To prevent the other thread from becoming derailed, I created this one, so people can theraputically come to terms with the Danuser-era of World of Warcraft.
What do you feel were the biggest errors of storytelling or lore judgment, and what could have been improved upon or done differently, in your view?
The execution of every concept with the understanding that itâd be new permanent lore being introduced into an already existing cohesive fantasy universe that would continue after the fact, rather than being self-contained fantasy novels sold by the same author.
The most genuinely baffling fumbling of a fantasy story I have ever seen, which had concepts, sections of the lore, and entire overarching metanarratives that lasted for arcs and even entire expansions that would have been so genuinely cool if they hadnât been executed by a writing team that would somehow mess up boiling a pot of water.
Tyr. Next question.
Niffen, Dracthyr. Slands main story.
Shadowlands is the short, easy, obvious answer but just to run through the highlights (lowlights might be more fitting):
)I feel like even Blizzard acknowledged that a lot of these things sucked because we did get mounts in the Maw and in Korthia, we did get changes to the soulbind system and renown, they did remove the punishment for swapping covenants (albeit you had to hit renown 80 with at least one of them beforehand)
I do like a lot of things in Shadowlands - more than most probably. Ardenweald is a beautiful zone and it existing as this weird mirror reality to the Dream is actually quite cool, but even then the positives are far outweighed by the negatives.
Oh and just for good measure because I only gave one bullet point to it; the Maw sucked. The Maw sucked. I cannot overstate how bad of a zone it is. It is the single worst zone in WoW, hands down.
Look, if Iâm going to get into the utter botching of the entire warcraft setting afterlife Iâll be here all night. From the themed realms, implications, religious themes, soulstuff as currency/fuel, Sylvanasâ stupid villain narrative hinging on her trigger word by the Lich King 2,0 and the mawsworn army outmatching the Legionâs endless host while doing comparitively nothing, Iâve not the juice. It is unworthy of my attention and time to disembowel in excruciating detail any further than Iâve already expressed for literal years.
How everything it currently did at the time had little to no future repercussions while dramatically unraveling everything we knew and loved about the past.
It takes a special kind of parasite to attach yourself to Warcraft 3, make everything about it feel like a joke with the new lore while none of your cosmic nonsense impact nothing about peopleâs beliefs and religion.
Iâm again going to start by mentioning that until Afrasiabi left in mid-2020, Danuser was just a part of a team at the top, not its sole member (if anything, he was the junior partner). Blaming him for BfA when apparently stuff such like Sylvanas burning Teldrassil was something Afrasiabi pushed on the team would be a bit weird. Same thing goes for decision to set an expansion in afterlife, given WoWâs development cycle, this decision must have been made way back during Legion.
So Iâm left with Slands patches and Dragonflight, with maybe some parts of War Within which I believe might have been his. As such, the greatest crime for me is turning the cosmic lore into âumm, aktchuallyâ fiesta.
WoW lore has always had some moral ambiguity when it comes even to its good cosmic forces. Light still answered the call of Scarlets. Titans were willing to destroy life on planets when it didnât suit their vision of what correct life was. There were times when we had to fight those who ought to be good, yet werenât.
But the moment first patch made under Danuserâs leadership (9.1) came, in-game writings and books started appearing which directly questioned pretty much everything we have known.
The cosmology? Foolish living, they donât know the correct one.
The Black Empire? Oh, the Titans destroyed the knowledge about how awesome it was.
The Titans? You thought they were uncaring gods with severely flawed vision? Nah, theyâre enslaving everyone with their Order.
The Void? Oh, many paths, itâs great, ignore the whispers.
Now, if these writings were in-universe perspective that is meant to be flawed, that would have been great. But many werenât, they were outright admissions from the âgood guysâ.
And those that did not fall into this category had this smug aura about them which caused my BS sensors tingling because they reminded me of RP characters whose IC views were formed by what the RPer thought to be the intellectually and morally correct opinion.
I donât believe these were instances of in-universe characters stating something. Rather, the author(s) were using them as mouthpieces.
The worst thing about this are the consequences. Not in the lore, Blizzard ignores its lore often enough, they can easily ignore this if they want to. Rather, itâs the effect it had on the community. The introduction of âumm, aktchuallyâ into the narrative caused people to doubt everything.
Which wouldnât have been as bad if thatâs what the story was about now, but itâs not. Metzen is at the helm and his approach to lore is vastly different. That doesnât mean Titans are suddenly going to be the good guys, but we are no longer in an era where doubt is cast on everything. The most glaring case of âwe thought X but Y was actually trueâ is Dagranâs dialogue in that Dornogal vault, but even there the information is given to us directly in voiced cutscenes, not in some obscure in-game book that tells us weâre dumb for thinking the Void was evil.
