I wish him luck and success in his future endeavors.
Me’dan is seriously an overblown meme. They tried him out as a comic character, saw the reaction, and threw him away. Like they did with most of the comic content - way before Metzen left. His story certainly was a Gary Stu story, but he was neither the first nor the last Warcraft character with that flaw (just look at Thrall’s background…). He certainly wasn’t lorebreaking. No idea about which ways Starcraft and Diablo were bad, but comparing Warcraft eras… yeah, I certainly preferred Metzen’s era to Danuser’s or Afrasiabi’s. I mean, it’s Warcraft story, it was never great. But it was more fun to me before.
Now, how much can be pinned on one guy here is a different matter. There is a whole team around him, and well… there is a lot more lore baggage to content with than 20 years ago. Much of it trash. Not to mention… erm, cultural shifts that might show themselves in dev preferences or management guidelines from way up high. Not to mention that they might not even want him to change much, if they were sufficiently happy with Dragonflight’s reception in the social media of their choice. I can only say that Danuser never really seemed like he was happy to work with the world that preexisted his management tenure, and was more interested in how he could change it, while Metzen at least presents himself as caring about it. I like that better.
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As they’re lifting ideas from FF14 as of lately, they should look to them how to make a coherent and well crafted story throughout multiple expansions. Added bonus; actually know how to close a chapter, tie up all the lose ends and finish a story arch. Not shelve their villains and heroes until they need it for another expansion
I am of the firm belief that FFXIV’s story isn’t coherent or well crafted. I initially left WoW for FFXIV back when ARR launched and for the first few years I really enjoyed it. I won’t say who I am, exactly, so feel free to take this with a pinch of salt…though I had my hand in creating a fair few deep dives on the game’s story and characters.
Over time, more and more elements of the story were outright retconned, ridiculous levels of plot armour were erected around even many minor characters and the most recent expansion sought to justify planetary genocide, so long as it benefits the player character and ‘cRyStAl MoMmY’ says she did it out of love.
It also unceremoniously scrapped a Garlemald expansion despite building it up over the years, no doubt to appease the utterly insane and vocal portion of the community on social media that regularly send death threats and other horrific things to anyone who dares to like or dislike the ‘wrong’ characters in the story.
I know many former lore enthusiasts who feel the same way. It doesn’t help that the entire tone and aesthetics of the game has shifted far away from the classic medieval fantasy vibes it started with in order to implement modern day nightclubs as canon because a growing number of players do not actually like FFXIV and instead use it as a heavily modded Second Life style distraction.
It’s a damn shame what happened to the game in recent years. Who knows? Maybe it’s just inevitable for any MMO that ends up having staying power.
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The plot armour I agree, and that annoy the living life out of me in any story when a character just magically survives a situation, because apparently the author fell in love with it and refused anything bad coming to that character. In that regard I think the ending of FF14 was a bit spoiled as the characters were magically saved and ruined the whole emotion of it all.
However in comparison to WoW’s story, at least FF14’s story has a red thread throughout it that holds it together. Yes I wish they made more out of Garlemald given just how much impact they have had throughout the story, but on the other side they were a subplot in the overarching story so I also understand why they didn’t get more room. I don’t feel the expansion justifies planetary genocide, rather portray the necessity of it however cruel it was.
And I hope that WoW has finally learned that lesson that it can’t just retcon everything to fit into the next “cool” expansion. After Shadowlands I was just so fed up with the whole game I didn’t even join in on Dragonflight until the whole story was “told” (and I have to say, it’s not a particularly strong story but it’s a whole heap better than the garbage we got in BfA and Shadowlands).
That’s kinda how it works, if you want an open-ended plot to feel connected, though. You try to tie the new stuff you didn’t think of 10 years ago into the stuff you invented back then. As far as I understand it, FF14 is just as guilty of that as anyone. WoW’s team was just really bad at it and stuffed waaay too much into the Jailer to keep up the audience’s suspension of disbelief. Tying him to the helm of domination might have worked. Tying him to Sylvanas might have worked, though there were way too few breadcrumbs on that one. But tying him to the whole azerothian history, the dreadlords, Argus, and… well everything? Yeah, no.
