Read more about World of Warcraft ➜ https://worldofwarcraft.mgn.gg
Lead Narrative Director of World of Warcraft Steve Danuser is gone. Actually, he went quite a while ago. This will be a cause of celebration to many players, with many having criticisms of his work over the years, from the burning of teldrassil, to Sylvanas’s story and BFA, Shadowlands and the Jailer nonsense and even a lot of Dragonflight’s story too. What will be his legacy? Taliesin and Evitel try to work it out.
MrGM’s Love is in the Air Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4WuJuhtv9o&t=233s&ab_channel=MrGM
► Wowhead Articles
Steve Danuser Quietly Left Blizzard Entertainment Last November – Interview with PC Gamer
https://www.wowhead.com/news/steve-danuser-quietly-left-blizzard-entertainment-last-november-interview-with-337634
Gnomeregan Boss Strategy Guides on Wowhead – Season of Discovery
https://www.wowhead.com/classic/news/gnomeregan-boss-strategy-guides-on-wowhead-season-of-discovery-337772
Easy Collectibles to Obtain with Follower Dungeons in Dragonflight
https://www.wowhead.com/news/easy-collectibles-to-obtain-with-follower-dungeons-in-dragonflight-337712
► Our Second Channel: youtube.com/@TaliesinEvitelChannel2
► Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/taliesinandevitel
► Taliesin & Evitel Twitter: https://twitter.com/TaliesinEvitel
► Taliesin & Evitel Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TaliesinandEvitel
► T&E Merchandise: https://taliesin-evitel.creator-spring.com/
source
Honestly you're being absurdly generous.
But by being this generous you create a new problem;
If he wasn't (directly) responsible for all of the garbage that happened under his reign, then what did he actually do?
Cuz it's not like anything particularly good was produced under his reign either.
So, either he is responsible for (a part of) the garbage that they put out. Or he is a meaningless figurehead that achieved close to nothing.
Neither option speaks particularly highly of him.
I think people should be a lot more forgiving about things like fails in writing and such. In my opinion, making people care about the lore is a success, and the BFA arc certainly did. Nothing ever comes close to horde players removing their shoulderpads in solidarity to Saurfang and the Horde after the "Old Soldier" Cinematic. I would go as far as to say that nothing caught me more, story wise, than the BFA arc. Arthas and Illidan were all great, but the awesome BFA cinematics (starting with Jaina's sea shanty omg!), story cadence and the Saurfang-Anduin relation culminating in Saurfang's burial inside Orgrimmar was just wonderful.
The only thing that I personally could never forgive is to make story exclusively accessible outside the game. I love wow lore and story, but since that happened, I came to acceept that I will never fully dive into it again because the disappointment was so massive it kinda made me resign. Something died, the spark was extinguished, however you wanna call it.
Really curious as to the music that starts at 19:51 anyone know?
Denuser self inserted his soy ass as Nathanos. For that he deserves to be ridiculed until the end of time.
I think the main crime of Steve Danuser is his passing resemblance to HeelvsBabyface
Hey remember when Tyrande had Sylvanas dead to rights until Elune, inexplicably, withdrew the powers of the Night Warrior because she cares about her. Only to then immediately reimbue her with those powers so she could become a bomb capable of not only killing her and everyone else in the area? I'll never forget….
I feel like the plot of wow is both too "planet of the hats" and too simple in resolution of conflict. Some characters have weaknesses and strengths but I feel like writers approach to writing is that someone is bad not because they are opposed to you, but because their reasoning is wrong. I can see that for cartoons (and maybe that's what they are going for) but in my opinion conflict is usually a materalistic and/or power-based. I liked that some dragons were excluded by the titans so we could get a conflict there, I liked that the primalists were basicly people that didnt wanna be slaves anymore, I liked that there was no reasoning with the evil centaur clan. The problem with all of these conflicts is how they are resolved.
