Blizzard won't "change" Sylvanas Windrunner, even if her World of Warcraft Midnight return proves divisive

I read a lot of books. Fantasy. Sci-fi. Graphic novels. Nothing’s off limits. That includes game-inspired titles: I have a whole collection of Warhammer 40k novels, League of Legends books, and, of course, World of Warcraft stories. But of all the videogame books I’ve read, Christie Golden’s 2022 ‘Sylvanas’ is perhaps my all-time favorite. In Sylvanas Windrunner, World of Warcraft finds its most tortured soul – a character who has tried to do right by her people, in all the wrong ways. Golden’s book really brings that story to life; I fell in love with her character through that novel. But, unfortunately, Shadowlands ruined that.

For a character so decisive, Shadowlands robbed Sylvanas of her agency. The idea that the big scary Jailer was pulling all of the strings, manipulating her into burning Teldrassil, committing genocide by proxy, felt like a poor excuse to make her avoid accountability. While the Teldrassil sequence still divides to this day, it would all have felt a lot better if she’d just owned it. Yes, they’re wrong, but at least she would have stuck to her principals.

But instead, Shadowlands’ narrative fell flat, and the character has been confined to the bowels of The Maw for the past few expansions to live out her “penance.” It certainly feels like Blizzard hasn’t really known what to do with her, so her reappearance at the tail end of World of Warcraft’s The War Within cycle took a few of us by surprise. Sure, Xal’atah has her eyes trained on the Sunwell, and Windrunner Spire is set to become a dungeon in Midnight, but her sudden reappearance was met with an equal ratio of sighs and excitement.

In the Midnight prologue campaign, Arator seeks out Sylvanas in The Maw, persuading her to return to Azeroth and help stop Xal’atath’s march on the Sunwell. She simply tells Arator that their “paths will cross again,” heavily implying that we’ll see her in either Midnight or The Last Titan. I ask design director Maria Hamilton and principal artist Jay Hwang about bringing back such a divisive character, while attempting to reconcile what happened in Shadowlands.

“We’ve seen her doing her work in The Maw, we’re going to Eversong, and one of our dungeons is Windrunner Spire, so we’ll learn more about that” Hamilton says. “I don’t want to make any promises about when we’ll see her next: I knew we would be seeing her before Midnight came out, and we have. I don’t think we could leave out such an important character that people care about in the World Soul Saga, but I can’t say more than that.”

“We don’t want to change the character,” she highlights. “The character has an arc: it’s important that the character has that arc and that it’s internally logical. But we do want to hear players’ thoughts about it – you’re right [referring to my question], it is a very divisive character. There are maybe people who don’t know her whole story, who maybe don’t understand how she got where she got. Maybe they do, but they don’t believe that’s right.

“People are really passionate about our characters, so we want to hear what they’re thinking,” she says, before concluding that “we’re trying to do justice to every character we have, and the Sylvanas story is certainly not over.”

As someone who really loves the character, that’s music to my ears. Narratively, WoW has significantly improved post-Shadowlands (even if Dragonflight was a little stale), so I’m hopeful that the team can give her return the grace it deserves. Sure, I’m still a little hesitant, but I’m also excited. Redemption always looks good if it’s pulled off well, especially on The Banshee Queen.