Lore in WoW has become a bit of a mess.

Blizzard is, publicly now, making a point about changes to the story team and how that will hopefully improve going forward, while also potentially making some moves that they are talking about less publicly that might greatly improve the lore, although talking about them will be tough and require some humanity and compassion. For today, I want to discuss Dragonflight’s lore, the shortfalls and interesting ideas both, and then talk about what could come next and the moves Blizzard is making and appears to be making to course-correct the lore disasters of the last few years, including talking about a rumor involving a potential job loss and the mixed feelings that evokes. It’s gonna get involved, so let’s get started.

Firstly, a disclaimer – this is just me spitballing. It’s an opinion, and if you like the lore of Dragonflight, that’s great! Genuinely, I think that the funny thing with art is that sometimes people see beauty where others see trash, and it is that spectrum of opinion and the discussion around it that I enjoy. I don’t like the Dragonflight story overall, and I’m going to explain why I feel that way, but it is just my opinion and I will try my damnedest to not represent any of it as pure fact.

Launch Lore is the Strongest

WoW expansions tend to launch with well-made overarching narratives that tie in the events of us getting to business in the new areas and uncovering the base plot beats, big bad, and then dealing with the initial threat. After that, the story kind of tends to either meander or launch into the real meat of the baseline expansion story, which is a different problem (I dislike that the experience new players get in the same content years later is often the launch experience alone which means they never get to wrap-up that story). In Dragonflight, this was definitely the case for me – while the opening of Dragonflight is a head-scratcher (why’d the Isles open up? What mechanism triggers that? Why did the Aspects never mention this and now all of a sudden have so much to say about the Isles? Why is this the first we are hearing of Dracthyr and the Incarnates when the Aspects were around for both?), the overall zone stories and flow through leveling was great, and I think the driving force of that is Raszageth. Sure, she’s screechy and almost stereotypically angry villain mode, but at the same time, the storytelling we do get about her makes that kinda make perfect sense! She has a real reason to be pissed at the Aspects, to want revenge, and to believe that freeing her kin is the way forward, and the way she constantly comes around in leveling to tell us off and get in the way makes her feel like a real threat in a way the Jailer never did in Shadowlands. In fact, Raszageth very much fits the Sire Denathrius mold – a compelling and interesting villain with backstory, good characterization, and memorable moments, who meets their end far, far too early.

While I quibble with the idea of the Dragon Isles mostly involving stories of other races as we level and question the tie in of those races to the overarching Dragon Isles lore (the island was locked but the Tuskarr have boats and trade routes while never really seeming to mention being locked down with the Isles as a whole?), the stories involved are pretty okay and give us a sense of how the Dragonflights have interacted with the denizens of the Isles, both collaboratively and oppressively. There’s a lot of interesting ideas in those threads, from the Drakonid feeling unheard and abandoned in all sorts of different ways to the Centaur having their own rituals and relationships with the flights, the launch-experience Dragon Isles is a comprehensive place with an overarching idea of how it functions as a society, although again, we have to pretend that some elements of the lore aren’t butting up against that, like the whole sealing the isles thing. Unlike some of the issues with overarching themes in past expansions, Blizzard made a decent call here to insert more variety into the zones so it wasn’t just constantly dragons and that is kind of nice.

I think launch narratives in WoW generally work out okay because they are an extension of the strengths of the game’s setting and storytelling – worldbuilding. Even when the end result of the worldbuilding is illogical or weird, Blizzard has always leaned into the fact that WoW’s setting and sense of scale are strong and well-established. So it’s okay and good when we get storytelling up front that is less a concrete, point-to-point narrative, and more about establishing the place, sense of scale, and history of our new zones. When a lot of the Classic-heads go off about what Classic did best, it’s often worldbuilding, and I think the dirty secret of WoW is that the game in modern times is still good at this too. What it does once that world is built is where problems tend to start (and where logic gaps in that worldbuilding start to present), but I think the thing that most people, new and old, on the WoW team like about the game is that it feels like a world with a history and story to tell, and establishing that world is clearly a highly-important goal to them.

