What do you think of Steve Danuser's lore work as Lead Narrative Designer?

[Progenitor Aquarius]

Idk. I just like killing things.

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Hard to talk shit about the lore now when WC3 fucked with almost everything from WC’s 1 and 2.

Then what makes you so invested in cosmology when as you said you just like killing things?

[Magnagarde]

tl;dr Garithos was right. The elves are our misfortune.

Your post deserves a bigger reply than this and I'll make one if I get the time anytime soon, though one part in particular - about the Horde being for the people who like the undead - is the key point. While Thrall's Horde was a narrow corridor in terms of storytelling, there were many ways to tangle the playable races within the Horde sans Forsaken in order to appeal to Horde fans, both present and past.

I agree with everything you wrote, except that the Forsaken brought something to the table that the orcs didn't already have. Thrall's Horde was bland at the end of Warcraft 3, but there were a hundred ways to make the more interesting without forcing the undead into the Horde. The orcs are one of the most colourful groups in the game and as such could've brought everything the Forsaken brought with themselves and more. In fact, the orcs who suffered reprisal at the hands of the Alliance after the Second War and the rag-tag bands scattered all across the Eastern Kingdoms would make a much more natural pick when it comes to representing Horde interests in the EK. Enslaving dragons, readmitting their brethren who mastered fel magic and necromancy; there's a lot of potential.

There was no need to look for controversial and interesting stuff beyond what the orcs alone can offer for starters; things can be expanded from there. The MMO and RTS game design differences hinder the progression of the story, there's no doubt about that. I understand that the Forsaken brought substance to the table that Thrall's Horde didn't have, but I believe that Blizzard looked in the wrong spot for said substance. In turn, neither Thrall's Horde nor the Forsaken were allowed to freely flesh themselves out without continously either bumping heads or sticking together where it made least sense.

The reason why I believe the Forsaken could've been a faction of their own is because it would be more in-tune with Warcraft 3's representation of the factions and would allow a natural progression of the factions' stories based on what everyone knew so far. Within the Forsaken they could've fleshed out the good ones, who would not go down a dark path and within the Horde they could've fleshed out how the past comes to haunt the new Horde through the activities of various clans that have a hard time adapting to a new world.

I'd just like to point out that my critique goes towards the very start of WoW; there's nothing that can be done now or well, not without major complaining from players invested into the affair.

[VoidSeeker199X]

The main issue I have isn't the story itself but the way they presented it. After Legion I didn't know why Sylvanas burned Teldrassil and when Shadowlands was announced everyone wondered why she was so powerful. The whole storyline is based on the short story after Wrath where she throws herself off Ice Crown Citadel and lands in the Maw meeting the Jailer for the first time. All of this isn't shown in game. To fully understand the story I have to rely on short stories and books which shouldn't be necessary. Like mentioned here before they should have given this story more time to unfold. It feels like it's missing crucial parts and is told too fast which makes it frustrating and unfun to follow.

[Nerovar]

If you want to see it done poorly right away, just look at the Night Elves. How did the Night Elves join the Alliance? No one knows, there's no canon inciting incident to this day. Why did they join the Alliance, considering it consists of members they never saw throughout the entirety of WC3? Lol. Why was their bond to their allies so close that not only do they immediately work together but they ditched their gender roles and nocturnal life on their behalf? Haha. These aren't issues that can't be overcome later, since it's primarily a gameplay choice provided thematically you still hold onto the same points. The Night Elves are a powerful, imperial force and more than that, decently xenophobic and trigger-happy. Their High Priestess caps both her own people to free Illidan and also offs the orcs and humans for their intrusion. Yet from the start they are treated as high elf stand in. The faction does not expand and experience friction from their inclusion with it as an acknowledged point, instead their key traits are sanded off to accommodate their inclusion and the only time they threatened to recover was in 8.1, only for it to go down like a wet fart due to the writers' unwillingness to commit and their message mongering. And while that was fine in Vanilla since the humans and dwarves, unlike the orcs and trolls, had a huge amount of meat to their internal storytelling and the conflict that came with it it festered into a problem once the Alliance gradually had all of its conflict-inducing traits demolished from expansion to expansion culminating with BFA where everyone is a peacenik with identical values and elemental void figures and elemental holy figures are so overcome by their shared goodness that they don't clash.

