Hey, so the news finally hit that Steve Danuser left Blizzard last year.
I'm sure that had NOTHING to do with Metzen coming swinging in and everyone blaming Danuser for Shadowlands.
The truth is that blaming or giving credit to any one person for an expansion is myopic at best. Expansions are made by hundreds of people in a myriad of capacities.
On top of that, Shadowlands was made during the worst part of the harassment suites with one of the main, powerful harassers at the helm of WoW--Alex Afrasiabi--who was accused of assaulting both men AND women, destroying property, and was a notorious, barely-functional alcoholic. He finally left during Shadowlands' development and based on my experience with MMO cycles, probably left the team a pile of incoherent shit. If anything, the fact that Shadowlands has a story AT ALL is a testament to Danuser and the remaining WoW team.
If you liked Dragonflight, you like Danuser's writing and his story choices.
And now out with Danuser and back in with Metzen. You'll probably never see something like Dragonflight again. Under the hood are the same people, but the driver is again different. Will The War Within be bad? No, probably not. Will it be better than Dragonflight? Perhaps... if Metzen doesn't let his ego get in the way.
But what it will probably be is just different and that's a sad reason for Danuser to have left or have been forced out.
