TL;DW: Afrasiabi’s was awful at thinking long term with his ideas and Steve inherited one hell of a mess.
Side note: I would have loved the Nightborne more if they had french accents. 
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Honestly im not going defend afanasbi because i can see this being his doing but that doesnt excuse dansuer awful story telling.
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in response to the video, I am undecided if it was a vindictive move or if it was something he wanted to do for shock value and nothing else. If I was to make a decision, it would be a mixture of both. Humans are creatures driven by emotions (most of the time). And through emotions sometimes beliefs that we try to hide seep through. I myself am guilty of such things. As shown when I tend to get overly aggressive in threads when I read certain posts. This is why it is hard for me to outright deny the rumours that state that Alex placed Sylvanas onto the arc she is on now out of spite for what Kosak did to Garrosh. Given that Alex claims that he wrote Stonetalon Mountain during Cata.
However, I stated this in another thread but it does worry me when you do get writers who become too emotionally involved in the story they want to tell that they forget about minor or major important details. Basically they want the characters to go from A----->B----->C. They have A and they have C but they are so caught up on getting them to C that they forget that B exists. Therefore they go from A-------->C. Which we can clearly see when it came to the burning of Teldrassil.
Afrasiabi isn’t the only person that worked in Blizzards story development for WoW that had that same kind of attitude. In the Looking for Group doco, it states how one day Metzen just stormed into the office and pitched the premise of Cataclysm. That being the old world (aka the Vanilla zones) get a complete makeover caused by some cataclysmic event. Aka “break everything”. I could see it more of a dramatization though.
https://youtu.be/xyPzTywUBsQ?t=2534 for reference.
I would say the difference between Metzen saying “break everything” and Alex saying “burn Teldrassil” is that Metzen and the team at the time (which did include Alex. kek) worked out how the story was going to approach that result. Even if it did involve retconning the “credit scene” of Night of the Dragon. Which had Deathwing hiding in Grim Batol the whole time his former prime consort was working on the Twilight Dragonflight. Having a background character be the catalyst for the event made it easier to implement from a narrative point of view. Instead of one of the central characters of the expansion prior. Also helped that the Twilight Dragonflight did appear in Wrath. So you had NotD and Wrath building up to Cata. Ruby Sanctum also aided in that. Showing the Black Dragonflights true hand and a fully grown Twilight Dragon. Along with the progressively growing earthquakes from patch 3.3’s launch to the Cata pre-patch and Loken’s / Yogg-sarons speeches about the “end times”. There is nothing in Legion that was intentionally put in to be foreshadowing of BFA’s pre-patch. And that is the major problem. Considering expansions prior such as Wrath as previously stated along with MoP for WoD and WoD for Legion had events or details that was setting up the next expansion.
Now one could argue and say that the alliance and horde battling over Azerite in Silithus is foreshadowing and it is. It is foreshadowing one of the reasons why the factions are fighting each other. Nothing in that epilogue to Legion was setting up Teldrassil getting burned. Maybe if the Horde had something after the quest chain where Sylvanas decides to remove the remaining Alliance stronghold on or near Kalimdors mainland in response to the Alliances actions then sure. This way the Alliance is not reacting since they were the aggressors for a change. While the invasion of Ashenvale and Darkshore is the horde reacting to what the Alliance had done. It is also concerning that the War of Thorns did not have important assets the Alliance had in their arsenal. Such as an orbiting spaceship that had a lazer that could cut through several layers of the Legions blast doors with ease. Along with drop pods that opened up portals to and from the Vindicaar. Instead we are given no explanation for why the Vindicaar was not involved in the War of Thorns. This links back to what I said about certain writers like Alex who want to go from A to C but they completely ignore B for whatever reason.
It is funny though that Alex was on the writing team for Cata but basically learnt nothing from Metzen.
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Well said. Not going to excuse dansuer though people need to remember at the end of the day he is the lead writer now and shouldnt be left off the hook.
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While he is at fault I would give him some slack for Shadowlands. At least early Shadowlands. Because this isn’t the first time I’ve seen or heard of where a new lead writer has to come in and clean up their predecessors mess for whatever reasons. It happened to Ratchet and Clank Tools of Destruction. Where the original writer left but the higher ups at Insomniac and Sony wanted certain story elements to remain. The robot space pirates being one of them. It is hard to be given someone elses work and told to “make it happen” while trying to keep certain things involved. Story elements you yourself might not want to keep in. But deadlines are fast approaching. A game can only be delayed so much. Hell, Joss Whedon had this with the Justice League film. Which is why I don’t outright blame him for the horrible movie that it is. Given that Zack Synders “true version” had a lot of problems, some of which he tried to pass off to Joss by editing out certain scenes that were in the original trailers of the original version of the film. But were not in the final “true” cut. An example being the “yeah!” scene where Aquaman screams that after landing on the Batmobile at high speed.
This is probably why middle and late Shadowlands is in such a horrible state. I am not defending any of these writers but it is important to understand what state they were in when they had to salvage a pile of hot mess while under deadlines and higher ups breathing on their necks. Hindsight is a wonderful thing after all.
To fully critique Danusers writing style I would say we would have to wait for the next expansion. As I’m sure that one will have none of Alex’s involvement in it. Hopefully it isn’t a “patch by patch, wait and see” approach.