My favourite part about the Night Elves in WoW to this day is their portrayal in Cataclysm where (as a Horde player) you can slaughter them by the bushel in Ashenvale, then walk over to the next zone where they act as your friendly quest givers. It's hard to think of any other fictional race that has been narratively violated to this degree. At this point it seems pretty safe to say that they will never escape their role as a narrative tool for the protagonist races.

[Feanoro]

Bravo, @Super Dickmann.

There was no need to look for controversial and interesting stuff beyond what the orcs alone can offer for starters

Which is a problem in that any other Horde races are rendered orc-lite. Trolls were just lanky orcs with a Jamaican patois and Tauren were even tempered orcs that said moo in vanilla, and it hasn't drastically improved since. The Forsaken were the only ones that weren't another flavor of orc, largely due to the WC3 writers loving the Scourge concepts.

A large part of the damage to the Horde has been that in both the orcs' and undead's cases, once they had central elements forcibly stripped out, the writers had no idea what to do further, and the other races were so underdeveloped that they couldn't carry the story.

[Skildar]

The main issue I have isn't the story itself but the way they presented it. After Legion I didn't know why Sylvanas burned Teldrassil and when Shadowlands was announced everyone wondered why she was so powerful. The whole storyline is based on the short story after Wrath where she throws herself off Ice Crown Citadel and lands in the Maw meeting the Jailer for the first time. All of this isn't shown in game. To fully understand the story I have to rely on short stories and books which shouldn't be necessary. Like mentioned here before they should have given this story more time to unfold. It feels like it's missing crucial parts and is told too fast which makes it frustrating and unfun to follow.

Why she burned Teldrassil was explained. She wanted to break all hope for the alliance.
How she became so powerful didn't really matter much. She was due to some binding, we knew as much and it was enough to let us think about it. You could tie it to different events : her suicide and pact with the valkyrs, her deal with Helya. The importance of it is that the global war fueled her.

Having all the answers and explanations serve no player and putting the blame on these parts is really just showing that you didn't interact much with the NPC or pay attention during cinematics.

[Ardenaso]

tl;dr Garithos was right. The elves are our misfortune.

someone needs to make a "what if" when Malfurion agrees on executing Dath'remar and his Highborne

[uzira]

Danuser is doing just a GREAT job and he is here to STAY. So yall better just accept that FACT and move on with your hate.

[Feanoro]

Malfurion agrees on executing Dath'remar and his Highborne

"Remember, Peter, with great power comes the responsibility to sit on your ass and do nothing but develop amnesia about those who repeatedly slaughter your people."

Somehow Blizzard's version is a bit less compelling...

[Super Dickmann]

This touches on another problem with WoW's storytelling I've noticed. You have all of these various races and factions: Night Elf druids, Tauren Druids, human priests and paladins, Orc shamans, etc, but 90% of the time the world ending threats are resolved by human or elf mages. It feels like Cataclysm is the only real exception to this rule, with Thrall and the Earthen Ring getting to be the main stars who combat Deathwing, and the Cenarion Circle getting a guest star role in the Hyjal/Firelands subplot. But otherwise, whenever the threat of the week shows up, it inevietably boils down to human or elf wizards researching the threat and then going off to defeat them, while everyone else stands around and twiddles their fingers offscreen. It's pretty egregious when you have superpowerful characters like Malfurion who spend 95% of WoW's plot offscreen and inactive.