Danuser poisoned the minds of community and rewarded behavior of people like Pyromancer with their insane conspiracies. That is the worst thing he did, and the one whose consequences people will feel for much longer than any actual lore from Slands or DF.
It does have that smarmy energy of Stormwind RPers that seem unable to write their characters in a way that doesnât reveal that their only familiarity with theology is daily three hour doomscrolling sessions on r/atheism, when it comes to writing on the titans and the void during Shadowlands-The War Within.
As for what the Danuser era did wrong, mostly just three things:
Dragonflight
âOrderâ
The comically excessive focus on the Alliance somehow failing to at the very least manifest some sort of internal conflict within the faction.
My red background would turn blue so quickly if the Alliance wasnât just always the goodboy agreeguys that get along superduper good
When looked at from a more neutral point, the Alliance is the biggest den of evil Azeroth has ever known. When the faultless union of the forces of good incites wars on a single personâs whim, it includes the Dark Irons that still havenât got rid of the followers of Ragnaros, a cabal of Void sorcerers able and willing to unleash the corruption on whatever gets in their way, the last addition to their ranks is a splinter of the Burning Legion of all things, and unlike the Horde they donât even acknowledge any of this as something wrong, anyone with a modicum of historical knowledge would know where to expect trouble from. Or just make peace with this (un)holy unionâs plot armor being beyond good, evil, reason and common sense.
I donât think itâs as much this as it simply not being on Blizzardâs radar for the story they want to tell. You see it poke through now and then with Jaina, pleading with Magister Hathorel that sheâs the one heâs after, not her companions. But then as soon as heâs off stage it simply vanishes into the abyss.
The Alliance being negative or doing something negative gets glossed over because its not relevant to the long-term story. Garrosh and Sylv both had valid reasoning for their wars, poverty and the fact that â in the long term â the Alliance will never truly leave the Horde be. But these kind of get misted over and eroded by another retelling of Warcraft 2 (this raft of CDevs can do it better this time bro, trust us.)
Said it before, will say it again.
He turned the universe away from fantasy into nihilistic space slop.
Also I will never get over the Troll afterlife being a joke dungeon.
What, you didnât like it being 50% trolls and 50% gnomes and danuserâs totally-not-ethereals?
The fairly unapologetic rewriting of the WoW setting, pretty aptly summed up by the lad Thaurissan II himself
âDagran Thaurissan II says: What weâve learned here⌠It calls the entire history of Azeroth into question. What if⌠what if our history isnât what they said it was?â
First of all was the destruction and uprooting of afterlife lore which later called for the need of a disclaimer from the lore team that these are not the only afterlives (which imo is not something you assume if you go into the shadowlands questing without this disclaimer being known to you, it really makes it sound like its those 4 afterlives or the maw).
Second was creating a new threat in the Jailer, then forgetting to flesh him out entirely over the whole expansion beyond a âhe was behind everyting that has ever gone wrongâ.
Several attempts at replacing what we already had with something worse;
The afterlives again pre disclaimer, brokers where I wouldnât have found it a stretch to just find straight up Ethereals in the shadowlands considering their state of being.
Dreadlords not being legion agents that are trying to keep a grip of control on death for the legion but are actually agents of death that pretended to be agents of the legion to pretend to be agents of death.
The first ones (to this day I am convinced this is just some heehee hoohoo what if we just rename the titans and pretend theyâre something else cause different place = different name for same thing).
The jailer being behind every big bad and thatâs just SL.
Niffen whose role couldâve been fulfilled by Drogbar or even Kobold.
DF Centaur which does not compute in any way with the original lore of where Centuars originate from or even how they behave, I jokingly called them Neighâdorei cause they felt more like elves with horse bodies then actual warcraft centaurs, then they do think of a race that conceptually has promise in the Djarjadin and they just fumble it by not writing anything about them, all they had in s1 was a single trash pack mob in the raid and all they got in s2 was a world boss.
Another crime is that WoW DF has managed to make dragons boring which is really impressive once you take a step back and look at how dragons are usually depicted in pretty much any other media then wow.
The only thing that seemed to have gotten proper attention was the lore that felt like it was only there to replace or even rewrite old lore and the original ideas that showed some promise like the Djarjadin were just not worked out.
^^^^^^^^^^
This I would argue is the biggest Danuser era crime that feels like they kept repeating it, I canât say if replacement or rewriting of lore was their intention with any of the listed subjects I gave but man did it feel like it was.
