Insomniac Games’ first foray with Marvel spent nearly a decade teaching players how to be Spider-Man across three separate games. Now, the studio wants to see what happens when they throw claws into the mix.
Marvel’s Wolverine is a very different beast from Insomniac’s Spider-Man games — literally and creatively. Logan is heavier, angrier, and far more comfortable getting his hands dirty, requiring the team to rethink everything from combat and traversal to the emotional story underneath all that Adamantium.
Below, creative director Marcus Smith, Marvel Games executive producer Eric Monacelli and game director Mike Daly discuss with Deadline, at a recent hands-on preview in Burbank, how they approached building their version of Wolverine, why they wanted to push the character “to 11,” and how they balanced the freedom to make the game more brutal while staying true to the iconic X-Man.
DEADLINE: Following the Spider-Man 2 video game, when did you all decide it was time to tackle Wolverine?
MARCUS SMITH: A long, long time ago. We had been talking about working more with Marvel after the successful collaborations on the Spider-Man games. The Spider-Man: Miles Morales team were pretty much the ones that were going to be rolling over to make a new game. We have a lot of fans at Insomniac who are fans of Wolverine too. So, we had been spending a lot of time on combat, and we felt like this would be a perfect match. Then we decided to go Wolverine, and never look back.
DEADLINE: There’s obviously a different approach here too between Peter Parker and Logan. In just the three hours of playtime, Logan nor his comrades have an issue with cussing. And there’s lots of blood and guts happening…
DEADLINE: Born with the bottle in his hand. Were there limitations on how far you wanted to go to distinguish this game from the other arguably more family friendly format?
ERIC MONACELLI: We collaborated so long and so much on Spider-Man, we just completely trusted everyone to dial this version of Wolverine to 11. And then we’d see where we need to go from there, pretty much. But it’s always an iterative process, you go back and forth, you get to know how far you can go and you can push it. We mostly thought about how we didn’t want to be inauthentic or out of character.
SMITH: We did tend to go too far and then edit back. A good example of this is telling the writers they could swear. And boy did they swear. The lines for Jean Grey would have made sailors blush.
SMITH: And that’s where you step in and say, “This is out of character, let’s pull it back.” [Laughs].
DEADLINE: Something I found fun during the playthrough is that there’s a Deadpool-themed outfit and then an outfit called, “When Two Pals Went to Hollywood,” amongst many other ones to come, I’m sure.
DALY: Yeah, that was inspired by the cinematic universe. We let you craft suits in the game because, as a fan of Wolverine, it is fun to see the look of your favorite representation of the character. So, we built out the roster of suits that we wanted to pull from the things that are going to be the most exciting and inspiring to fans, which means pulling in a lot of iconic representations that they’ll recognize. So naturally, the suits from the movies are broadly recognized. They’re really well-designed suits because a lot of care and scrutiny are put into them. And so naturally we really want to give fans the ability to see more of that in the game as part of the choose-your-own-suit experience.
MONACELLI: That broad recognition is super important to us from Marvel because we have a wonderful creative team. We work with Insomniac, but of course there’s the creative team that did the Deadpool and Wolverine movie. And so we’re like, “Oh cool, this is a cool suit.” And Insomniac’s, “Yeah, that’s a cool suit people know. Can we use it?” And it’s like, “Hell yeah, you can use it in the game.” It was just about figuring out what’s in the zeitgeist, what’s culturally appropriate, what characters we want to depict.
I grew up with Jim Lee, X-Men, 1991. That was my Wolverine. So that suit is what I’d love to wear. But we’re all different. Everybody came into the sort of touchpoint in the world of Marvel at a different point. And so we want people to have that ability to express themselves.
DEADLINE: How did you guys parse out which characters you wanted and which ones you didn’t? Is this story based on any of the X-Men comic runs?
SMITH: That’s the thing. What we took away from Spider-Man was how can we forge our own identity? How can we make this Marvel’s Wolverine, a unique storyline? So while we use a lot of comics and TV shows and movies as inspiration, it’s a reference from which we moved around.
So in terms of selecting characters, I think the first thing was we just said, what embodies Wolverine? What do you think of when you think of Wolverine? What are those characters? And some of them just make perfect sense. We’re going to figure out how to get Deathstrike in this game in some way, shape or manner. And then we start building the overarching storyline. And as the storyline comes together, you start to figure out what are the major themes that are pieced together. And sometimes characters no longer make sense and we need to jettison them and bring somebody else in.
It’s a constant iterative process. How do we build a unique Wolverine? How do we build a story that supports that version of him? And that is where all the characters come out of.
DEADLINE: What were some negotiables and non-negotiables about bringing this character to his own video game?
MONACELLI: Well, the biggest one, at least from our standpoint, was that this needs to be an original take: Earth-1048 Wolverine, the Insomniac take on it. We didn’t want it to be derivative of anything else. We wanted it to be fresh and unique.