So Dragonflight confusingly puts us on the Dragon Isles with no real mission short of preventing the trouble that is Raszageth and the Incarnates, and after the weird start of the story, it finds a groove in worldbuilding and local stories before we face off with and kill Raszageth, unable to stop her from unleashing her kin in the Incarnates. We’ve been specifically told that Iridikron is the real threat and that imprisonment is no longer on the table – should they be freed, they must be stopped. So then what?

A Lack of Focus

The early patch cycle of Dragonflight was marred by the plot becoming the main focus over the world, with the Incarnates fading while the Dracthyr and Black Dragonflight take the stage. There’s an established kinship of the remaining Black Dragonflight and the Dracthyr by virtue of their shared parentage with Neltharion – in different forms, sure, but the general bonding over that common lineage is well-established and honestly, not a half-bad story beat. Honestly, the 10.0.7 patch story, while a little rushed with how quickly Sarkareth appears to turn and establish a desire to take up the mantle of Neltharion, isn’t bad – the bonding of Emberthal and Ebyssian is cool and there’s a lot of genuine-feeling emotion and appeal here. Even in Sarkareth, there is a sort of interesting enshrining of Neltharion as he was seen by the Dracthyr, a refusal to let the events of their time in stasis taint that view – and it is understandable as a form of hero worship.

My only problem with the focus on the Black Dragonflight in 10.0.7 and 10.1 is that it eventually takes over the interesting Dracthyr-focused parts of the story and makes it into a succession squabble. The idea of debating and disputing Neltharion’s legacy is really good, and it reconciles neatly with the Dracthyr starting experience, the nature of Neltharion’s remaining dragon offspring, and how they fit into the world with the Dragon Isles reopened and the Dracthyr taking up roles in the Horde and Alliance. We toss that aside to make Sarkareth a sort of blinded fool who wants to do the worst things Neltharion did (mind control and forced domination) without really understanding why he feels that way, short of the vagueness of wanting the Dracthyr to be what Neltharion made them to be. It’s okay if he spirals into madness, and it’s interesting to explore him succumbing to the Void, but we get told that is happening rather than shown it – he mentions hearing voices and the only clear assertion that he has given into the void is tucked into his encounter as the endboss of the Aberrus raid. I think there was room to say more here, to show the descent into madness and focus on Sarkareth as the primary antagonist of the patch, but we didn’t get that – we got the Black Dragonflight ascension story, Fyrakk’s shadowflame infusion, and the Niffen, with only the minor outline of a single chapter of story that actually focuses on the Dracthyr as characters and explores their motivations and the split between Emberthal’s faction and the Sundered Flame. Meanwhile, after being pivotal in opening the way to Zaralek, Iridikron has fucked off, the character who was supposed to be the main focus of the whole Incarnates and the true threat, and similarly Vyranoth is just straight-up missing until 10.1.7.

The lack of focus of the 10.1 patch cycle feels like a bad way to tell the story being told, because we never get long with any one plot thread before we zip to another one, and while the Dracthyr and Black Dragonflight plots are related, we spend so much time breaking between them to talk about Fyrakk, who isn’t that important in 10.1 but needs to be setup for 10.2, and while the Niffen are WoW-style comedic relief through and through, it feels like we are only told stuff about them and their society so that we feel something when Fyrakk flies through Loamm and torches it in the story quests. The minor patch stories breaking focus to talk about the Bronze and Infinite Dragonflights and the Druids of the Flame feels kind of weird – at least in 10.0, the whole cycle was about the Incarnates and the various ways they sought to enact their plans, so there was a consistent reinforcement of a central plot and narrative, while 10.1’s cycle was scattershot and didn’t really have a single central thread tying it all together. Sarkareth’s purpose in Aberrus seems unrelated to the Incarnates reason for opening Zaralek, which seems to be mentioned in the cinematic as accessing Neltharion’s facility but then they never so much as approach it and Fyrakk does all the shadowflame stuff far from Aberrus, and the Druids of the Flame being involved in the whole Dreamsurge thing is fine but it doesn’t bear much relation to anything else going on and doesn’t help to setup why the Druids of the Flame and Fyrakk are buddies in 10.2, and the Suffusion Camp stuff is fine enough and even sees slight payoff in 10.2 but we also don’t really talk about the actual story of why Fyrakk needs these shadowflame weapons as much or what goal it serves, and Vyranoth’s change of heart is fine but it happens quite literally in a single cutscene (and as part of an out-of-game novel which I’m not even going to start on) so it feels like such a major case of narrative whiplash because things are just sorta happening from the in-game perspective and there’s very little to tie it into a cohesive whole.