I honestly hate it so much that the alliance people from back in the day were so salty about Camp Taurajo that Blizz got the impression of âWe need a villain for the next expansions, alliance people dont want to be evil, so lets throw Garrosh into the meatgrinderâ. And ever since then, the Horde suffered from being forced to play the bad guys.
I always wondered about the implications of that.
Having the dark irons struggling with the remnants of their old days is a rather small thing, having literal warlords of the burning legion being in the alliance thanks to Velen just deciding that above everyones head must have enraged the horde greatly.
On the other side⌠maybe the Draenei do go extinct after all of this. Finally.
It would be at least a bold move for the story. At least if Blizz cared for how the Draenei stand right now. Everyone who is not a Draenei is at least justified in believing that the Draenei betrayed the alliance and sold out to the remnants of the legion.
Alot to count.
However we dont really know how much Danuser brought into the whole thing before he took over.
Some parts were already mentioned like the whole âUhm acktuallyâ-part of the story where the story of warcraft was either rewritten or retconned beyond recognition with new informations no one needed.
While Danuser was virtue signaling and conveniently forgetting lore written by Metzen himself back in the days of old. Kaldorei society before the third war and how strict it was with the genders is a subject immediately coming to mind.
The writing under Danuserâs direction destroyed the cosmology, not that it ever really mattered before honestly, but the little we had for the absolute nerds was destroyed.
But what we have now is even more ridiculous:
Now we got some omnipotent gods on top of everything who created everything using fractals, procedural generation and some weird programming language that sounds like as if you make chatgpt sing.
If that was meant as meta-commentary in regards to how Blizz makes stuff it would be genius and fun as hell, even while still being desastrous to Warcraft.
Most what annoyed me was the storytelling and the worldbuilding.
Many parts about it either didnt make any sense, were pulled out of nowhere or simply werent engaging.
Or had a certain dissonance in what it wanted to tell and what it portrayed.
Dragonflight as âlow stakesâ-expansion mainly focused on mending old wounds wouldnt have been that bad of an idea. Maybe not my cup of tea because I dont think that healing is a big part of what warcraft is about, but people like that kind of story and I can respect that. Its just that this message was also interrupted by a very urgent âthe world is going to die because dragons in their rebel teenage phaseâ which isnt low stakes if you ask me. Burning Legion, Deathwing / Twilight Hammer and Primalists are on the same level of cataclysmic threat in regards to Azeroth alone. They all want to destroy Azeroth as we know it.
Low Stakes would be more like the defias brotherhood. Or the korâkron. Smaller threats, smaller power-level, still a pain for the regions they are in. But nothing with the ability to destroy the world if you dont stop them.
As someone mentioned it before:
Danuser isnt a bad writer. He would have done better writing his own things, but he did destroy a good chunk of warcraft by doing things his way and bludgeoning his ideas into Warcraft regardless wether it makes sense of how much has to be retconned. I mean Metzen himself also isnt at his best form for over 15 years by now, much of it spent ill of course. But we know how desastrous Warlords of Draenor as premise is or how much Cataclysm actually ruined in worldbuilding when you dare to take a look at the whole dragonsoul-thing.
And now we have TWW which is, once again, another âUhm acktuallyâ-expansion. The Arathi being clearly the biggest offender of that trope in this expansion because their whole premise and existence is built on a gigantic, middle-finger shaped âUhm Acktuallyâ.
The Cosmic Nihilism Slop is honest to God single-handedly the most damaging and harmful introduction he gave to WoW and its legacy is just going to remain in the game forever now like a stink cloud wafting over any magic-related lore because the team probably canât entirely retcon his fundamental ideas away because theyâve had such a long time to ooze into the minds of every WoW Twitteroid and YouTuber to the extent that Pyromancer is somehow being welcomed back into the WoW community despite being a reprobate of the highest order.
You can easily go around Stormwind, or even most RP venues now, and see the visceral impact the cosmic nihilism philosophy has had on almost all RPers in some way; either through a visceral hatred of it, or because r/atheist RPers now feel a form of vindication and will shout from every rooftop that all magicks and gods are bad.
How a Man whose vision collapsed 6 other MMOs and failed 2 Singleplayer RPGs was permitted to even touch the helm of the narrative ship is truly unknown to me.
Wait what?
Highly recommend taking 1x look at Danuserâs LinkedIn just to see the absolute and utter abyssmal failure that is his career until he got a Blizzard Intern job and started rising through the ranks.
Look Iâm all for people being given a chance and improving, but I think you should just give up after such an extensive amount of failures 30+ years into your life. You gotta find something different, Man.
Iâd honestly be so down for this if theyâd just commit but the eternal back and forth ainât it