wow Steve Danuser May Have Left Blizzard in November 2023

[Staff 1,488]

Steve Danuser, the Warcraft's Narrative Lead, seems to have parted ways with Blizzard, as suggested by his LinkedIn profile.

Though there's been no formal acknowledgment from any party, indications on Danuser's LinkedIn suggest his departure from Blizzard in November 2023, after a tenure of 8 years and 7 months.

Credit to Reddit's Tigertot14 for bringing this to light.

[Damianff 2]

Not soon enough, but finally... good riddance 🥳

[Prophet001 598]

Bro single handedly merc'ed the lich king smh

[Mercuryo 0]

This was posted first by the Spanish fansite AlterTime...

[Cham79 87]

Shadowlands and Dragonflgiht was a fairly damning 4 years for anyone to put faith in this guy to direct any type of story TBH

Edited February 9 by Cham79

[Q 200]

18 minutes ago, Cham79 said:

Shadowlands and Dragonflgiht was a fairly damning 4 years for anyone to put faith in this guy to direct any type of story TBH

Dragonflight wasn't too bad, it was mostly a whole lot of nothing compared to Shadowlands that ruined multiple characters for the sake of some modern Marvel level garbage storytelling

[zigrifid 133]

Now he can ask his imaginary banshee girlfriend for help ! maybe she can help him since he was so loyal to her ! 😄

[Swarf 110]

Regardless of anything positive in DF which Danuser may ever have contributed to, his actual legacy is -- and will forever be --Shadowlands and its universally hated mangling and near destruction of WoW's lore and story.  The very fabric that wove the heart of this game's story together and everything that multiple millions of people have loved was unraveled and shredded apart by Steve Danuser.  That... is his legacy. 

Never in the entirety of WoW's history has there ever been such an outcry against the narrative as there was in Shadowlands, and there never will be again.  Even people who had never previously bothered to really take an interest in the story at all came forth in droves from everywhere on the internet to collectively voice their disdain for the horrible writing in Shadowlands.

There are Danuser defenders and simpletons who would have everyone believe that it's Danuser's predecessor Afrasiabi who is actually responsible for the atrocities of Shadowlands, and perhaps Afrasiabi did help set the wheels in motion for the story's dismal demise; but make no mistake about the facts -- Steve Danuser was the head honcho of story and lore and narrative throughout the creation and development of Shadowlands throughout its entirety.  Immunity is a privilege he will never enjoy as long as those with the capacity for critical thinking still exist.

We will never forgive, and we will never forget.

Good riddance, steve danuser -- (upper case deliberately omitted in this final use of the name, as not even that gesture of respect is warranted for this individual.)

Edited February 9 by Swarf

[Chipsky 0]

2 hours ago, Mercuryo said:

This was posted first by the Spanish fansite AlterTime...

/facepalm

[Stan 5,239]

4 hours ago, Mercuryo said:

This was posted first by the Spanish fansite AlterTime...

We apologize for any oversight. Due to our inability to verify the original source of the news about Steve Danuser leaving Blizzard, we credited the Reddit post where we first encountered the information. Our priority is to ensure accuracy and fairness in our reporting, and we appreciate your understanding in this matter.

[Arcling 898]

4 hours ago, Swarf said:

Never in the entirety of WoW's history has there ever been such an outcry against the narrative as there was in Shadowlands, and there never will be again.  Even people who had never previously bothered to really take an interest in the story at all came forth in droves from everywhere on the internet to collectively voice their disdain for the horrible writing in Shadowlands.

I'd argue there was something similar in Cataclysm. A lot of people complained about Metzen's "Green Jesus".

 

5 hours ago, Q said:

Dragonflight wasn't too bad, it was mostly a whole lot of nothing compared to Shadowlands that ruined multiple characters for the sake of some modern Marvel level garbage storytelling

I think this is a wider issue with their storytelling, Blizzard guys have mastered the way of telling stories without actually telling stories. Some expansion feel like a filler, nobody important from the good guys dies now, even some villains survive. Those who die are just some freshly introduced villains. This was already a problem with a huge part of BfA (Azshara escapes and nothing, also almost no one important from the "good guys" died). Some characters have plot armor (Jaina, Thrall, Anduin, Sylvanas, Tyrande, Malfurion and many others), there is no feeling of stakes being high. Everyone survived Shadowlands, everyone survived Dragonflight. At least Shadowlands didn't feel as much of a filler (despite the obvious issues with its story) as Dragonflight. Even the last villain escaped into what looks like another filler expansion, just to prepare the story for Midnight and possibly for The Last Titan as well.

