In some ways, Marvel’s Wolverine is exactly what you would expect from Insomniac Games, the studio that made the recent series of Spider-Man games. It’s a technically slick, cinematic adventure, strong on storytelling, that brings the unique qualities of its superhero star to the fore, while exploring his relationships with a broader gallery of great Marvel characters. It’s got fast combat against crowds of enemies, collectible suits, and light progression systems.
In other ways, it’s not. The Spider-Man games are set in an open-world New York City and revel in the web-slinger’s freedom to swing wherever he wants; they’re crowded with treasure hunts, sidequests, and optional activities. Wolverine is a cinematic action game from the old school, all about charging headfirst through levels battling bad guys on the way to the next cutscene or boss fight. It’s hardly alone in this genre among Sony-produced games — you could point to Uncharted and especially God of War as kindred spirits — but it does feel surprisingly lean for a modern AAA game, and it’s even attracted some criticism online for its old-school design.
Game director Mike Daly defended the choice in an interview with Polygon; he explained that all the choices Insomniac made with Marvel’s Wolverine stemmed from what would be right for the character of Wolverine, and game design was no exception.
“It really goes back to when we were gathering references for the character very early on,” Daly said. “We looked at our favorite Wolverine stories, and he’s a character who gets pulled all around the world. You know, he’s lived a long time. He’s been to a ton of places. He’s not anchored to a particular place. He just goes on adventures. And so we felt like [a linear action-adventure] format was a much better fit for the character. Putting what is a Wolverine story at the top of our priority list meant the open world is not really the best fit.”
Daly said Insomniac was much more focused on what would do justice to the character than hitting a checklist of what players want. “You know, it’s not about having a palette of features that gamers like for the gamers’ sake,” he said. “It’s about having the features that are really focused on just making the best Wolverine game possible.”
It was a similar story with Marvel’s Wolverine’s relentless combat design, in which the player has to keep the momentum up to build Wolverine’s rage up through three distinct phases and keep his regenerating health working. “What we all sort of communally felt was important for Wolverine combat was, like, visceral, close contact, but a character who was constantly aggressive and relentless,” Daly said. As he put it, the idea was that “if you were playing well, then you were doing what Wolverine would do.”
The first rage tier is designed to “bring out Logan’s reflexes, his survival instincts, his ability to be resilient and stay scrappy.” In the middle tier, you “build your rage, harvest your resources, use your special techniques, and be more tactical.” And in the top tier, “play as aggressively as possible and don’t have survival at the front of your mind.” Combat is designed so that each phase is “distinctly Wolverine,” but they provide natural dynamic variation to prevent the combat becoming too repetitive; Insomniac wants players changing their decision-making on the fly rather than “building these muscle memory grooves that have them just doing the exact same thing for the whole game,” Daly said.
The decision to set the story before the formation of the X-Men was also taken to support this singular focus on what makes Wolverine Wolverine. Insomniac felt the best setting for the character would be “a world where he was uniquely needed. Like, these problems were not going to get solved otherwise.”
Daly said this was Insomniac’s north star throughout: “Let’s set our assumptions aside about what needs to be included in a Wolverine game, really focus our decision-making on just the character and building back out from there. And that’s how we filled in the cast of characters, the roster of enemies, the list of locations, and really everything about the game.”
Given Marvel’s Wolverine is something of a throwback — albeit a very expensive, AAA throwback that’s been in development for years — I wondered if Daly was nostalgic for the time when he joined Insomniac in the early 2010s, when his team would produce a new game every year.
“I mean, the grass is always greener!” he laughed. “Because in those times, we wished we had more time and more team members and a bigger budget to fulfill our ambitions. I think, nowadays? Not really. I have urges like that, and what I try to do with it is ask how we can take that mentality and apply it to what we’re doing now, which is really just — you can let any game production run off the rails if you’re not careful. And bringing it back to, let us make the right decisions as quickly as possible to keep our production efficient so that all of our effort really goes into the things that make a direct impact on the player experience.
“That’s how I can take those good-old-days thoughts, and make sure that they apply here.”
