New interview with Steve Danuser about BfA

[Queen of Hamsters]

I'll go back to this post when SL launches and when it ends xd

Why though...?

I sincerely doubt they'll go backwards on the technical stuff...

[LemonDemonGirl]

I mean even Bwon didn't have any complaints about soul delivery to the shadowlands or his realm being disrupted this whole expansion, you'd think that would be a major indication that something else was happening.

Well, Bwonsamdi is quite chill/laid back. Or maybe he hasn't really though of it as an issue since Sylvanas burned the tree?

I'll go back to this post when SL launches and when it ends xd

You should bookmark this thread lol

[Easo]

You guys still remember the "MORALLY GREY"? Because I sure do and it all was a big bullshit. Then again, players called it out in the beggining already, yet they kept repeating it again and again even it all was very obvious. They kept repeating the cliches and they absolutely cant do the "Show, don't tell".

Story truly was one of the weakest parts of BfA and overall on of the worst ever made for WoW.

Less faction wars and more fucking planets with big ass swords then?

Ooohhhh, kinky! Yes, please!

[DemonHunter18]

Why though...?

I sincerely doubt they'll go backwards on the technical stuff...

I sincerely doubt that Shadowlands will have a good story or a well written bad story.

I can already see incredible retcons with Arthas and Kael...

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Well,
You should bookmark this thread lol

Yeah, LMAO xd

[Queen of Hamsters]

I sincerely doubt that Shadowlands will have a good story or a well written bad story.

I can already see incredible retcons with Arthas and Kael...

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Yeah, LMAO xd

Good for you, that's not what I was expressing hope towards though.

Story delivery mechanisms and systems (quests, cinematics, effects on the world etc) =/= the story being told through those systems. Whilst I wouldn't say I'm a Negative Nancy like so many others, I'm entirely blank in terms of expectations for SL story.

Simple enough.

[FelPlague]

Lol, really, ignorant as ever.

And he kind of admitted they straight up lied to the fans when saying Sylvanas won't be Garrosh 2.0. - No instead she's a Garrosh 2.0 with nuances... with a shade of purple maybe?

These old white men at Blizzard are just complacent dickheads. If they haven't learned how to make a good expac or tell a good story by now, they most likely never will.

what does that have to do with anything other then you being racist?

[DemonHunter18]

Good for you, that's not what I was expressing hope towards though.

Story delivery mechanisms and systems (quests, cinematics, effects on the world etc)

Sure but their latest N'zoth cinematic was legendary.

But hey, if we get full CGI cinematic in SL where Tyrande shoots an arrow through Sylvanas' skull in the first patch then there might be hope.

[Maljinwo]

They clearly have no roadmap for the story

Nor any idea what the playerbase wants

[Relapses]

Ooohhhh, kinky! Yes, please!

This comment inspired me to make this meme.

I'm sorry internet.

[Queen of Hamsters]

This comment inspired me to make this meme.

I'm sorry internet.

What has been seen... T.T
Well done!

[Nerovar]

You guys still remember the "MORALLY GREY"? Because I sure do and it all was a big bullshit. Then again, players called it out in the beggining already, yet they kept repeating it again and again even it all was very obvious. They kept repeating the cliches and they absolutely cant do the "Show, don't tell".

Imagine being so bad at storytelling that you have to lie to the recipients in order to appease them and get them where you want them to be and still fail because of your crass ineptitude. The writing team is a fucking trainwreck.

[Mehrunes]

And if the "cycle" brought up by Sylvanas in the BFA trailer is supposed to be the Warchief cycle she herself is a part of, why does she even say it? Is she that self aware? It doesn't make any sense, she doesn't sound happy about it at all (even though she should, given her newly revealed motives of killing as many people as possible). And what do the rest of her lines mean? "Alliances forged and broken", "We have paid the price for sharing this world"? They don't seem to gel very well with what he said about the cycle and the nuances and the stuff...

The rest of your post is pretty spot on but here you stumbled. Yes, Sylvanas is obviously this self aware. She has already broken the fifth wall and is in the process of breaking the sixth one. She can not only deliberately lie to the consumer but her thoughts can now travel through time and alter reality Steins;Gate style. That's why she has 20 different goals that all conflict one another yet she's meticulously executing them all at once and everything her enemies do is according to keikaku.

Not even comparable. GoT had the biggest character assassination in history (Daenerys). Nothing in Warcraft comes close to that.

Well... maybe Kael, who could've been a very good tragic villain... but they're bringing him back in Shadowlands anyway.

She wasn't assassinated. The seeds of her downfall have been planted eons before S8. It's just the execution of it was rushed as hell, as everything else in that season.

Just wait until Shadowlands has been out for a while.

Then this insipid, selectively forgetful song and dance in regards to WoD will start to shift.