As for their stories being inspired by Marvel, they always were heavily inspired by Marvel and D&D, among others things. Metzen himself copied a lot from Marvel's Thor (Thrall and Doomhammer) and Conan the Barbarian (Varian and also Thrall).  However, some of previous stories worked quite well, because they were simple. It was when they tried to retroactively introduce some new stuff there when it all started to collapse. For some reason, they always have to insert some new events in the past, instead of just introducing some new, independent villains. Yet it usually comes back to "they were always there, imprisoned for 10,000 years!". Jailer was obviously a bad amalgamation of Satan and Marvel's Thanos. Making him into some grand mastermind behind most previous villains was a bad idea. Retroactively, there were now various factions aligned with Jailer who fought each other for no good reason.

Anyway, we will see if Danuser's departure will have any positive impact. Let's not forget how people used to criticize Metzen, his storytelling had multiple problems as well.

Edited February 9 by Arcling

[Swarf 110]

15 minutes ago, Arcling said:

I'd argue there was something similar in Cataclysm.

That's an argument you'll lose a thousand times over.  

Never -- EVER -- in the entire history of this game, has there EVER been such an outpouring of universal hatred against the narrative as there was in Shadowlands. And there never will be again.

The entire 'green jesus' thing you mentioned is utterly laughable by comparison.  Yes people were sick of saving Thrall all the time and every other thing about Thrall at the time, but it's like a peanut next to an elephant compared to the unprecedented, utter mountain of sheer hatred heaped at Blizz during Shadowlands.  

That you would even make that comparison makes me wonder how closely you've actually paid attention to anything.  

 

[Arcling 898]

11 minutes ago, Swarf said:

That's an argument you'll lose a thousand times over.  

Never -- EVER -- in the entire history of this game, has there EVER been such an outpouring of universal hatred against the narrative as there was in Shadowlands. And there never will be again.

The entire 'green jesus' thing you mentioned is utterly laughable by comparison.  Yes people were sick of saving Thrall all the time and every other thing about Thrall at the time, but it's like a peanut next to an elephant compared to the unprecedented, utter mountain of sheer hatred heaped at Blizz during Shadowlands.  

No, WoW was much bigger during Cataclysm. Early Cataclysm was when they had their peak of subscribers (before huge drop later in that expansion). So interest in the game and story was much higher. People were often complaining about Metzen.

Shadowlands happened way past the game's peak. Less people cared, but of course there was a very vocal part of playerbase who hated it. However, it wasn't that much compared to Cataclysm. It might seem bigger, but it's mainly due to how social media have changed since Cataclysm's release. Playerbase was way smaller during Shadowlands than Cataclysm.

11 minutes ago, Swarf said:

That you would even make that comparison makes me wonder how closely you've actually paid attention to anything.  

Given how long I've been playing this game (and also how much of external lore I've read), this might be the least appropriate thing to say about me. If you were reading comments on this site regularly, you would know this.

Edited February 9 by Arcling

[Swarf 110]

5 minutes ago, Arcling said:

No, WoW was much bigger during Cataclysm

Where in the actual hell have you BEEN that you are so oblivious to things?  How is it even possible that someone is making your argument?  I can't begin to fathom how anyone can be this literally -- LITERALLY -- clueless. 

You're actually, legitimately attempting to make a serious argument that people's piddly gripes during Cata are on par with the shrieking outcry collectively rained down on blizz during SL.  In your mind, this is actually a valid comparison and argument.  

Ignorance on your level genuinely offends me.  It straight up pisses me off that anyone can be so astoundingly oblivious to things that they can somehow just not notice the entire world's reaction to what Shadowlands did to the story and lore of WoW.  Somehow you just... didn't notice!  If you had actually noticed, you sure as *filtered* wouldn't be comparing it to Cata as if there is any remote, actual comparison there.

What the AF?!!

People like you are bad for my blood pressure, so I'm gonna go ahead and nope out of this thread.  You can have the last word.

