Five years after its initial reveal, developer Insomniac will launch the action-adventure game next month. Besides being the first big game in many years to star the ever-popular Wolverine, there’s been particular excitement over this project due to Insomniac’s work on the beloved Marvel’s Spider-Man series.
Last month, MobileSyrup visited Insomniac in Burbank, California to go hands-on with Marvel’s Wolverine and hear from the development team. You can check out our preview for full impressions, which includes some sequence-specific insights from creative director Marcus Smith. For this piece, though, we sat down with Smith for a wide-ranging chat. In it, we talked about the differences between working on Wolverine vs. Spider-Man, landing on this particular pre-X-Men story, how the team designed combat around the “unkillable” Wolverine and buzzworthy Canadian locations in the game.
Marcus Smith: I think that our take on making the combat more cinematic and those moments where you get in close and you really feel the visceral nature of it. Obviously, authoring with haptics helped us a lot. So every project we do here is always built on the shoulders of the projects before. Spider-Man, obviously, was huge for us to be able to build off of. But then, of course, we branch into very different aspects as well. While Spider-Man is a “Friendly Neighbourhood Spider-Hero” and he is in New York, we are telling a tale [in Wolverine] that is globe-hopping, so that precipitated us to do a lot of smaller areas instead of one big open-world. Wolverine is not necessarily a hero known for his traversal abilities; he doesn’t swing across cities or anything. So that meant that our layouts and designs, our missions, were much more consolidated than they were [in Spider-Man]. So we base everything off of what we had built, but then we deviate pretty heavily, pretty quickly.
Smith: Hopefully, hardcore fans will appreciate the nods that we do in comic book cover reenactments in some of our shots. We really were looking for a unique spin on it. So while we did do a lot of reference-digging, and we looked at all of the media of which Wolverine has been a part of, we really did try to tell an original story. So I couldn’t point to one particular run.
Smith: Our goal always is to be as true to the character as possible, with some exceptions. Obviously, given a choice, Wolverine would rather be in the woods in a cabin alone, not talking to anybody. So we need to pair him with strong personalities to bring out the best. Ultimately, we’re telling a Wolverine game. It’s called Marvel’s Wolverine, so we need him to be the star of his game, and that means that we wanted to not suck the oxygen out of the room by having a broader cast of even bigger characters, and really just focus on Wolverine and his relationships with the characters that we’re bringing to the table in this story.
Smith: There are certain characters that you have to have when you’re talking about building a Wolverine game. Essex, again — how do we stay true to a character but bring something new? The idea that he’s the one who forms Team X, and he’s the one who really brings this family together, I think, is really important to draw out that personality and that conflict of how his moral code and Wolverine’s moral code can run afoul of one another.
Smith: First of all, one of our art directors, Gavin [Goulden] — he lives in B.C., so we had to have Vancouver represented properly, or he wouldn’t be able to go home. [laughs] Wolverine’s Canadian, so we obviously need to spend time there. In our case, I don’t want to reveal too much, but we knew that Canada was one of the locations you had to spend time in. So you’ll spend more time in parts of Canada.
Smith: I don’t want to give him all the credit because certainly it was a whole team effort! We had decided that we were going to be using Vancouver for one of our mission areas. It is funny; we weren’t sure if everybody was going to understand the sulphur piles outside of [people from] that area. [laughs] It’s confusing to see this giant yellow pile! But it’s also great because one of our artists went on vacation up there recently and took a picture of the pile and was like, “There it is!” So it really was, we figure out first where we’re going to go and how it fits into the narrative, and then we just do a ton of research to make sure that we’re representing it properly.
Smith: No. That’s my only answer. [laughs] We’re mostly West Coast, is what I’ll say.
Smith: [laughs] He’s a hairy dude, yeah!
Smith: Honestly, our technology groups and our art tech groups do witchcraft. I have no idea — it’s a black box to me how they’re able to pull it off. But a lot of time and effort went into body hair and what is enough and not enough. Man, I can’t tell you how many meetings were involved talking about body hair. [laughs] It’s more than I thought I would ever be in in my life, honestly.
Smith: [laughs] It’s all hair, yeah! It’s blood and body hair that you know you had to do a good job on.
Smith: It’s an iterative process. All of game development is an iterative process. We throw all of our ideas into the game, and then you just slowly whittle things out. I’ll say that about the way that we incorporate both the health regen and rage — the difficult part was, “How do you not make this seem like every other game?” Because so many games have regenerative health, even if it doesn’t make sense. [laughs] And there’s a lot of different versions of rage in gaming mechanics.
And for us, it was, “How do we balance the fact that he is basically invulnerable and he does gain rage?” In earlier incarnations, we were doing sort of a more standard health increase. But what people were doing was you go away from combat to heal up, and so the model that we fell on was, “How do we promote the ‘always moving forward’ nature of Wolverine?” And that’s how you gain your rage, and that’s how you are preventing yourself from losing health by way of being able to trade the rage in for health in the Last Stand. It all just comes back to, “How do we make a game that actually has stakes with a character that is almost invulnerable?”
Smith: Yeah, that was much more traversal-oriented. We have a few different categories of Nightmare challenges. Going back to the initial idea, we knew we’re telling a very linear story, but we want to promote you replaying missions. And so having collectibles, having optional content that you can do, trials came up and fit very well. Because know we’ve got a lot of different challenges in the game, we want to make sure that players can test themselves on those skill sets.