10.2 in many ways is this, as what felt like a relatively small thing tucked into the Renown questlines at launch, the planting of a new world tree, is suddenly a major focus and pivotal to everyone’s goals. We need to keep it safe because it represents renewal and is the gift of the Shadowlands, specifically the Night Fae of Ardenweald. Fyrakk wants it because…uh, I guess infusing it with fire will cause the world to burn as the tree is born into Azeroth? To what end this helps him with any specific goals is unclear, as it seems to just be a lust for power and dominion without representing the actual arc of that story (presumably, it has to do with the forces of Order and dealing a blow to the Titans, but very little in-game says this). The Druids of the Flame are the clearest motivation of our enemies we get since Raszageth, as their plot is pretty specifically about how they genuinely believe in the power of flame to restore their immortality, clash with Tyrande for disagreeing, and see Fyrakk’s ascent and ignition of Amirdrassil as means to their ends. Somehow Smolderon returns from the Shaman order hall story as a villain who wants to expand his domain, which is only really explained in brief quest text and dungeon journal flavor – and you might not have even met Smolderon if you never played the Shaman order hall story in Legion! There’s so much happening, but all of it is kind of barely adjacent to the world tree.

10.2’s finale was a neat moment in theory, but it also made very little sense narratively. Our journey into the Dragon Isles, much less the Emerald Dream, was not a faction-based mission and we’d already dealt with the primary antagonist that drove us to the Isles in the first place. There’s no plot or narrative about this information being reported back to the faction leadership or anyone else outside of the Dragon Isles – our whole goal is self-contained and doesn’t involve the factions outside of the joined expeditionary groups of the Reliquary and Explorer’s League. The whole “Avengers assemble!” finale is cool and fun, but it also makes no real narrative sense – having Jaina, Thrall, the faction leaders outside of Tyrande and Baine, all show up alongside the actual Dragon Isles representatives is jarring, because there’s no build up or interesting thread to support it. It just sort of happens, and for all of them to show up precisely as needed at the right time is just too on the nose for me. And I know that I am doing a big nerdy “um akshually” here and I get that, but it’s indicative, to me, of the lack of care that goes into WoW’s current storytelling – why does it happen, show me the process, we’ve established that getting to the Dragon Isles is a journey we undertook by boat and airship but the leaders and major NPCs can just get here, not only here as in the Dragon Isles but here as in the Emerald Dream? It kind of dampens the cool moment because there’s no sense of logic to it, when to that point, there actually is an established story around Fyrakk, the Druids of the Flame, and everyone else who is in the Dream being there. If we had literally anything to connect it – a quest to tell our faction leaders back home about the world tree and the quest against the Incarnates, some indication that the Dragonflights have been sending intel back, anything would help make this land! Instead, we get a rule of cool moment where all the heroes bust in to save the day, and it’s cool right up until the logic of the moment intrudes.

So in summary, my issues with Dragonflight’s core narrative are this – the pieces are too disconnected, too scattered and inconsistently woven between, with strange worldbuilding that is pretty cool but also has holes big enough to drive an eighteen-wheeler through sideways, but with some interesting emotional moments and connective bits that get so close to being able to carry the story that it makes it frustrating when they can’t pull the weight.

Next week’s 10.2.5 intends to close the book on Dragonflight and bring us forward into The War Within. What now?

Metzen Returns

Early into Dragonflight, on December 15th 2022, it was announced that Chris Metzen, original writer of much of the Warcraft universe, was back in a limited fashion working as a advisor to help the team with Dragonflight. Almost a full year later, in September 2023, it was announced that he was now the Executive Creative Director on the Warcraft franchise. This news, both times, was met with a general cheer from the community, as Metzen was the hand in charge during WoW’s best overall story years. Now, though, where he was once the main creative head at Blizzard on all games and franchises, he serves a much smaller overall role with more focus – Warcraft-only.