[Arcling 898]

1 hour ago, Swarf said:

People like you are bad for my blood pressure, so I'm gonna go ahead and nope out of this thread.  You can have the last word.

Sounds like you have some serious issues going on if something like this is making you mad. Maybe you should check some facts before calling someone ignorant.

You presented no facts. The peak was 12 million subs during early Cataclysm, it was only a downward trend from there. There were some ups and downs later on, but the game never became as big again. When subs were officially reported for the last time, there were about 5 millions of them. Now we only have estimates based on addons, they suggest subs are somewhere between 2-4 million. So yes, interest in the game was way higher back then.

As I've mentioned above, social media affects how these things are perceived. There was huge backlash during Cataclysm, but it was more spread out between various sites, forums etc. Reddit wasn't that big back then for example. So with social media changing and getting bigger (also more centralized), it might seem like Shadowlands was the biggest outrage ever. I was there, people really hated "Green Jesus" and kept complaining about Metzen. Also, only a fraction of people are on these sites and smaller part of playerbase cares about lore. Most people who are still playing the game just don't post anything. So outrages like these are usually overblown. It doesn't mean there wasn't any valid criticism though. Shadowlands' story was a mess and I agree with this.

Edited February 9 by Arcling

[Kaji159 3]

You're presenting pure numbers, but without context, and within a pure bubble.

A lot of people left after WotLK/during Cata because the stories that began in War3/War3x (Arthas, Illidan) were now over. Sure, Deathwing had been around since War2, but that was 9 years before WoW, and 15 years before the last patch of WotLK; as an in-game figure, he was nowhere, and only the books covered him. 

If you played Warcraft pre-MMO, the end of WotLK was the perfect time to stop. You had your story resolution, you had a great time, you could stop paying monthly fees, you didn't need to hang out and help out guildies out of a sense of commitment, you could move on to a new generation of games. 

You realised you could a be gamer, or a Warcraft MMO gamer, but you knew that it would be kinda hard to be both. You had changed, WoW had changed, and it wasn't because of one green Orc.

[Arcling 898]

3 hours ago, Kaji159 said:

You're presenting pure numbers, but without context, and within a pure bubble.

A lot of people left after WotLK/during Cata because the stories that began in War3/War3x (Arthas, Illidan) were now over. Sure, Deathwing had been around since War2, but that was 9 years before WoW, and 15 years before the last patch of WotLK; as an in-game figure, he was nowhere, and only the books covered him. 

I presented the context, waning interest. Most people don't quit the game just because of the story. It's a minority of players who do. A lot were angry back then about balance changes, some dungeons were considered too difficult etc. It was a combination of several factors. By then WoW has been around for a few years, so those who wanted to try it, have already tried it. 

3 hours ago, Kaji159 said:

If you played Warcraft pre-MMO, the end of WotLK was the perfect time to stop. You had your story resolution, you had a great time, you could stop paying monthly fees, you didn't need to hang out and help out guildies out of a sense of commitment, you could move on to a new generation of games. 

Yeah, but by then RTS players (like me) were a minority. RTS games didn't even sell close to these 12 million subscriptions.

3 hours ago, Kaji159 said:

You realised you could a be gamer, or a Warcraft MMO gamer, but you knew that it would be kinda hard to be both. You had changed, WoW had changed, and it wasn't because of one green Orc.

I think you misunderstood something. The discussion was about "lore bubble", what caused the bigger outrage among those interested in the lore (not entirety of playerbase) - Thrall's story in Cata or Jailer's in SL. It was true that many didn't like Thrall's story in Cataclysm. Interest in the game overall was greater during Cata (12m subs for Cata vs ~4m for Shadowlands), so during SL the amount of players invested in the story had also to be smaller, because overall playerbase has shrunk. Therefore, more people cared about Cataclysm's story than Shadowlands'. Even if it might seem otherwise, because back during Cata, less people were on Reddit, social media that tend to exaggerate the impression of the scale of some outrage were also different etc. I hope it's all clear.

Edited February 10 by Arcling

[Grumar 188]

I like to imagine Metzen made sure he knew exactly what he thought of him and how he treated the world he created before he *filtered* threw out out the door.

[Arcling 898]

18 hours ago, Grumar said:

I like to imagine Metzen made sure he knew exactly what he thought of him and how he treated the world he created before he *filtered* threw out out the door.