To resolve the conflicts they could for instance: have the aspects step down from governance when they figured out slavery was happening (which would make sense honestly) and have their own little factions of dragons and have the drakonids rule the isles because they lived there all this time and outnumber the dragons from what I understand. They could have the primalist conflict resolved this way as well and the dragonflights taking responsibility for not supporting their followers by stepping down or switching to an advisory position. I will say that the evil centaur should have had more complexity written into it instead of wanting to rule by force. I would have loved a wow equivalent of conspiracy nuts as centaurs following a god that doesn't exist at all and have proving that the god doesn't exist not do a damn thing to stop the worship or the violence. The resolution to just kill them could be the same (I am not advocating for a resolution like this irl, I am simply saying this would be better for game feel). I am not a game writer in any way so I may be missing something (maybe the political stuff might outlaw the game in certain countries for instance) but I feel like the plot gets so simple morally that they can't even have reasons or resolutions to problems that isn't just killing people who are wrong because we have to reason with them.
Sorry for the wall, I just disagree that the writers couldn't do a better job atm. Im a random person on the internet and I feel like it's not super hard to write more intrigue to get more layers of story to both flesh out the world and the characters.
Alex Afrasiabi dug the hole that WoW’s lore fell into. Danuser simply wasn’t talented enough to lift it back out.
Why is the grimoire cosmology chart reminiscent of the infinity stones? The Jailer=Thanos????
Shadowlands had 1 good thing. Night Fae.
I don't like him or what he lead. However I agree that people are way unfair to him overall.
I, too, agree that Danuser seems like a really nice guy; he certainly came off that way during the DF announcement video where he talked about story.
However, there is a through line between thinking GoT season 8 was brilliant and the story / narrative / writing in Shadowlands. It's one thing to enjoy a story, it's another to think it is "brilliant". I enjoy The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, but I'd never say it was particularly well-written. (Sorry, I didn't watch Lost, so I cannot speak to that as an example.)
Also, consider the size of Danuser's blunder. The burning of Teldrassil and Sylvanas' villain arc were bad, but they were largely concentrated on one planet and one character respectively, and as such, they are easy to write around or "recontextualize". But how the f*** do you get around the "recontextualization" of not just the entire Warcraft cosmos, but the entire Warcraft mythology going back to the first RTS game?
What kind of narrative lead would think that writing a story in which the beloved characters and mythology of an entire franchise that people have grown to know and love over decades getting "recontextualized" with "HA! Everything you knew was WRONG!" was a good idea? Has Danuser never watched The Phantom Menace? Did he not see just how controversial and divisive the concept of medichlorians was? And that was just one throw away line in one movie, not an entire expansion's worth of story!
Also also, you did not talk about players' dissatisfaction with the general tone / vibe of Dragonflight, which I think is also a mark against Danuser (and the writing team in general).
All that being said, I do hope Danuser learns from this experience and goes on to do better wherever he ends up.
I organically discovered my first mage rune. I had decided to go in blind and didn't read anything. Had a habit in old vanilla of sheeping everything- because it was fun. I sheeped cows, defias, bunnies, even sheep- all of it. So when I saw a Gazelle wandering, totally out of place in Elwynn, what did I do? Well first I checked type to see if it would be tameable by my hunter (nope, critter) so I sheeped it. Boom – lucked out. So when I saw the other 'out of place' animals in the zone it was a no-brainer.
Idk how to feel about Steve tbh. I don't like Metzen's story at all. Especially if he does Sylvanas like the starcraft female lead he seems to be mirroring with her. But I loved the dragonflight main story. More then any other.
"Is this going to be a defense of Steve Danuser? No, definitely not. I promise." Proceeds to defend Steve Danuser.
Gotta get yourself a fresh cut blud
Even if there is no WoW news, we can still expect a skit once a week 🙂
The writing in Dragonflight was terrible…
I appreciate the work Steve put into our beloved game and he made some good and bad contributions just like we all do. Thanks, Steve.
I just wanna give Steve a hug. Doesn't matter whether you like or hate the story, no one deserves that level of vitriol. Man was just out there doing his job and loving it and trying to make everyone happy. No one can convince me that Steve didn't care.
no i been working on blizzard for so many years,no i tried my best . whatever f that guy
Whether it's reading books, comics, television or any other media for entertainment. Stories turn to s*** when you start making good bad and bad good.
I was really glad to hear you put the blame where it is due on the burning of Teldrassil. Everyone blames Danuser and it really sucks because he literally had nothing to do with it. He was handed a flaming pile of shit. And while there were missteps under his direction, we will never know how much control he actually held and how short a leash he was on. Dragonflight in my opinion has been wonderful.
