Metzen retired.
It’s been happening for a while that resonant intellectual properties are given to people who don’t respect the setting. We see it in films and in television, we see it in games, and it’s happening now in Blizzard.
Because the “old guard” isn’t around in the same capacity as it used to be, the people who have been given the charge to craft the evolution of a world have a divergent vision of what that world should be that the original architects did not have.
Flat out, I lay this at the feet of Danuser and Golden. They’re motivated by more than telling a story. I don’t know exactly what they’re trying to accomplish, but I’m not seeing the same reverence toward the characters and what they were before they had a chance to take a spin with it.
Comic book characters have been around for decades. Even before their original creators died, they were being written by others at times. When Miller wrote Batman, he didn’t invalidate what was established by Kane and Finger. Bendis and Slott evolved Spider-Man, but didn’t make us feel like we never understood them. At the very least, they didn’t reach back into previous storylines that they did not write to try and change what we thought was happening.
Danuser is not doing that. Many of the character’s he’s currently driving were not created by him, had their stories and motivations details in ways that were understood and relateable. I go in detail about this in a post I wrote about the three “eras” of Sylvanas here: A Tale of Two Sylvies and why the Jailer Reveal was Bad
The story is bad because everything we thought we knew about the major characters is a lie, and we’re shown that we never really understood them. The Jailer revealed that Sylvanas has lied to us since after Wrath, and that’s something this current writing team decided when the previous team were writing her a completely different way.
This isn’t a simple redefinition of a character either. This is a lot closer to Bruce Wayne saying the death of his parents had nothing at all to do with his decision to be a crime fighter, despite decades of the character’s motivation being understood as inexorably connected to that event, all because the current writer has a vision different than the creator.
The writers are misleading the players. They’re doing that by reaching into parts of the story they were not involved in and changing what those events meant. It’s nothing short of narrative desecration and I don’t know how they can call themselves writers if they can’t tell a story without erasing the intent of those who not only came before them, but built the world that enables them to prance about in this way.