Legion to Shadowlands were probably the most interconnected addons WoW ever had. They introduced and explored the six cosmic forces and their conflict over the fate of the world and the world souls. And that was a big part of the problem, because they really bet on the wrong horse there, and much of the WoW playerbase really didn’t care for any of that. Mostly because it wasn’t a good story, wasn’t sold well and wasn’t what they expected or wanted from the world of Warcraft they had now played in for up to 20 years or so.
So I don’t think “if they just had some connecting red threat WoW would have been so much better” is hitting the mark here. Indeed, I would argue they’d have been better off dropping the red threats they did follow. I do think an episodic style would have suited Warcraft better than trying to tie everything into one epos anyway.
One thing is to make things up as you go along and try to tie up what hasn’t been really explained before. In my opinion, that’s fine and that’s how FF14 has done it, build the story and the universe.
What WoW is so guilty of, is taking what is established years ago, and just break it completely. Take the whole WC3 storyline of Arthas, Ner’Zhul and even Sargeras, just completely demolished in Shadowlands. That’s pretty impressive I’d say to destroy something so established just to fit into the next “cool”.
That’s what I mean with having a red thread throughout the story, not that you have to alter a few things, but that you don’t even make sense from expansion to expansion, nor within your own universe. We’re not talking about a world just established either when it comes to WoW.
For me at least, I gave up on Warcraft’s lore after Shadowlands. I was pretty much fed up already in BfA because of how much they destroyed, and Shadowlands just took it way too far in that destruction.
Funnily enough, with the Worldsoul saga going on, they seem to understand the necessity of a red thread in their story. It will be interesting to see if they can manage to deliver on that, or if they’ll destroy even more established lore
Did they, though? You could argue that they just added more context. Like I said, they did so with the sublety of a sledgehammer, which is why I’ll certainly agree that it failed, but I don’t think it’s a different principle.
And we yet have to see if that’s a good idea.
Metzen started all mess with the “rule of cool” in Cata.
They added context by retconning the retcon of the retcon of established lore.
In what way did it add context though? There was context established already, so they didn’t add anything to that context, they subtracted from the established and replaced it with something that made no sense even if you were half-way down a bottle of Vodka (other alcoholic brands are available).
May I ask what specific change exactly we are talking about? In my understanding all the events and actions and even feelings surrounding Arthas and Ner’zhul pretty much stayed the same, didn’t they? I’ll agree that having another manipulator using domination magic behind the scenes devalues the meaning of Arthas’ struggle, but it doesn’t really change it. In truth, with a castle of Saronite around him and a powerful Dreadlord artifact on his head, and in his hands, fan theories about magical influences on Arthas weren’t exactly a new thing.
And Blizzard did it to add a new level of cosmic intrigue to the well-known story, that tied the Shadowlands story to the much-beloved stories that came before, and was supposed to get us invested and theorizing happily. It certainly failed, but I really don’t see them anything unusual here, just an unusual amount of it, in way too short a time and with no preparation whatsoever. Tackling the concept of death was a bad idea in the first place, but once they are tackling it, tying the Lich King to it sounds reasonable enough to me.
The lore and story up until Shadowlands was released, was that the armour that housed Ner’Zul’s spirit was made by Kil’Jaeden. That the nathrezim were of the first demons recruited into the Legion by Sargeras. There were perfectly good explanations and stories surrounding the creation of the Lich King, the armour and everything. Then suddenly out of nowhere we have this “master planer” who seemingly tricked Sargeras (a Titan), Kil’Jaeden (known as the deceiver and master of manipulation) and the entire existence, all while being imprisoned in a place that seemingly no one could escape from (except it seems to be a drive-through for everyone).
Sorry but Shadowlands doesn’t tie into anything really, it’s something most people just want to forget even existed and made even BfA look like a stellar composition of epic storytelling. Yes good idea trying to tie in the realms of the afterlife, but it was incredibly poorly done, poorly executed and poorly written. It seemingly played out like a fan-fiction made just so you could visit old dead heroes.
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Do you know where you got that one from? Because I think it was pretty much always said, that Ner’zhul got Frostmourne, and presumedly the armor, from the Dreadlords of the Legion. That’s also what chronicles said before SL:
“The dreadlords bound his disembodied spirit to a specifically crafted set of armor and a mighty runeblade called Frostmourne. These items were locked in a diamond-hard block of ice to imprison Ner’zhul.”
