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r/wow • … • u/AnwaAnduril

What, exactly, did Danuser write?

So with Danuser no longer being at Blizzard, I want to look back on his time writing the lore and see what exactly he was responsible for and what can be attributed to other writers.

I know he gets a lot of flak from the community (deservedly so), but do we give him grief for things that weren’t his fault? And what can we gleam about the future of WoW lore from deciphering his contributions to the last several years?

A few years ago, the lore team went on damage control for the guy claiming that late BFA/Shadowlands wasn’t his fault because he was just cleaning up from Alex, and that Dragonflight was “Danuser’s baby”. Judging from this and the timelines, this is the picture I get (feel free to correct me where I’m wrong):

* Alex does Teldrassil, decides to make Sylvanas a villain, gets forced out from Blizzard

* Danuser inherits a faction war and an evil Sylvanas

* Danuser decides that Sylvanas can’t just be evil and begins designing the Jailor and the core of the Shadowlands narrative as a vehicle for her redemption arc

* Sylvanas peaces out mid-BFA, letting Danuser end the faction war very abruptly and set Sylvanas up for his redemption arc

* Not sure if it was Danuser or previous writers, but N’Zoth gets wasted in a single patch at the ending of BFA

* Blizzard really wants Shadowlands to be huge with a giant marketing push, so Danuser decides to artificially up the stakes by retconning his new big bad the Jailor as being behind literally everything that’s ever happened in Warcraft

* At the same time, he looks around and sees most/all old WoW villains already dealt with, the Titans sealed away, etc. so he starts universe-building things like the First Ones and the Zereths to set up future arcs

* We all know how the player reception to Shadowlands lore went down, so he and the team “leak” the damage control stuff to try to save face

* Danuser designs Dragonflight (his “baby”) to reflect player feedback from BFA/Shadowlands, and probably with a ton of corporate directives as well. No Sylvanas (except for one side questline per patch because he literally can’t help himself), no more retcons for artificial hype, established characters and world, far less cosmic stuff.

* Dragonflight is received super well… except for the lore. Around this time, Activision’s being purchased by Microsoft and the WoW team is undergoing a massive ideological change with regards to lore and game design.

* Because of all this flux and the poor reception of his work, Danuser is quietly forced out and Metzen is brought back to work on TWW and the Worldsoul Saga. All of Dragonflight is still likely Danuser’s work but I doubt he had much influence on TWW.

Does this line up with what we know about the lore behind the scenes? Do we think TWW will feel significantly different from BFA, Shadowlands and Dragonflight?

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