This remark would make sense only if Shadowlands was somehow incapable of having an even shittier story than BfA. But despite how hard you want to pretend otherwise, Blizzard isn't actually the god's gift to mankind and as such there is nothing preventing that from happening.

Just like there was nothing preventing BfA to have an even shittier story than WoD. So congrats, by bringing up WoD for no reason whatsoever you just showcased how you are still treating your claim how WoD is worse than BfA as objective truth despite constantly lambasting all dem "haters" of saint Blizzard for treating their own opinions as truth as well. But hey, do as I say, not as I do, eh?

[Easo]

This comment inspired me to make this meme.

I'm sorry internet.

Nothing to be sorry for and far from the worst I have seen.
Thank you good Sir!

Imagine being so bad at storytelling that you have to lie to the recipients in order to appease them and get them where you want them to be and still fail because of your crass ineptitude. The writing team is a fucking trainwreck.

And this is my biggest fear about Shadowlands - one more expansion of them trying, but ultimately failing to tell a cohesive, likeable story.

[Mehrunes]

The storytelling *IS* good, it's the story being told that was such a turnoff for me and mine. Throughout BFA we (as in me and the people I play with) kept saying "man, imagine all these storytelling tools and content relations to the story occurring for an actually GOOD story?"

"Good story" is certainly subjective, of course I concede that, but it's that line of thought that makes me look forward to shadowlands!

The story was well told, it was just such a bad story (again, subjective), so Danuser does have something to be mechanically and systemically proud of in their actual methods and tools available.

Anyone saying that the full on cinematics were bad is just being ridiculous. The storytelling has gotten better, the stories will always be hit or miss.

Your argument amounts to saying that pretty packaging makes the storytelling good.

Definitely can agree with this.
I have hope for Shadowlands as a result of the delivery mechanisms.

And people claiming that BfA had worse storytelling than WoD (as in going downhill from then), are jokes.

"Draenor is FREE!!!" - Never forget.

Opinions, how do they work. Never mind the part where the stark majority of the Horde pulled AU Draenei of the WoD's ending and simply forgot all their grievances against the Alliance on the spot. The only difference is that they did so after a Horde member made an equally shitty one-liner rather than their enemy. Great choice of a hill to die on, ye o bearer of objective facts.

You guys still remember the "MORALLY GREY"? Because I sure do and it all was a big bullshit. Then again, players called it out in the beggining already, yet they kept repeating it again and again even it all was very obvious. They kept repeating the cliches and they absolutely cant do the "Show, don't tell".

Well, it's rather hard to do "show, don't tell" when you're changing direction half a dozen times and have to hamfist an explanation for your newest retcon somehow.

Imagine being so bad at storytelling that you have to lie to the recipients in order to appease them and get them where you want them to be and still fail because of your crass ineptitude. The writing team is a fucking trainwreck.

Maybe if we were talking about a train carrying all of the Ebola virions in the world that wrecked because it drove straight into a dumpster fire the size of Jupiter. Otherwise it's an insult to trainwrecks.

And this is my biggest fear about Shadowlands - one more expansion of them trying, but ultimately failing to tell a cohesive, likeable story.

Given their track record with retcons and the like, they may have tried many things with the story but they sure as hell did not try to make it cohesive.

[Queen of Hamsters]

Sure but their latest N'zoth cinematic was legendary.

But hey, if we get full CGI cinematic in SL where Tyrande shoots an arrow through Sylvanas' skull in the first patch then there might be hope.

1. It was lazy and pure wtf-fuel, having such a lackluster "cinematic" for what was ultimately the big bad. Sure they had the showing of our character defeating N'Zoth but they could at least have put SOME effort into the end cinematic...

2. I'd call that pandering. If they went down that route, I'd like to see an arrow in Nathanos' face as well. Or an Elysium-style facial explosion, even though PG13.

[sam86]

BFA is competing with GoT season 8 for the worst story trophy, still deciding who to give it to.

let's not drop wow that low
even fanfictions are still miles better than GoT s8

But he didn't even address anything about Nathanos, like he doesn't exist, probably because Nathanos doesn't exist outside of him
Maybe the question should been what u think u'll do for ur ex-warchief next?