Cheers, your first paragraph summarizes a lot of what I was getting at regarding the MMO narrative, but this one's worth expanding as it's part of a general problem that the MMO has never been able to fix due to the framing lock that I allude to and that you cover very well in the first paragraph. The game is built so you occupy the worm's eye view of a given perspective essentially indefinitely, but like every Blizzard product it also badly wants to retread SC1's protoss campaign/Eternity's End a million times, which hinges on a unity of perspective that an RTS can allow but the MMO can't mechanically deliver. So to have its cake and eat it too the game, since Wrath, centers the very core story against the big bad on ostensibly neutral groups which must by definition be as bland as possible in order to conflict as little as can be with the fixed perspective you're in for most of the rest of the game. This has two narrative issues, the first being that these groups are by necessity boring, with the Argent Crusade and Ebon Blade essentially filling the role of the living of Lordaeron and the Forsaken as regards their grievances with Arthas, but they can't take advantage of the narrative weight of these grievances because as they're required to be universal and these are specific plot beats bound to specific races. So instead you've got orcs and night elves engaged in a weird paladin LARP without any of the context to motivate them, ditto gnomes and draenei filling in for the necrotically raised victims of Arthas' slaughter of Lordaeron, all unable to hearken back to the actual thing that makes these archetypes powerful because being the Burger King Kids' Club of Azeroth is the way you can square them. It's appropriate that Tirion is the leader because while he's a human paladin, that and being exiled by Uther in a a fashion that never comes up in Wrath anyway is the only thing connecting him to Arthas, he's just the most bland and acceptable possible figure to take Arthas out, possessing the right aesthetic and not having any credentials that'd make one or the other side feel cheated.

That's the good version of this storytelling too. The bad version is when instead of a straw group being recreated that occupies screentime and narrative role of a more specific faction, a specific faction has to be turned bland enough to carry that narrative. This is how you end up with what @Nerovar mentions where the orcs and night elf questing experience consists of one besieging and the other defending their home in a life or death struggle but just one zone away, the Night Elf leader can't give one bit of a shit, dude doesn't even reference it. His inexplicably alive mentor isn't the least bit annoyed that a demon blood-pumped orc chopped him down with an axe. Malfurion not only has to be written out of the plot for large stretches so the story doesn't have to explain why he doesn't solve every problem, even when he does appear his narrative role in neutral content necessitates that he do nothing in racial or factional content. Accordingly, most appearances people see him as, including the playerbase he's supposed to appeal that being the people who play night elf, are left with a man who talks in bland homilies and engages in matters of perennial importance while never bringing up the invasion of his land literally within eyeshot of him. Malfurion is treated as a de facto neutral character despite having very strong associations with a given race, meaning that his actions or inaction directly affect how both the night elf playerbase and those interacting with it view him and them in general.

This has only really degenerated over time too. Back in Wrath and Cataclysm, the Cenarion Circle, Earthen Ring, Argent Crusade etc. were at least organisations implying multiple people and perspectives, with Malfurion being a crucial part but not the entire group so you at least have the figleaf that he represents some kind of specific faction and allowing distance between it and the playable group, even if that distance comes at the expense of said playable group being robbed of narrative that would be more compelling, if niche. But in new expansions and in the latter half of Cataclysm as well, even that figleaf is gone because the plot hinges regardless of faction not even on groups but on people, and the same group of people too. Thrall goes from Warchief of the Horde to shaman prioritizing the saving of the world over that of his race alone, but the transition from that to Ersatz Aspect wrenches the character out of any context as far as the story is concerned. Thrall can't have too much of his story center around things specific to the Horde lest it be alienating to his new role as a savior, which means his story must be at least this boring to proceed, yet he's still the Warchief of the Horde. People don't suddenly forget the parts where you see the Alliance try and seize, then assassinate Thrall in the goblin intro area and as Alliance you know Thrall tolerated Sylvanas and appointed Garrosh, belligerent leaders counter to your interest but the narrative and his writing doesn't. The more the game has centered around superheroes the worse it has gotten. BFA is the peak of the dissonant aspect where as Horde Jaina goes from deadly threat to your best friend within patches while failing to address the reasons for either, without even getting into the carfire that is the entire Alliance reaction to the Horde's moral status or lack thereof. Shadowlands meanwhile is the peak of the vacuity of this trend where the entire living Azeroth cast are all hollow husks who have absolutely nothing to do or say and are treated as a single cohesive entity, unable to express any position or emote to anything because they're supposed to appeal to everyone and chafe against no one, with the exception of paper thin callbacks. Jaina for example, besides having no actual plot throughline to speak of, reacts to both the woman who raised, tortured and enslaved her brother to kill her mother in her sleep and to seeing the crucible of all creation with all the stirring emotion and narrative weight of a man seeing his toast land butter side down.

For all the issues I've got with Mists' goal and end state, it's the absolute closest to WC3 in the sense that it's the only WoW story that doesn't hinge on this kind of autocannibalism. All of its plot beats hinge on characters introduced in the MMO who have a reason to be in this plot and it confidently bases the actions of every participant on their own motives, its neutral factions are unique instead of being soulless replicas of other plotbeats and it feels no need to feature characters without need. It's the most confident narrative Blizzard has done since the RTS and likely the boldest they'll ever go.