And we knew, from over a decade now of working together, that the team could bring it. And they’re best in class at storytelling, best in class in gameplay. So you need to tell your own story in your own world, that Earth world that you’ve created, and just bring it all to the table. And I think that’s what y’all did.
DALY: For my part, I don’t know, you can classify whether this required a negotiation or not, but another thing was, we’re making a video game, we want to immerse you in this character as much as possible. And knowing that it was Wolverine meant, from the beginning, we need to represent the violence of the nature of the character from day one with open eyes.
And so that was one of the things we all realized early on, agreed with and were like, we’re going to have to go for this. It’s going to be different from what Spider-Man fans, for example, are used to.
DEADLINE: I mean, just from the demo downstairs, it dropped us right into the mess. I was stressed out.
MIKE DALY: You’re in the shit, right away. [Laughs].
DEADLINE: From a gameplay perspective, how did you approach directing these action sequences?
DALY: We wanted to pull in as many iconic moves that represented Wolverine’s scrappiness as we could. And so that meant things going beyond the up close, seeing the claws make their way into other enemies, incorporating moves like headbutting enemies or cutting the weapons in half.
Those moments, I think, really allowed us to project his personality onto his actions in a way that you were in control and you were feeling it too. It was a challenge seeking out how many different avenues we could weave into the combat system. That was our main goal, and it worked out.
MONACELLI: I mean, the techniques you guys had too, like the bull rush and different tornado spin, all those techniques, it’s just like, that is so Wolverine. You really nailed that.
DEADLINE: The feel of this gameplay feels really rooted in the material of the environment. He can claw himself up poles, metal and concrete amongst other things. What are some of the new things that players are going to experience in this game that they haven’t in another Insomniac game?
DALY: So a lot of Insomniac fans really enjoyed Spider-Man traversal, which very much embodies that character. For this game, it was very important that you have a completely different traversal experience.
DEADLINE: And there’s Logan’s nightmare doors.
DALY: Logan has a metal skeleton. He’s super heavy. And so we wanted to design a traversal system from the ground up that represented that sense of weight and that sense of groundedness, yet also let him express his animalistic strength. That’s how he overcomes it. And he feels very at home in natural environments. And so a lot of the things you’ll see, like being able to use his power to climb rocks and trees, using it to sneak through areas and get the jump on enemies, we felt like we presented it in a way that makes you feel like Wolverine. He’s not light or agile, and it captures that essence.
Similarly, another thing we wanted to capture about Logan was, he has these lost memories, and what we’ve done with gameplay is let you use his enhanced senses to track down smells that’ll trigger lost memories. In the form of whiskey bottles that he had an experience with and just couldn’t recall until he had that smell in hand again.
And these quiet moments tucked in the corners of the levels, where he will enter his mind cabin and undergo a trial in order to basically push through that mental resistance to remembering something from his past. And so the player gets to physically fight for Logan’s lost memories and get to earn a puzzle piece that they can put together to realize what happened in his past lives.
MONACELLI: I hope players go through all the mind cabin things to just get to the core of what’s going on in his head. Because creating that avenue was a theme of loss and remembering and what forgetting or remembering means for a character. It’s core to Wolverine. That’s what this is about. So, I’m really excited for people to play through all of those and see what they’re like. Because you got a taste of it during the playthrough, but there’s a lot of layers, very deep.
DEADLINE: Where are players meeting Logan during this time in his life? What should they expect when they start the game?
SMITH: Well, I think the biggest thing is that we’re developing a character that, despite his gruff defense mechanisms, he’s a very vulnerable person. And you get a sense of why he puts up these barriers. That at his core, he’s a very sensitive person. And despite the fact that he will fight to the death for the underdog, he hurts, he feels every bit of pain of being shot and kicked and punched, but he’s also been hurt very many times. And he suffers from the consequences of his own actions of losing control because rage is such a built-in part of who he is.
That vulnerability, I think, is the thing that’s freshest in this game.
DEADLINE: Which version of Logan is this? He’s 200 years old when this game begins.
DEADLINE: But he’s also not the X-Men Logan that we know.
SMITH: Yeah. He’s an amalgamation because he is a little bit older than I think in a lot of the canonical versions X-Men would have been around. In this version, he’s got a little bit more distance and emotional strength to him.
But it’s a world that’s a little bit darker and more menacing because there aren’t X-Men there to protect mutants, because mutants aren’t well known in the world, but they’re in danger from those people who do know about them.
ERIC MONACELLI: I mean, it’s the Insomniac or 1048 world of Logan, that’s who it is. It’s resilient, resolute, really, really brutal, but emotionally vulnerable and caring and deeply concerned about the world state and where he’s going. He’s seen a lot of shit and he needs to know, how can I work to repair and make this a better world?
Marvel’s Wolverine arrives September 15 exclusively on PlayStation 5.
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