Those: Blizzard
February 12, 2024 at 4:00 p.m. – We recently asked ourselves why things have become so quiet about WoW’s Narrative Director Steve Danuser. Now we know the reason.
Steve Danuser moved up from Lead Narrative Designer to Narrative Director on Blizzard’s WoW team in October 2022. Instead of “just” directing the stories of individual characters during a WoW expansion, from the end of 2022 he was responsible for planning the lore of Blizzard’s MMORPG across several WoW addons and franchises.
However, since the return of Blizzard veteran Chris Metzen as Executive Creative Director, things have become very quiet around the lore boss of World of Warcraft (buy now). No wonder. There is a reason why we are writing about Steve Danuser as a Blizzard employee in the past tense: Steve Danuser apparently left Blizzard in November 2023.
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Did Danuser have to vacate the position for Metzen?
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This can be seen from Danuser’s LinkedIn profile. According to the website, he resigned from his job at Blizzard in November 2023 after eight years and seven months.
This also explains why it was Chris Metzen and not Steve Danuser who announced WoW’s upcoming three expansions to the World Souls saga at BlizzCon 2023 at the beginning of November. At the time, many people assumed that Chris Metzen was naturally sent to the BlizzCon stage because he had already thrilled WoW fans with his positive energy at previous BlizzCons.
His last tweet about WoW in September 2022 was about the release of patch 10.2 for the current Dragonflight expansion. There was no final farewell or message to the community. This may also be because the ex-narrative director did not have a good standing in the WoW community.
In addition to Dragonflight, Danuser was also responsible for the story of the previous expansion “Shadowlands”. In this WoW add-on, a character named Zovaal (The Jailer) was introduced for the first time, who, to the astonishment of lore fans, is said to have secretly pulled all the strings in the entire Warcraft history. For many, this was a violent break in the long history of WoW and Warcraft. With the World Souls Saga, the developers are taking a new path and, for the first time in 20 years of World of Warcraft, made the WoW lore of the next three expansions public at an early stage. Have you noticed that Danuser hasn’t worked at Blizzard for a long time?