I will admit that I have being guilty of criticizing Danuser and blaming certain story elements on him. But with the new information being released I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt for now. If the next expansion is anything like Shadowlands then what I have said in the past will stay.
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Side note.
I really need to plan my essay long responses more carefully. Sometimes new ideas or ways to express existing ones in different ways to make them more clearer come to me after I have posted the responses. I would say doing 5 edits is a bit excessive.
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Oh yes, let’s blame everything on the guy that left Blizzard 2 years ago and completely ignore the absolute disaster Shadowlands has been story wise.
The current writing team had over 2 years to fix what Afrasiabi allegedly did and they somehow made everything even worse.
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You saw/read/heard it on the internet, it must be true. lol.
From what I’ve seen - and if you want to watch it for yourself, go ahead - this is my impression of the video and the situation it covers;
A vindictive man who believed his own hype shoehorned a new idea into the story, and now writers ranging from decent to terrible are trying to clean up his mess.
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Didnt you quit wow.
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Is there any clear timeline that Alex lost his privileges in the story?
Like… at what point did Danuser take over? How much of what we have seen in BFA and Shadowlands is his and his team’s responsibility?
I’ve heard that he allegedly took the reins in 9.1 at the earliest. But I have my doubts on that and think he’s more responsible for the story than people claim. Afrasiabi can definitely be blamed for some of it but it’s not all of his fault. Sylvanas is one of Danuser’s favorite characters and I think it’s unlikely that he wouldn’t have any responsibility involving her in BFA. I don’t think anyone currently involved in making the story is good, definitely not the person who is making the dumb crap about fractals in 9.2.
Know who created the rope concept for souls in the Shadowlands? Danuser. Know who created the POV style for lore we get? Danuser. We don’t have to wait for the next expansion to know he’s implemented bad ideas.
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While I don’t think the current writers would have been able to really “fix” Afrosalami’s destruction of the story after he left (development time would make it difficult at best, impossible at worst), I do agree that Danusaur gets no absolution either. Nothing revealed yet says he was against Afro destroying the night elves and forsaken for the sake of shock value.
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I’m curious about Taliesin’s tweet referenced in the video:
So … what do you suppose his original plan was??
Also, what does “after it was announced” mean? After Blizzcon 2017? After Warbringers: Sylvanas dropped at the end of July 2018? They make it sound like the former, but they had about eight months between that and the Warbringers video to change the video if he was gone already and the team didn’t like it.
ETA after watching the whole thing: Yeah, I know they say he didn’t have a plan at all, but c’mon, he must have had some vision more than one step in the future.
He never has a plan.
He just has an even bigger reveal or crazy thing to distract from it.
They don’t thats point. Probably why the power scaling is so crazy now.
We aree fighting gods now but whatever Alex Afrisiabi did doesn’t excuse what Danuser has done.
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Yeah, it doesn’t have to be just one or the other.
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Random other thought: does this confirm that leading up to the burning of Teldrassil wasn’t the reason they killed off Vol’jin and made Sylvanas warchief so suddenly?
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Afrasiabi not having a plan also would indicate that Lordaeron wasn’t intended to be fought for first and that there wasn’t a big rewrite of the plan, as there was none to begin with.
Not necessarily. We don’t have any information about exactly when Afrasiabi came up with the idea of Sylvanas burning Teldrissil, so we don’t know where plans for BfA stood when he had his brainwave. It may have been “Guys, here’s how we start the next expansion that we haven’t started drafting yet!” or it may have been “Guys, throw out everything we’ve been working on—I have a better idea on how to start the new expansion!”
I’m inclined to think the latter, since the opening cinematic must have been written with some kind of idea of how it was going to happen, and we know that was started way in advance.
This video seems decently balanced to an extent and does seem to cut Afrasiabi some slack on the woman hating front, which I’m on the fence about. It could easily have been both, ergo he wanted to do some big bombastic thing but out of spite went for Sylvanas and the Night Elves because they were creations of the original team. This is something in line with his behaviour, for instance he once said in an interview that the reason Drek’thar was in a wheelchair in Cata was due to him, and he did it because he was trying to jab at Metzen as a ‘joke’.
From what I’ve personally heard (anecdotal of course, so take with a grain or six of salt), Afrasiabi was an absolute nightmare to work for and tended to do what he wanted because once Kosak was out, he was the big boss. What this seems to me is that he did the Burning, and didn’t have any plan as to how it would turn out, and was then ousted. At which point no one really wanted to clean up the mess except for Danuser, who per this video was a quest writer.
He probably got the job because he thought he could fix it, was overconfident, and, to be entirely honest? Was and is probably a hell of a lot nicer to work for and with than Afrasiabi. As much as I think the guy has messed up, he does seem genuinely nice, which likely factored in a lot.
The inability to change course was likely due to squeezed funding, honestly. So much time and money had been sunk into the storyline at that point that there was no real way to reverse it.
Knowing Danuser was on quest writing and design prior to this does give me some hope that once we’ve shaken off this Sylvanas… stuff, things might improve. The quest writing and design has only improved each expansion, it’s just been the overarching stuff that… plummeted.
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