Metzen coming back is an interesting thing to me because I do think it is good news, but not unambiguously good. Why? Well, aside from any specific quibbles with Metzen himself, I think the writing process on a franchise like Warcraft is tough to rejoin. Metzen wasn’t just involved back in the day, he was the primary creative force behind, well, all of it. At the point where Warcraft developed from an RTS into a franchise, it was Metzen’s guiding hand that penned the lore, built the world, and worked with the game development team to keep cohesion between these elements. Metzen had a keen sense of what he wanted the franchise to be and built in that direction as a true north. He was in this role, working with various understudies and outside collaborators, from the early 2000s until 2016. For nearly 8 years now, the franchise has been written by new people, some of whom were his understudies and others who came in later or came up to that role on the team after Metzen had left.

When you have a clear creative vision, you can work on something with a relatively straightforward process. You build the world, you know the characters, and that eases the process of creating this enveloping narrative fiction. But when you hand the reins off, and someone else writes those characters through their lens for years, the story changes. WoW has suffered for the tumultuous wake of Metzen’s initial departure, as the game was handed off to Alex Afrasiabi for a few years, whose writing was very much focused on rule-of-cool over foundational worldbuilding and storytelling – fine enough when you have the Metzen codex to work from, but difficult as the game expanded into new settings and concepts like Argus, the nature of Worldsouls, and the Shadowlands. Afrasiabi was outed in summer of 2020, after work on Shadowlands had begun, and the hand put in charge of moving the story from that early state to finished product as well as starting work on Dragonflight was Steve Danuser. This shifting in leads, quick and chaotic compared to the constancy of Metzen for the game’s first decade-plus, means that a lot of change came for the setting. Afrasiabi changed a lot of characters, hitting a lot of female leads with villain bats and stereotypes (gee, I wonder why…) while being so focused on making something cool that the underlying logic of those cool moments was threadbare or non-existent. Whether he had a real plan or not is something we may never know, because he was in the lead chair for such a small period of time that his loose plot threads could have had plans we never got to see, since his ejection from the company clearly led to some changes and shuffles in story planning.

That takes us to Steve Danuser. Danuser is not as bombastic or charismatic as either of his predecessors, and he seems to prefer making vast sweeping statements about the impact of his stories while writing in a very scattershot, odd manner. Danuser’s narratives were sort of strange, because there was some clarity on the central ideas and motivations, but he leaned almost harder into rule of cool and big moments than even Afrasiabi, while also disregarding the logic leading there even more. Shadowlands suffered a lot because it wanted to be cool and huge, the “realms of death,” and we get told that there are dozens, maybe even hundreds or thousands of such realms, while Shadowlands showed us…5, adding two more in patches for a total of 7. Danuser’s biggest sin, though, was how he attempted to use the setting to add some backing to his stories, in ways that undermined that original lore. Warcraft III was his favorite place to draw from, and Shadowlands hits a ton of events in WCIII with a peculiar twist about motivation that makes the original moments less impactful and cheapens the overall feeling of the story. Arthas as a character feels weaker for it, Kel’Thuzad is definitely weaker for it, and very few people came away happy with his writing. In Dragonflight, he’s curtailed this by largely making small additive changes to characters or backfilling lore that wasn’t previously a part of the setting, which has its own problems but is generally better. Outside of Warcraft, Danuser is commonly dunked on for a couple of things – his refusal to engage with criticism of his work (I don’t blame him for, say, locking his Twitter replies, but he also never really engages with critique in interviews or presentations either), and his taste in non-game narratives (I have no opinion on this one, but a lot of people say it is noteworthy to his writing that he thinks the Game of Thrones TV series finale is good). For me, Danuser’s biggest sin is that a lot of his writing is just kind of boring – the faction conflict under his pen was a milquetoast centrist narrative about how maybe actually both sides are wrong (even as the Horde was catching the villain bat left, right, and center), and a lot of his writing of emotional moments like the Arthas finale in Shadowlands is ham-fisted and strangely distant-feeling.