Your post deserves a bigger reply than this and I'll make one if I get the time anytime soon, though one part in particular - about the Horde being for the people who like the undead - is the key point. While Thrall's Horde was a narrow corridor in terms of storytelling, there were many ways to tangle the playable races within the Horde sans Forsaken in order to appeal to Horde fans, both present and past.

I agree with everything you wrote, except that the Forsaken brought something to the table that the orcs didn't already have. Thrall's Horde was bland at the end of Warcraft 3, but there were a hundred ways to make the more interesting without forcing the undead into the Horde. The orcs are one of the most colourful groups in the game and as such could've brought everything the Forsaken brought with themselves and more. In fact, the orcs who suffered reprisal at the hands of the Alliance after the Second War and the rag-tag bands scattered all across the Eastern Kingdoms would make a much more natural pick when it comes to representing Horde interests in the EK. Enslaving dragons, readmitting their brethren who mastered fel magic and necromancy; there's a lot of potential.

My point isn't that the WC3 orcs was made for the people that like the undead. The opposite, the WoW Horde as it is in Vanilla is meant to incorporate both the WC3 orcs and undead much like the Alliance involves both humans and night elves, they are coalitions of very different fantasies and appeals. It's that the RTS to MMO transition squeezes the perspectives involved and that if you will have a two-faction format the only way to preserve 50% of the playable races from the RTS is to place them within these factions. As such, you have to choose where to put the undead and the night elves. The undead choice is obvious for multiple reasons, ranging from story reasons like ending their story by burning bridges with the Alliance to aesthetic and thematic ones like the orcs prior to WC3 practicing necromancy and the first Death Knights being orc-associated and both representing opposition to humans to gameplay ones like having a race on the other continent. Their introduction consequently helped solved a lot of other problems regarding the longevity of Thrall's Horde in a far different context from the one it was connected to.

Would it be possible to spin the undead and night elves off into their own factions and, really, would it have been more narratively flexible to not have factions at all? Of course, but the factions as said were powerful marketing tools then and now and identifiers of the franchise to this day and under that spectrum, there's no other way to add both races and the only question is not if it's done but how well it is achieved and what is accomplished through it. They are by no means a silver bullet to unrelated problems, like what I alluded to and what @Feanoro puts succinctly which is that no matter what you do when incorporating the WC3 into an MMO you have to actually set apart the trolls and tauren from the orcs since they were never intended to be able to carry their own narrative, which the undead inclusion also helps with. The reason the night elf inclusion fails is because it doesn't actually provide the people who liked them in WC3 what they wanted whereas the Forsaken have consistently been far more satisfying for their player group and that it only diminishes the night elves instead of adding anything to the Alliance. The reason the blood elf inclusion post-TBC fails, to abridge the upper text, is that they are thematically and visually closer to the Alliance than to any element of the Horde without having any narrative reason to continue in their role, but are obligated to continue to be a part of the Horde for mechanical reasons. The moralizing nonsense that was applied to turn them into this state is both replicated later and also took precedence over the logic of both factions and the failure to correct it in favor of doubling down set a precedent that damaged both factions long-term by removing even the most basic requirement of the two-faction setup, i.e that the placement of the race must hinge on it not being more appropriate for the opposite faction.

They also aren't in any way to suggest the orcs couldn't carry the faction without them. Hell, the orcs don't need any other race to participate at all, properly applied they can constitute the entire faction. That is effectively how WC2/Tides of Darkness/Beyond the Dark Portal worked and it's only further reinforced by things like WoD's Iron Horde which manages to create several separate sub-groups which can all bounce off of each other and fill different niches with all of them still being identifiably the same race. Even aside from being vastly more cohesive thematically and visually to the hodgepodge the faction's gradually become, it'd not be too hard to argue that this setup would also have more viewpoint variety and conflict than the present Horde.

[Catastrophy349]

Has anyone been following the news regarding Sylvanas' character being ruined in BFA by Alex Afrasiabi and Steve Danuser doing his best to fix it ever since?

