Insomniac’s Wolverine Writer Says Sabretooth “Yearns” for Logan, and It’s the Final Straw for a Game That’s Been Fighting Its Own Creative Choices for Two Years

Marvel’s Wolverine launches September 15, and five days before release, Insomniac narrative director Walt Williams handed critics of the game its most damning quote yet, on the record, to the Washington Post.

The scene happens during an assault on a military base. Sabretooth grabs the back of Logan’s head. Washington Post reviewer Gene Park described what follows as “a brief moment of yearning.” Williams confirmed to the Post that reading is exactly what Insomniac intended, walking through the beat in detail: “Logan feels that yearning and he gets scared and pulls away. Sabretooth feels that yearning and it makes him hurt and want to lash out to exert that hurt outward. Hate and love are so hand in hand. You hurt me so I’m going to hurt you, and we’re still going to be linked because now the pain is shared.”

That’s Insomniac’s narrative director explicitly framing Wolverine’s most violent, longest-running rivalry as romantic yearning, described in his own words as “hand in hand” with love. The internet went crazy immediately. “Wait Wolverine and Sabretooth are gay? I thought they were brothers,” one widely shared post read, referencing X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the 2009 film where Victor Creed was written as Logan’s half-brother. That specific sibling relationship comes from that film continuity, not mainstream comics canon, and Insomniac hasn’t confirmed the game treats them as blood relatives. But the sharper point fans raised cuts deeper regardless of the sibling question. As one fan put it: “Are they aware their rivalry started with Victor raping and murdering Logan’s lover?” That’s established comics history, not exaggeration. Sabretooth’s decades-long feud with Wolverine in mainstream continuity traces back to Victor Creed murdering Silver Fox, a woman Logan loved. Reframing that history as a relationship with “room for love” is a direct, quoted description from the writer himself of a character whose canonical history includes murdering Wolverine’s partner.

This new controversy piles right on top of a fight that’s been building around the game for over two years, not a controversy invented in the last week. It starts with Sweet Baby Inc., the narrative consulting firm confirmed on the project since 2021, when the company’s own account posted excitedly about joining “the amazing folks at Insomniac” on both Spider-Man 2 and Wolverine. That confirmation resurfaced publicly in early 2024, and it mattered because Sweet Baby is the same firm attached to Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, a $200 million commercial disaster for Warner Bros.

Jean Grey became the flashpoint almost immediately after. Leaked test footage from the game’s early development showed Jean fighting alongside a Patch-costumed Wolverine in a Madripoor casino, and former World of Warcraft team lead Mark Kern posted the leaked model next to later development art, writing: “Look at what happened to Jean Grey from Insomniac Games’ Marvel’s Wolverine from these leaked early screenshots of the first, beautiful model, to the masculine, world weary version we have today. They are ruining Marvel.” When Jean’s in-game look debuted properly at the June 2, 2026 State of Play, the backlash reignited immediately. Fan account @Ronsaidwhatnow posted: “I was so right from the very beginning when I talked about Jean Grey being ugly from the leaked photos of Marvel’s Wolverine. Well, here she is now in the finished product, still ugly. What is it with modern game studios and their desire to make women so unattractive?” Another account, @Kachinkastic, drew a direct east-west comparison: “Jean Grey in Marvel Rivals, made by Asian devs: beautiful, charming, gorgeous. Jean Grey in Marvel’s Wolverine, made by Western devs: visually ugly, Karen-style, looks like a man in women’s dresses... and some people still wonder why everyone currently prefers games made by Asian devs.” A third, @JohnnyMassacre, tied it directly to the game’s own marketing structure: “LMFAO DEI quota detected. We must give significant run time to female ugly Jean Grey in a WOLVERINE game.”

Mystique got hit with the same criticism when her design surfaced later. One widely shared post asked outright, “I’m cautious about Wolverine. How much Sweet Baby STINK is still on it? Because they turned Spider-Man 2 into dog shit.” The launch trailer, which opened Sony’s September State of Play twelve days before release, reignited the fight a third time. God of War creator David Jaffe, someone with no track record of reflexive culture-war commentary, posted his own reaction video calling the female character designs “ugly and disgusting,” directing his criticism specifically at Marvel Games VP Bill Rosemann and pointing out that Marvel Rivals and Marvel Snap depict these exact same characters as conventionally attractive without any apparent difficulty. Insomniac’s response to the mounting criticism, according to reporting at the time, was a clown emoji pointed at critics. Throughout all of it, Insomniac’s own narrative director publicly defended Sweet Baby Inc. as “one of the finest in the biz.”

Now the reviews are in, and they give the critics of all of this even more ammunition. Marvel’s Wolverine landed at 77 on Metacritic, Insomniac’s lowest-rated game to date, below both Spider-Man titles and below Ratchet and Clank. OpenCritic has it at a similarly soft 79 to 81 depending on when the aggregate was checked. Metacritic’s own critic consensus reads: “Unfortunately, the shallow combat, repetitive enemies, inconsequential stealth, and overreliance on linear cinematic sequences exhaust their surprises far too quickly. Insomniac created one of Wolverine’s finest stories, but placed it inside a game that is ultimately more spectacular than deep.” IGN gave it a 6 out of 10, writing that its “slick and satisfying combat wears thin well before its conclusion.” But Why Tho? called it “too safe,” citing “repetitive combat, unanswered narrative questions, and uneven pacing,” and noted that despite coming from the studio behind Ratchet and Clank and Marvel’s Spider-Man, the game “doesn’t live up to Insomniac Games’ previous work.” Multiple outlets independently flagged the same core problems: enemy variety is thin, combat encounters blur together across simple arenas, and exploration outside of fights offers limited player choice. This is a studio with a genuinely excellent track record producing its weakest-reviewed game yet, in the same stretch where its own narrative director is publicly defending design and story choices a large chunk of the fanbase has been rejecting since 2024.

None of this happens in a vacuum, and it isn’t unique to Wolverine. It’s the same pattern that’s now played out across nearly every major AAA release of the last two years. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II’s director admitted outright that the game’s same-sex romance option with Hans Capon was added, in his own words, partly “to avoid accusations of sexism against us,” a decision made for optics rather than organic storytelling, by the studio’s own admission. Dragon Age: The Veilguard leaned hard into identity-driven character writing and pronoun selection as central mechanics, and became one of BioWare’s biggest commercial disappointments, with even sympathetic critics conceding the identity focus came at the expense of the dark, grounded storytelling the series built its reputation on. Assassin’s Creed Shadows gave its Black samurai protagonist Yasuke a nonbinary love interest, Ibuki, sparking a controversy large enough to reportedly draw formal concern from Japanese government officials over historical distortion, layered on top of the game’s separate backlash for depicting violence inside real, active Shinto shrines.

Why do studios keep repeating this pattern?