So Metzen returns after nearly a decade away from these characters and this setting, with two lead writers in that span who had vastly different ideas and approaches, both of whom worked with and modified the Metzen source and have taken characters and the setting as a whole in new and different directions. The reason I do not universally celebrate Metzen coming back is this – picking up where you left off isn’t possible. You have to pickup where they left off – you have to find a way to take your original vision and source material, meld it with the changes and tweaks made by multiple different writers, and find a new way forward that presents a unifying vision of these disparate elements from 3 very different writers. That is tough, regardless of the writers, regardless of skill level – merging different creative visions is tough. If you discard too much of the last 8 years of WoW, you risk alienating current fans and people who like elements of that lore and story. If you lean too heavily into the last 8 years, on the other hand, you’re presenting too much of the storytelling that people disliked and that story is the whole reason that Blizzard begged and pleaded (presumably) to get you back in the writer’s room. From every perspective, that is rough, and the pressure of expectations must be difficult at even the best times. I do not envy Metzen and the responsibility, the pressure he must feel for all of that. I think he’s probably up to the challenge, but the pressure of expectations, he admitted, led to panic attacks his first time at Blizzard and are what ultimately sealed his initial retirement in 2016. Being in charge of only one franchise must be a relief, but a lot of eyes and jaded fans are looking eagerly at the output of his work – and hoping he gets it right. Inevitably, it won’t be right for everyone – that’s just the nature of creative endeavor – but the bet is that he will do a better job at the helm that the successors that followed his first exit.

Some cynicism that was laid on this news, though, was that the team underneath him was largely the same, and someone being a creative director is more likely to pitch big-picture ideas than being deep in the trenches, which would have left a lot of the actual writing to the team that landed us in this perception in the first place. However, whisper networks around the game are indicating that more change might have already been made…

Danuser Out?

I want and need to start this off with a heap of disclaimers. A lot of what I’m going to discuss here is from rumor millery and innuendo from connected WoW creators – it is by no means confirmed, either by Blizzard or the man himself. His LinkedIn still shows him working at Blizzard as a Narrative Director (although he doesn’t seem to use it much and last updates were over a year ago), and while his Twitter has activity as recently as this week, he’s been pretty silent there, curiously not talking about the developments for WoW from Blizzcon and with some likes that feel like the rumors might have substance to them. I don’t have Bluesky to investigate there, and I can’t say that I know for certain if he’s still on WoW, gone from WoW, or even gone from Blizzard altogether. Until we get something substantive, this is all based on rumors, and the rumor is that Steve Danuser is no longer working on World of Warcraft.

I want to follow that with a second thing I think is important to say. I’m not going to celebrate this news and I don’t think it is celebration-worthy. I will never celebrate someone losing a job when their biggest offense was “making a thing I didn’t like.” There are plenty of reasons to want someone sacked deservedly – what Alex Afrasiabi did, as an example – but making a story I didn’t enjoy isn’t on that list. He was given an unenviable task (and if all the old Afrasiabi “sabotage” rumors are also true, then his role was even more unenviable than the one Metzen is about to undertake) and it was bound to have some detractors even if his work was A+ certified high grade. I think I’m a pretty decent writer but I know that if I was put in that role, I would absolutely buckle under the pressure of it, one-hundred percent. That feeling has to be worse when the game has a large and passionate fanbase who is talking publicly about issues with his work, and I know at times I even contributed to that, to a point where I tried to make a blanket rule for myself to never name him in posts unless it was a news-facing issue. I hope that he has a different role within Blizzard if he was indeed removed from WoW and I hope that if he was let go that he is safe and comfortable and finds new work that he is passionate about quickly.

Having said that, I think that the game is going to be on a different footing if Danuser is no longer writing for the franchise, and I think that it could be a net-positive to the game. Lore has been an increasingly soft spot in WoW’s franchise strengths for years now, and with Metzen back at the helm writing most of it, the game has a real chance at starting to find its footing again in the lore and story department. Afrasiabi and Danuser both lacked the worldbuilding chops and overall strength in that arena that Metzen has always had, but I also think the way each lead has looked at the lore and setting has been different. Metzen has cared about creating a continuous, logical world. Afrasiabi saw Azeroth as a stage where cool things and big conflict could happen. Danuser seems to have seen Azeroth in a similar sort of way – as a stage for dramatic stories to take place, one where what is true at any given time is in flux and history was written by the victors instead of being immutable fact (which is sometimes the case in the real world, but hey). And, to be clear, this could be an interesting hook – but I think that the work we saw in his time as lead reflected a lack of process to get there, a missing attention to detail. The idea that, for example, the history of Azeroth was largely self-serving fiction of the Titans, is an interesting hook I really like! The hard part of that hook is that the support for it in-game is flimsy, especially when we as players have been witness to many of the events directly. The defense of an unreliable narrator only works if there is an obvious narrator presenting falsehoods – which works well for a book like Chronicle, but less so when the lore we’ve seen in-game changes later and we’ve been shown it from our player’s perspective at all times.