In some Tweets, Metzen said that he liked Shadowlands' story and was excited to see more of it. We don't know for sure if it was just false politeness or if he actually meant it, but I think he actually might have liked it. Metzen also wrote a lot of cheesy stuff (including Legacy of the Void), so him genuinely liking Danuser's writing wouldn't surprise me.

So any conflict between them is imagined, at least there is no evidence of such. Let's not act as if Metzen's writing was that great, it had many inconsistencies and it lacked any coherent planning. But of course I won't miss Danuser, because he certainly wasn't an improvement.

Edited February 10 by Arcling

[Nobleshield 15]

Good riddance.  Dude crapped on 30 years of Warcraft history to make everything the work of the Jailer, who was actually an interesting villain other than all that stuff ruining him.  Instead of making a compelling character stand on his own, he went the route of just making him some Tzeentch-like all-powerful entity who set everything in motion because "lol just as planned".

Edited February 10 by Nobleshield

[Kadath76 6]

On 2/9/2024 at 8:34 PM, Swarf said:

And there never will be again.

Careful with what you say 😖

[Swarf 110]

5 hours ago, Kadath76 said:

Careful with what you say 😖

I stand by what I said.  There will never be another outcry against the narrative that's even remotely on par with the seething hatred collectively screeched against Shadowlands by everyone.  Another forum participant who I now have justifiably blocked so as to spare myself any further spewing of their ignorance, habitually squealed about Cataclysm having larger sub numbers than Shadowlands, as if that is somehow important to anything. 

The rejection of what Shadowlands did to the narrative was universal and involved so much more than just a pocket niche of currently subbed players at the time.  Everyone hated it.  Old players, new players, casual players, hardcore players -- all hated it.  Critics and gaming sites and across the world universally chimed in with negative sentiments on the Shadowlands narrative destruction.  Everywhere you looked, every article you read, every user comment you read, every sentiment you ever seen expressed was, with few exceptions, filled with disappointment, anger and grief.

Years and years of story -- literally the foundation and entire accumulated lore of the game from inception -- was trampled upon and utterly mangled.  This isn't ever going to be repeated.  

People still just don't get the magnitude of what happened.  I don't know how it's even possible that some people still don't get it, but some people still don't get it.

No future grievances anyone has with the narrative, writing, lore, story, etc., will ever... ever... EVER COMPARE to this.  The very soul of the game's narrative -- everything that the rich and storied history of World of Warcraft was built on -- DIED in Shadowlands; and it was a gruesome, ugly, honorless, insulting death, the stain of which will never be cleansed or erased.

[Migol 433]

On 2/9/2024 at 1:13 PM, Arcling said:

I'd argue there was something similar in Cataclysm. A lot of people complained about Metzen's "Green Jesus".

 

I think this is a wider issue with their storytelling, Blizzard guys have mastered the way of telling stories without actually telling stories. Some expansion feel like a filler, nobody important from the good guys dies now, even some villains survive. Those who die are just some freshly introduced villains. This was already a problem with a huge part of BfA (Azshara escapes and nothing, also almost no one important from the "good guys" died). Some characters have plot armor (Jaina, Thrall, Anduin, Sylvanas, Tyrande, Malfurion and many others), there is no feeling of stakes being high. Everyone survived Shadowlands, everyone survived Dragonflight. At least Shadowlands didn't feel as much of a filler (despite the obvious issues with its story) as Dragonflight. Even the last villain escaped into what looks like another filler expansion, just to prepare the story for Midnight and possibly for The Last Titan as well.

As for their stories being inspired by Marvel, they always were heavily inspired by Marvel and D&D, among others things. Metzen himself copied a lot from Marvel's Thor (Thrall and Doomhammer) and Conan the Barbarian (Varian and also Thrall).  However, some of previous stories worked quite well, because they were simple. It was when they tried to retroactively introduce some new stuff there when it all started to collapse. For some reason, they always have to insert some new events in the past, instead of just introducing some new, independent villains. Yet it usually comes back to "they were always there, imprisoned for 10,000 years!". Jailer was obviously a bad amalgamation of Satan and Marvel's Thanos. Making him into some grand mastermind behind most previous villains was a bad idea. Retroactively, there were now various factions aligned with Jailer who fought each other for no good reason.

