Steve Danuser didn’t say that Shadowlands closes the book on Warcraft 3. He said 9.2 closes the book on Shadowlands.
This is the full quote:
The Shadowlands story pulls together threads that started in Warcraft 3 and wove their way through many of our expansions.
We approached it like a drama in three acts. Now, as the third and final act begins of the saga, we need to stop the Jailer from reaching his ultimate goal, which is to rewrite the rules of reality.
Eternity’s End serves as the final chapter of one book of the Warcraft saga.
Obviously, Shadowlands does pull together threads from Warcraft 3, since many of the core cast (Sylvanas, Tyrande, Thrall, Kael’thas, Uther, Vashj, Jaina and Kel’thuzad) are Warcraft 3 characters and refer back to events from Warcraft 3 (Kael’thas’ anger at Kel’thuzad, Uther’s confrontation with Arthas, Vashj and Kael’thas’ bickering, etc.)
But the drama in three acts is obviously referring to the Shadowlands story, which we know Eternity’s End is the third and final act for. It’s the final patch of the expansion of World of Warcraft or the final chapter of the Shadowlands book of the Warcraft saga.
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Means it’s the end of the Warcraft Saga….like how did you misinterpret that to mean just the Shadowlands?
It’s a metaphor. The chapter is the patch, the book is the expansion, the saga is the entirety of the Warcraft story. Eternity’s End is the final patch/chapter of the Shadowlands book/expansion of the Warcraft saga, which is the entire Warcraft story told across all games and books and comics and whatever else. There will be future books of the Warcraft saga (more expansions) and there have been past books in the Warcraft saga (previous expansions.)
We know that Eternity’s End is the last major content patch of the expansion wrapping up its story with the Jailer’s defeat and Sylvanas’ judgment. He’s just saying this is the final patch of the expansion.
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What book is the Shadowlands? It feels like a sudden right turn in the story. How many previous stories need to be recontextualized for it to fit?(All of them) Sylvanas was acting strange? Car tires screeching No, she wasn’t trying to secure place in the world, but she had a secret evil master that was filling her young mind with visions of delusion to change reality. All she need was her “young brother” to make it so.
Shadowlands is the slacker/high/idiot kid writing the final chapter to a story people that actual cared about their own work.
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While this does seem to be a ‘new thing’ with Shadowlands, going back and changing and warping the prior stuff for the sake of a ‘new vision’, what we’re seeing now is actually just a culmination of things that started, arguably, with WoD and certainly with Chronicle. And so the problem with laying all this at the feet of the writers currently is that the setting’s core pieces started to be altered ages ago, and Chronicle itself, which took Old God and general universe lore and turned it on its head, was written in part by Metzen, one of the original creators of the setting and arguably the driving story force behind Warcraft for years. Now, there are three authors listed and at this point Metzen was going through stuff still, so I don’t know how much this was his idea, but what Shadowlands did to afterlife and spiritual lore, well, Chronicle Volume 1 did to the entire setting’s cosmology.
Even Legion, while considered ‘better’, and certainly containing some of the best written arcs in the game (mostly Suramar, like… 80% Suramar) took a hammer to established lore in a lot of cases. That initial arc with X’era, a ton of the lore in Val’sharah, demon hunter lore, Warden lore, Azshara lore, this was all essentially made up for the expansion to replace prior lore and story in a way that didn’t fit with that older canon.
So this didn’t start with Shadowlands. Afrasiabai made the War of Thorns decision, and got ousted soon after, leaving everyone with the bag. But what followed after was what the writing team had already been doing for years, we just didn’t notice as much. The only difference is that the story and the lore changes are off the rails at the same time, and they’ve bitten off more than they can chew.
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“Father! Is it over?”
“No, my son. The raid resets on Tuesday. For your unforgivable crimes, you are to spend eternity being farmed for your mount. For your start of darkness ultimately going back to being obsessed over mercy-killing your stupid horse, thousands shall line up for the chance to take him from you and ride merrily away on him while you remain here, forever.”
“… I see only darkness before me…”
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I have never been able to get that horse, so minus 1 from that queue.
…World of Marvelcraft has an endless supply of alternate reality Light Bound Garroshes and Arthases to get to yet…
This is just the tip of the iceberg. 
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Best guess? Fifty Shades of Grey, which was originally a fanfiction of Twilight, which would be the BFA in this scenario.
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I thought bfa was already Fifty Shades of ( morally ) Grey?
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Don’t you mean Fifty Layers of Shadow?
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It’s about contextualizing things. The residents of Suramar… who were they going to turn to when they faced adversity? The Highmountain Tauren?
Every zone is ‘wrong’ in Shadowlands and no one seems to notice it. “Oh, I guess the Arbiter is broken, no need to say anything. Everything is fine.”
The current story team really seems amatuer, their story has so many holes in it. For everything to proceed, it requires characters, even the player, to come to conclusions that make no sense.
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What’s sylvanas and the jailer’s motivation? Tune in next week to find out!
Yeah I’m not a fan of the lack of clear cut motivations, and the fact that everything’s broken yet were the ones who figure out why when the denizens of the SLs have had this problem going on long enough to find it suspicious.
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Honestly, the motivation thing is the one that destroys me. I feel like WoW does this thing where it strips out straightforward answers to story questions so that youtubers can make videos theorizing about answers.
So many of WoW’s story problems would be solved if core character motivations weren’t hidden from players.
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Sylvanas DEed the Helm of Domination because Hunters can’t equip plate. And of course Invincible didn’t drop for her, either.
Invincible sits gathering dust in Amadis’ mount tab because Amadis is a Druid and doesn’t need to use a mount.
Also not relegated in a book and instead playing out in game, imo it’s just a way for them to sell books for their transmedia narrative.
My point is it’s not the ‘current’ team, they’re mostly the same team for years. Prior stuff was better, yes, but it’s been a slow degeneration as opposed to a sudden shift. Hell, I mentioned Suramar, who was a senior writer in quest design for Legion and would have worked on that? Danuser.
Yeah. And this is something that really pissed me off about lore in the MOP/CATA/WOD era where all the lore was happening in books. Legion/BFA/Shadowlands has been better about that but the Sylvanas book feels like a step in the wrong direction.
Well from what I can deduce the Sylvanas book is going to be used to correct the now weird internal monologues she’s had in other books, gotta love how crazy decisions in a narrative make things that a character thinks unreliable and no longer true.
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Everyone is an unreliable narrator these days. Including Blizzard themselves.
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