The interview with the narrative team this last fall in the leadup to 10.2 that I referenced in my last WoW critique post irritated me because it reflected a quality of Danuser even though he wasn’t in the room for it – a refusal to engage with critique. The interviewers asked quite openly about lore retcons and changes and were met with a bizarre answer about how errors are opportunities to change the lore, that WoW’s world is living and subject to change, and that they “don’t see the narrative errors like real mistakes.” To me, this is the encapsulation of Danuser’s presented mindset on lore and critique of his work on it – no matter the examples used, the gentleness of the approach, the impact on players and their ability to follow and enjoy the story of WoW, the answer is always defensive, is always that no mistake has been made, and is always that there is some reason that makes this good, actually. What has frustrated me the most about lore under the current narrative team is that it is impossible at times to just enjoy it because it could change next week, next hotfix, next patch, or next expansion, and there’s no consistent, reliable base or foundation when every mistake is actually a good opportunity to introduce something new (never mind what it does the existing lore!). What I respect about Metzen, perhaps the most, is that when he’s had issues with continuity in the past, he has embraced them head-on, admitted a mistake, and then explained why he is taking the new direction. Talking about the Draenei story has been done to death, but honestly, I think it sticks out because it was a place where, instead of wiggling out or denying the mistake, Metzen just said he goofed but felt that the goof served the lore better and explained the scope of the change. Danuser, or hell Afrasiabi for that matter, would never engage with such a thing, much less admit fault. Afrasiabi would talk about how cool the plot is, while Danuser and his understudies would talk up how there’s an oppotunity, no mistake, and that it’s just “perception” of an error.

At a time when the gameplay apparatus of WoW is responding more and more directly to player feedback and making changes from it, it was baffling to see the lore staying stagnant, unwilling to engage or entertain thoughtful critique. That’s why the “wait and see” about lore under Danuser has always sat poorly with me. When I’ve been told to wait and see, the end product either never comes or is never worth it. Wait and see with Sylvanas turned into a convoluted mess about missing soul fragments in folk tales and multiple segments of personality, while wait and see with the Jailer was basically watching him have fewer lines than a talking-head dialogue quest NPC and doing nothing of note along a plan that made no sense for the sake of some nameless villain we have yet to see. And if lore errors and continuity mistakes are just opportunities anyways, then hey, who even cares about getting back to those? What am I waiting and seeing about, exactly, when you can just change the foundation on a whim and call it an opportunity?

So while I don’t wish any ill will upon him and hope that he finds his next role quickly if the rumors are true, I do think that moving Danuser off the WoW team is a net-positive with Metzen in the lead role. I think that gives the new lore a chance to breathe and to find solid footing, and I think that the approach Metzen discussed at Blizzcon, looking at the loose threads of the era of his successors as the next major hook, is a good one. I don’t say that lightly or to celebrate his (possible) departure, but to acknowledge that WoW’s lore has become a negative in the past several years and it has not retained player interest as effectively. We may never know what the process looked like under Danuser’s leadership or how the team handled lore in that era, and maybe he gets a bum rap for being the name attached to it publicly – but for what we see publicly, he seemed to be the driver of a lot of the poorly-received lore of the last 4 years and that has an impact on how people perceive this news – that’s certainly the case for me, at least.

Closing Thought

In the end, Dragonflight has been a little bit better on lore, getting so close to being genuinely good as to become frustrating, but it has lacked focus on a steady and consistent central plot in favor of an erratic approach that has tried and failed at cramming in too many extraneous details without proper supporting worldbuilding. Metzen, if anything, is a simple writer who writes stories around basic, common themes and ideas, and I think after almost a decade of new writers and poor approaches to the story of Warcraft, maybe a return to that simple, world-building focused style is exactly what the modern game needs.