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Has anyone been following the news regarding Sylvanas' character being ruined in BFA by Alex Afrasiabi and Steve Danuser doing his best to fix it ever since?

I've heard Allerica's voice actor on twitter, the Red Shirt guy, and Taliesin claim it, but I haven't heard it from any of the devs or actual writers.

[Cherry123]

The main problem is not in the lore, but in the way it is written. Danuser can't write, that's a fact. Look at the shadowlands cinematics, communication between the characters is incoherent, most of the actions and words do not make sense. He tries to be smart, but he's not. By the way, not a single character has received development in shadowlands.

-Anduin arc led nowhere
-Bane, Jaina, Thrall didn't make sense to be in shadowlands
-Sylvanas' actions are inconsistent
-What did Calia and Taelia do ?
-Bolvar arc abandoned

And 10.0 will be the same, dude can't write new characters and tries to write from guides left by the old writing team.

[Combatbutler]

someone needs to make a "what if" when Malfurion agrees on executing Dath'remar and his Highborne

It would be amazing for trolls. Dwarves, humans and gnomes would most likely be wiped out or live in extremely hostile terrain.

[Kralljin]

Has anyone been following the news regarding Sylvanas' character being ruined in BFA by Alex Afrasiabi and Steve Danuser doing his best to fix it ever since?

People already pieced that together months ago.

It doesn't take a genius to put the pieces together as far as Afrasiabi is concerned.
(1) Dude created Garrosh and wanted to turn him into a Protagonist (See Stonetalon being a "mistake", despite the fact that this is an entire questzone with VA)
(2) Instead became a villain in MoP (which was under the direction of someone else)
(3) Afrasiabi is in charge of BfA and declares it as MoP 2.0 (he is cited as creative director in the credits)
(4) Turns Sylvanas into a 100% villain similiar to how Garrosh was turned in MoP (which was likely "revenge" for Garrosh) - he also said that Sylvanas has been always a villain
(5) His other creation, Saurfang (look up who was the Horde counterpart of Field Marshal Afrasiabi) suddenly becomes super relevant, despite only being like a secondary character - also remember who Garrosh called a "wise War hero" in Stonetalon?
(6) sudden shift of Sylvanas the moment Afrasiabi is out of the picture

I said it a few weeks ago, the Mak'gora between Saurfang and Sylvanas is basically a million dollar toy figure fight between Afrasiabi' self insert and Danuser's waifu.

But saying Danuser is trying to fix it?
It's like trying to fix some acidic burns by pouring some sort of base substance over the wound.

[Catastrophy349]

I'm not a snowflake so I won't take offence to your reply to my comment. I simply added to the thread what I heard. I don't live on social media so this was news to me.

[Syegfryed]

Has anyone been following the news regarding Sylvanas' character being ruined in BFA by Alex Afrasiabi and Steve Danuser doing his best to fix it ever since?

The little disagreement between afrasiabi and Kosak is one thing, they fucked each other characters, and this is like, well know for a while, they both had "descent into villany" because yes, but Danuser was working on BfA too, so, not giving him free pass here.

My grandma would fix sylvanas better than this clown.

No respectable writer would see what was done thus far and go for the route he went.

[Catastrophy349]

Yeah, I'm not defending Danuser or saying his story telling is good. I was simply relaying information that I read online to this thread. Wasn't implying I have an opinion in one direction or another.

[Cherry123]

US politics and twitter snowflakes influence the gaming industry, all the new games make me cringe. The last game I liked was Resident Evil Village, but the game is Japanese.
Too many factors
-bad writing
-SJW wrath
-US politics

if we put it all together, then we have what we have

[Holdodlig]

One of his lines was "When a movie or a book is done, you can't undo what was done in this book. In videogames you can."

At this point, you know he's a shitty writer. Hate to be a dick, but the main story has been ridiculously bad since they've focused on Sylvanas. Major thumb down to how the Jailer was portrayed as a villain. Such a shitty character that the only legendary boss drop was a random bow Sylvanas got in Shadowlands (so it's not even her true bow) and the Jailer's mace isn't even worthy of the title of legendary.

Minor lore elements are good, but the main story he's supposed to direct is just bad. When even a guy like pyromancer ends up ragequitting the game because of that, you know how bad his storytelling is.