Then again, which wow exp had the best story ? classic for having almost no story, or wrath for having a childish story (turning Lich King to cartoon villain, but at least the story was actually stable, no plot holes nonsense, just childish)
Cata story is also ok in same wrath quality, as they turned Deathwing from manipulative to flying ignorant, but from MoP story just keep get from bad to worse, they add lot of good small details, but story just bad (also nothing as bad as WoD)
And no i'm not mocking lol pandas, more of 10k years of absolutely nothing isolated lands

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Opinions, how do they work. Never mind the part where the stark majority of the Horde pulled AU Draenei of the WoD's ending and simply forgot all their grievances against the Alliance on the spot. The only difference is that they did so after a Horde member made an equally shitty one-liner rather than their enemy. Great choice of a hill to die on, ye o bearer of objective facts.

it isn't opinion WoD is bad, it is fact
U can argue that many of wow stories are bad, not well written, but WoD is the only exp that just flat out nonsense
The idea that Legion is 'one and same' across all universe, while Sargeras their own leader is different in each universe is start of crazy sh8t, now add to it that WoD is 35 years younger than our world, but it has living still normal ppl before they became demons, so we already killed Soreccar, how is he alive? What about KJ? Why he didn't warn his past self that Velen will betray him? Does that mean that every single Velen in every universe will betray KJ - who is one single entity of course, but then explain to me how exactly there is a time where a demon archimonde and a non-demon archimonde exist, then the non demon decide to be demon, what happened to the already existing demon ?
just don't try to think, u'll get a headache and brain damage

TLDR: WoD is only exp that doesn't have total crap bad story, and not just plot holes, but it is flat out doesn't make sense and can't work!

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I'm pretty sure everyone wanted Azshara to have her own expansion.

agree, i may not be one of them but her popularity was massive
Azshara is built since wc3 as the ultimate strongest mage, and while i may not like Azshara much the naga empire and culture could easily fit an entire exp, i did wish for an underwater focus exp, instead of what we got

It was wishful thinking at best. They stopped doing single-villain expansions since Cataclysm with Deathwing (TBC was also meant to be about Illidan, Zul'jin and Kil'jaeden were added later to stretch for WotLK's release). All expansions since then follow the general rule of having multiple main villains per patch.

So in truth it was pretty obvious that there would never be a 100% Azshara expansion. There might have been an expansion where Azshara played a major role as villain.

And that was BfA.

don't make bad publicity change something here
TBC since day one they planned to make KJ the end boss, it was called The Burning Crusade not Illidari, there is a very old interview (that no way in egypt i can google it, i may spend years in it) where they talk about how we will meet KJ before even BT out, internet was still infant and very few heard about it but that was the plan from start, to make KJ appears, exact details of course weren't final but they even planned to have sunwell

TBC raids were a mess but unlike what it seems they had clear plans for raids and bosses from start, they just f8cked up the presentation

[Jastall]

Faction war isn't inherently a bad story. MoP did it fine. Garrosh was a better villain than Sylvanas, and the Alliance also had their own "unsavory" elements with Jaina and Vereesa.

The problem with BfA is that Sylvanas is a bad villain. If the villain is bad, the story sucks. That's why the villain is even more important than the protagonist. Had they written Sylvanas as a more coherent villain, the story would've been better.

N'Zoth isn't much better. Dumb octopus with generic evil motivations gets boring after a while.

I wouldn't call Nazi Orcs "fine". Garrosh was better than Sylvanas insofar as 1) his core motivations were relatively consistent (his character sure as fuck wasn't), 2) he was fun to hate due to how boisterous, unapologetic and in-your-face he was, 3) at some point Blizzard dropped any pretense and just said 'yeah, he's the villain" instead of dancing around the issue and 4) he was carried by a great voice actor. It still wasn't a good story that made much sense, and Garrosh still wasn't a good villain.

[deenman]

No one working at an enterprise will ever come out and say ''yeah, this thing I did - it blew donkey kong''.

Not many solo, independent artists have the courage and self-reflection to do that. So you can't expect honesty from him.

actualy it happens,some movie directors and even actors have come out to apologise for bad movies they made

[Coconut]

The rest of your post is pretty spot on but here you stumbled. Yes, Sylvanas is obviously this self aware. She has already broken the fifth wall and is in the process of breaking the sixth one. She can not only deliberately lie to the consumer but her thoughts can now travel through time and alter reality Steins;Gate style. That's why she has 20 different goals that all conflict one another yet she's meticulously executing them all at once and everything her enemies do is according to keikaku.

I have to concede your point here, she is able to lie to the readers in her own thoughts after all. Hmm... I wonder if she's able to lie to Danuser too. Maybe her actual master plan is to get him fired from Blizzard for being such a creepy stalker. That's why she's been rattling so many chains and acting so inconsistent!

[Super Dickmann]

I have to concede your point here, she is able to lie to the readers in her own thoughts after all. Hmm... I wonder if she's able to lie to Danuser too. Maybe her actual master plan is to get him fired from Blizzard for being such a creepy stalker. That's why she's been rattling so many chains and acting so inconsistent!

She's not speaking to Bolvar in the Shadowlands cinematic but to the audience, that's why she turns her head towards the camera. When she says she'll set everyone free she means that she'll release them from the writing staff by crashing this storyline with no survivors.