I’ve looked a bit at older WoWpedia page versions, but I haven’t found anything that alluded to Kil’Jaeden. Maybe you assumed that, because the Dreadlords alluded to the blade speaking with the voice of their master? Like here, in the by now pretty much ancient Arthas novel?
“You waste your breath, Mal’Ganis. I heed only the voice of Frostmourne now.”
The dreadlord threw back his horned head and laughed. “You hear the voice of the Dark Lord,”
Mal’Ganis retorted. He pointed a sharp, black-nailed finger at the mighty runeblade. “He
whispers to you through the blade you wield!”
Arthas felt the blood drain from his face. The dreadlord’s master…spoke to him through
Frostmourne? But…how could that be? Was this the final trick? Had he been gulled and
delivered directly into Mal’Ganis’s taloned hands?
“What does he say, young human?” The smirk came again, the expression of one who knows
something another does not. The dreadlord was gloating, reveling in this twist. “What does the
Dark Lord of the Dead tell you now?”
This fits better with the SL lore than I expected, actually.
And so they were. It’s just, that they were always double agents, in the updated lore. Is that a stupid twist? Hell yeah. Does it actually change anything that happened before? Nope. So I don’t really see how that would be the point of contention.
It’s stupid, yes. As I am trying to argue here, that’s exacly where the problem lies. If it wasn’t so stupidly and hamfistedly done, the retroactive additions to the lore wouldn’t be the real problem here. If we had more hints about the Jailer before SL, he wouldn’t have come out of nothing, if we had actually seen him being cunning anywhere, him manipulating things behind the scenes wouldn’t have been so absurd, if we understood why the Dreadlords would work for the Jailer, their involvement wouldn’t be so absurd, if we had actually liked the story and the characters involved, we might have found the changes enriching… We have tons and tons of ifs. They botched the story. And by tying older stories to it, they retroactively sullied them. Which will always be a risk, if you try to tie everything together, which was something you were arguing for before.
…that’s what I said, in the part you quoted, yes.
I might remember incorrectly and it’s difficult to find something because of how much the story has been retconned the last 10 years or so. Whoever made the armour can be hazy but it still, the lore of the Legion was as well established as to the Dreadlord’s origin (which also were conveniently retconned)
As for the snippet, that’s actually from the original Warcraft 3. The dark lord in question is in fact Ner’Zul, as up to that time Mal’Ganis was one of the Dreadlords sent to keep Ner’Zul in check. Ner’Zul in fact planned to ensnare someone to help him break free from the Frozen Throne. This is also why Ilidan was sent to destroy Ner’Zul, as Kil’Jaeden had lost control over him and would be a threat towards the Legion, no a tool to weaken Azeroth for the Legion’s invasion.
It sort of does change a lot of what happened before to be honest, it undermines the characterisation of several characters in the lore, chief amongst them Sargeras and Kil’Jaeden, as well as destroying the concept of the Titans as powerful beings of the universe (akin to Gods). That’s what hurts the story the most with Shadowlands, not that the story itself is poorly written within the expansion, but the destruction it does towards the previous story and lore.
And beside, the tool of retcon is something Blizzard has been too lose with the last 10 years or so. What’s the point of being invested into a story, when what you play one expansion doesn’t necessarily make sense 2 expansions down?
So the ramification of the lore changes isn’t just necessarily poor for the existing characters and plot points, it also hurts the fanbase when you’re retconning things without concern or thought to what you’re doing, you just do it because you thought it sounded cool there and then.
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I always though it was Kil’jaeden , that created the Lick King .
https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Ner%27zhul
“Following the Second War, he opened several portals on Draenor in an attempt to seek out new lands to escape to and conquer but was immediately captured by Kil’jaeden. His mortal form was destroyed and his spirit was transformed into the spectral Lich King, which was then encased in the mystical ice of the Frozen Throne atop the Icecrown glacier in distant Northrend.”
We also have the video from Warcraft 3 TFT :
https://youtu.be/j-xPm1M9ZRk?t=64
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