Anyway, we will see if Danuser's departure will have any positive impact. Let's not forget how people used to criticize Metzen, his storytelling had multiple problems as well.

Thing is, as simple as it is and with the fact that "noone important died"...Dragonflight's story at least made sense (for the most part) and didn't attempt to rewrite swathes of established storylines to fit its narrative.    It didn't bring out "celebrity cameos" npcs only to shelf them again after they provided one showing or just have them sit in place in Oribos all expansion.     It didn't have some of the most hackneyed, *filtered* backwards heel and face turns ever to boot.    It's plain, it's boring, but it's not bad would be my summary of dragonflight's story.

[Arcling 898]

6 hours ago, Swarf said:

Another forum participant who I now have justifiably blocked so as to spare myself any further spewing of their ignorance, habitually squealed about Cataclysm having larger sub numbers than Shadowlands, as if that is somehow important to anything. 

This is really sad. You are overreacting. Sounds like you have some other serious problems going on.

 

6 hours ago, Swarf said:

The rejection of what Shadowlands did to the narrative was universal and involved so much more than just a pocket niche of currently subbed players at the time.  Everyone hated it.  Old players, new players, casual players, hardcore players -- all hated it.  Critics and gaming sites and across the world universally chimed in with negative sentiments on the Shadowlands narrative destruction.

Since you did ragequit like an insecure child, you probably won't see this. Anyway, to make things clear (and I believe I already did so) - this is true, Shadowlands did a lot of damage to the lore. However, whole outrage about lore is exaggerated due to social media, it might seem like it was a really bigger issue than it really was. I think this poster simply ignored the facts and data presented to him and didn't grasp the context of what I really meant. Really funny to call me ignorant, when all he did was to ignore the data and context that didn't fit his opinion. WoW isn't in the center of as many people's attention as it was back in the day with its 12 million subs, there were outrages about retcons back then too, but they might have seemed smaller, because it was a different landscape - people were more spread out between various forums and communities, while today everything is more centralized, so every outrage seems bigger when you have more people concentrated in same places. Even though way less people are playing the game these days.

It's also important to note that only a smaller part of playerbase cares about lore, it was always like this. A lot of people quit the game during Shadowlands not because "Jailer story bad", but because a lot of its mechanics and systems simply weren't fun.

Jailer's story was a mess, but after such a long time a lot of people have their nostalgia going on and they forgot how flawed many other stories were and a lot of people hated them back then, too. WoW's story often lacked coherent direction, it had its own share of retcons and plotholes: Illidan's escape to Outland to hide after his failure (even though Kil'Jaeden had no problem finding him before), Arthas often acting like a cartoony villain (the way he often appeared during questlines and talked), Thrall's story in Cata, WoD with its multiverse (and also retcons to the main universe) and many other examples.

Edited February 12 by Arcling

[Arcling 898]

6 hours ago, Migol said:

Thing is, as simple as it is and with the fact that "noone important died"...Dragonflight's story at least made sense (for the most part) and didn't attempt to rewrite swathes of established storylines to fit its narrative.    It didn't bring out "celebrity cameos" npcs only to shelf them again after they provided one showing or just have them sit in place in Oribos all expansion.     It didn't have some of the most hackneyed, *filtered* backwards heel and face turns ever to boot.    It's plain, it's boring, but it's not bad would be my summary of dragonflight's story.

True, at least DF didn't have any multiverse stuff like WoD (well, it did have some of it with those time rifts, but it was a smaller patch and way smaller in scale) or Shadowlands' messy story of the Jailer and Sylvanas. Speaking of "celebrity cameos", I think Malfurion might fall into this category, because they had him sleep for the entirety of the expansion, only so he could rejoin towards the end, when Ysera wasn't needed anymore. We are still left with Iridikron, so I assume they kept him to be the boss of the first raid tier. It feels like fillers will continue for a while.

I think the upcoming expansion will be, once again, merely a preparation for the "proper" confrontation with the Void which is supposed to happen in Midnight. Some important villains may die, but of course the true threat will still be coming! If Void Lords aren't completely defeated in Midnight, then we could be fighting some corrupted Titans and their servants in The Last Titan, otherwise Titans will have to turn into villains by themselves, which is also a possibility. I wonder though if all important good characters will keep their plot armor on or are we going to see some deaths, villains should feel like a threat again.

Edited February 12 by Arcling