Marvel’s Wolverine has impressed with the fidelity of its visuals, and thankfully, it’ll have the performance to back that up. Insomniac’s senior project director Jess Reiner-Reed told IGN that the action-adventure runs at 60 frames per second with ray tracing enabled in Performance Mode.
“From early on in development, we knew we wanted to make this 60 FPS, working on the base PS5 in performance mode. And we’ve definitely been able to accomplish that. The game feels super smooth.”
It marks a big shift for the developer, which hasn’t typically shipped titles with a 60 FPS mode that supports ray tracing, instead adding it as a post-launch feature (among other options). However, head of technology Mike Fitzgerald said the team felt confident this time around.
“We’ve always had these fidelity and performance modes, and then we always sort of last-minute get the performance mode with ray tracing and like, ‘But this is pretty good…’ And so for this game from the start, we said, ‘You know what? We know we’re confident we can ship this now.
“This is going to be a 60 frames per second game with ray tracing, as the PS5 should have. We’re going to build the game around this and towards this.’ And it’s the default mode for the first time for us in one of our games. It’s important for the presentation.”
Of course, given the wider variety of locales compared to the Marvel’s Spider-Man series, Insomniac also put time into more realistic foliage and how characters interact with the wind. The result is a “very reactive” world.
“Spider-Man’s a very urban, city-based title. We invest a lot in technology to represent that. And then Marvel’s Wolverine takes us outside the city. We spend some time in the wilderness of Canada, in a different nature of city in Madripoor. So we invested in a lot of tech around foliage and the jungles that you start the game in. All that foliage is very reactive to wind and characters and the environment going on around it,” said Fitzgerald.
If that wasn’t enough, “most” of the objects in an environment will be destructible, in keeping with how a typical skirmish goes down for Wolverine.
“Logan’s a really destructive character. The aftermath after you fight a big battle, we wanted to make sure you didn’t feel like you were defeating a bunch of The Hand and then walking out of this pristine market that you happened to be in. So most of the props in the game are destructible and react in physically accurate ways. We invested a ton in that technology. So market stalls and tables and everything around you is splintering and flying off as you’re doing combat.”
Marvel’s Wolverine launches on September 15th for PS5. As an original story, it follows Logan in the usual struggle to find his place in the world, especially given his spotty memories. While characters like Jean Grey, Sabertooth and Mystique appear, the X-Men don’t exist yet.
PlayStation recently revealed special console bundles with unique designs that channel the new Battle Reborn outfit and Wolverine’s adamantium skeleton. Check them out there and stay tuned for more updates.