Not going into specifics but as a general concept: unless something comes demanded from someone higher up (like the Sylvanas-example in this here video) it's the team leader's job for any failings to be their fault. That's why they get the big bucks.
BFA had some great writing, and some terrible writing
Shadowlands had an amazing start and fell on its face
But DF I'd argue is the worst of the three, the story is not there, and what is there is just…small talk, alot of small patches and events with no substance. The Emerald Dream was wasted, Alexstrasza does nothing the entire expac.
People will still talk about BFA and Shadowlands for what it was and wasn't, but I think DF will be looked back as a point where Blizz put the story on the backburner to focus on the game systems(Which were improved greatly over the expac)
I've been playing WoW and familiar with Warcraft in general that i remember when Metzen was heavily criticised for 'green Jesus' Thrall and the choices he made as creative lead.
I find it very interesting how the community is treating Danuser similar to how they treated Metzen back then only for Metzen's return to be hailed as saving WoW.
As we know, however, the internet loves their drama and discourse so this comes as no surprise to me but its fascinating to see a new cycle of love and hate begin anew.
We'll see how it all turns out as the Worldsoul Saga progresses
13:55 What's aggravating about "the Titan point of view" is not whether it makes things more interesting or not.
It's that it betrays the marketing promise of Chronicle. It was advertised and sold as a definitive canon book. Then they retconned it. People were misled, that's what they are dissatisfied with.
15:15 There is a big difference between liking something and finding it brilliant. Liking is enjoyment, you can enjoy things for all sorts of personal reasons. Finding it brilliant is applying critical thinking, it's appreciation for the craftmanship. Finding a very poorly crafted story brilliant shows a cluelessness and incompetence when it comes to story craft.
He didn't say he liked it, he said he found it to be brilliant.
You have nice hair.
My problem with the whole outside game lore has always been this: every major questline in each zone has bunch of those "gather 10 bear asses and then go genocide local natives" that serve no other purpose than to artificially extend the playing time. Why are wasting their and my time with that shit when apparently the game still has so much lore that they have to cut it out and serve it as physical DLC. Why waste time creating filler arcs when they struggle to adapt even their core story like everything related to Jailer into the game?
I can't really disagree with any of your points. My only personal rub is the Jailer was just so poorly executed that it really colored all the other bits of Shadowlands that I actually quite liked. We kept getting told to just wait and we'd get answers, but man, Zovaal just never could carry the weight he was supposed to, and it just soured the ending so badly.
To save people 27 minutes: "Mr. Danuser is my friend, so I won't say anything controversial or overly critical"
I can forgive Steve for many story BS moments, but I'll NEVER forgive him for creating Zereth Mortis. FCK THAT PLACE! Only an idiot should blame HIM for EVERYTHING that went wrong with BFA and Shadowlands, because he was only the face to the public, there were way more people involved behind the scenes. But he should probable have stayed a quest designer if I'm being honest.
I guess I'm glad that you got to defend your IRL friend, Tali, but this video was a disservice to your audience. Danuser may not deserve the level of hate he gets, but at least 3/4 of what you said landed somewhere between you sounding delusional and you seeming like you were knowingly, intentionally bullshitting us. Disappointing.
Some of the dumbest shit I've ever seen and I can't believe anyone enjoys this.
I will die on the hill that Shadowlands wasn't THAT bad. ESPECIALLY in the second half. I really really like 9.1.5., 9.2, and 9.2.5 patches a lot actually. Some of the most fun i ever had in the game.
Granted i am a healthcare worker and basically couldn't play for the first year of Shadowlands due to working so much in the pandemic. Which is when covenants and all the other quality of life stuff did really suck (also the maw as a zone, and the jailer as a villan are just sub-par at best). But I am truly sad I could only do lfr for Castle Nathria, it was a great raid. Though i can also see how for someone like Tali, who's livelihood depends on the state of the game, it has probably mared his view on the whole expansion.
Stop fhcking defending steve. His story ideas where shit and we all know it.
Just give us a Funny-Intro every week and we are happy :p
Hand holding. Take all the raid and pvp addons out of WoW. Then I will take it seriously again.