idk he didn’t introduce a New, Better Version of Dalaran like he did with all the other danuserisms (ethereals/brokers, dwarves/earthen, humans/arathi f.ex)
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Xal´atath feels 100% like Metzen´s addition inserted to Danuser´s “new island with 4 zones” in an attempt to salvage an expansion into first arc of a longer story. Similarly, destruction of Dalaran feels like a classic “let´s do something big and epic to increase the stakes” thing Blizzard has been doing for over a decade now. If anything, it´s extremely un-Danuser to destroy a city, given that in his tenure (mid-2020 until sometime in 2023) there hasn´t been a single destruction of a city in WoW. People tend to blame BfA on him, but Afrasiabi was in charge for all of it, famously being the one who had Sylvanas destroy Teldrassil.
Iridikron feels like a villain that would have been part of Danuser´s War Within, which would be focused on us pursuing him to Khaz Algar because he wants to do some anti-Titan BS. The whole thing with Coreway, Thraegar, world core and Haranir just screams cut content, and none of these things fit into Void theme present so much with Xal´atath and first 2/3 of World Soul Saga.
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Danuser is one thing but I never knew Golden shared those ideas? Given how long she’d been writing for Blizzard ( even before she got an actual position) I thought she of all persons would’ve wanted to stick more closely to Metzen’s vision.
My boy Knaak has been the closest to Metzen’s vision. If it had been him on that team… He’d probably have quit from stress of having to wrangle his coworkers and dealing with their nonsense.
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I’ve read Day of the Dragon and the War of the Ancients trilogy from him and honestly, I loved those.
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I´m mostly going by her being removed from the company, which I doubt would have happened if everything was OK between her and the rest of the team.
Also, for all the “I´m just writing the dialogue for cinematics”, she also seemed to be willing to take a lot of the credit when people actually praised her in the Danuser era, so I wouldn´t be surprised if she was responsible for a fair chunk of the storytelling in that time.
Golden definitely gave off the same vibe as Danuser where she slowly became way too attached to the characters she wrote for and tried to hold them up as beacons of personal beliefs and standards instead of cool characters in a Warcraft game.
I think we’re all familiar with Metzen obsessing about Thrall to a similar extent but it never felt like he was trying to turn Thrall into a messianic figure of this or that political viewpoint. It was more like your younger sibling insisting on always bringing their nasty old stuffed animal everywhere you go.
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From the 10:40 mark, Critical Drinker highlights some strong points of feeling to what Danuser (And a lot of other media these days) are achieving with their writing and story telling.
https://youtu.be/qY-GLeHS0Ik?t=640
Effectively, they can’t match the acheivements of the past, so instead they tear them down, make them jokes and mockeries, while attempting to prop up their version which they are trying to make them the centre of everything.
Danuser is the idiot with the hammer.
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Christie Golden had the funniest pattern of reacting to feedback she got online
If praise?
Yay, I loved creating it.
If criticism?
There’s actually a whole team working on this, I can’t control everything.
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I’m still sad that the growth and arc of Anduin from Vanilla to Pandaria resulted in this very neat little comic prelude for Legion to serve as a sort of capstone to his youth, all of which was then binned to revert Anduin back to a comparably more infantile mindset riddled with self-doubt and anxiety in BfA and an almost complete ego-death in Shadowlands because, somehow, being a king is too similar to being mind controlled by an entity seeking the heat death of the universe.
The comic points out that the Legion expected him to fail exactly like this because Anduin was not a warrior in the traditional sense and Varian had “failed” to raise him, which is then turned around to give Anduin his own sense of identity in an admittedly pretty crowded universe of “peace-loving guys who can fight”.
So when Anduin has his back broken over the writers’ knees repeatedly it gives this weird sense of “See, the Burning Legion was actually right” without any real catharsis because he never really reaches a point like this again and his position is replaced by Turalyon who, from a mechanically narrative standpoint as the ruler in Stormwind, is just Anduin but better.
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It’s one of Blizzard’s weird trends that they’ve suddenly become really intent on post-Legion. Every character is just kind of like a sopping wet cat who watches from the sidelines as stuff around them happens and they’re only ever reactive instead of proactive. Just look at Gazlowe and the Player just watching from 3 feet away as an ethereal takes the Dark Heart from Gallywix at 0.1mph.
You basically have to assume the current TWW cast are all completely different characters from their Legion versions with the way that they’ve all simultaneously decided to just be really depressed and not take any direct action to actually solve issues (for the most part). No more Thrall whose Hand Quells the Recalcitrant and Defiant. No more impassioned and cool Alleria (dead since Legion). No more action-through-faith Anduin. No more “This Tower Shall Not Be Its Den” Khadgar. They’ve all resigned themselves to some weird form of absolutist nihilism.
That or they’re busy elsewhere installing proto-democracies whilst the world teeters on the edge of exploding for some reason we still don’t know 75% into the expansion meant to explain it.
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I see what you’re saying but Danuser style is also just introducing the new thing, putting it on the forfront and just ignoring the old thing or make the old thing irrelevant without direct destruction.
example: danuser didn’t destroy from wc3 all to SL, he said someone was behind it all and pushed that someone to the forfront of it all.
If it was danuser the replacement would already be here if that makes sense
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True, but the man has a weird obsession with dragons having sex, bwing SA’d or r worded.
I agree, the man can write and portray the Nelves exactly as we imagine them to be yet when it comes to dragons, he’s just like everybody else.
Now that I think about it, anything dragon related just seems in the grand scheme of things… Subpar, icky and relatively boring and mid. The quintenssential fantasy race/species in WoW just feel like a bunch of losers more preoccupied LARPing as mortals than being their dragons selves and doing the job assigned to them.
I think they peaked in Day of the Dragon, Vanilla and any content preceding the OG expansion.
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It’s the ‘why were all the Live Action Transformers films predominantly filled with human focus?’ guff all over again, and I despise it.
They’re Dragons. Write them like Dragons, have them in their real forms 95% of the time.
Visages on Dracthyr were stupid too…
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That cutscene in Dragonflight where Fyrakk has captured a green dragon in humanoid shape and it’s played like he’s weakened and unable to fight back as if being a dragon causes a strain on him is really bizarre.
Like if you beat someone up in visage form to the point they can no longer focus on spells surely they would revert back to being a dragon because maintaining an illusion is the active part right
they are still dragons right
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You’d like to think so.
However
Visages are best when they’re allowind dragons to blend in among mortals. That’s it. Beyond that these bastards should be aloof dragons, hoarding coin, looking down on their lessers. Sure some may care more for preservation of nature or whatever, but … they should be dragons first and foremost.
Not… I am both Vulpera and Dragon, I am neither.
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I think there’s another angle to consider as well. Many people, myself included, do not care to invest heavily in the use of social media. As a result, there is a very vocal portion of players who go out of their way to follow and try to chat with developers on social media and those who would rather keep a healthy distance.
This leads to warped feedback. For example, the ‘silent majority’ may very well have broader tastes whereas the ‘vocal niche’ cuddling up to the likes of Danuser and Golden may share their tastes and falsely give the impression that their writing and favoured characters are overwhelming adored.
I think the more pragmatic approach would be to treat every character and faction with dignity and respect, no matter how small their role in the story, to better appeal to a broader range of tastes.
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Correct me if I am wrong, but the dragons don’t use illusions, do they. They more so actually BECOME the thing. Didn’t Alexstrasza once turn herself into a tree? I know nothing of the context, it just seemed so absurd it’s stuck in my head.