Game director Mike Daly. While Insomniac Games’ recent showcase of the upcoming Marvel’s Wolverine may have indicated that it might be a more linear title than the studio’s previous superhero outings, game director Mike Daly has revealed some more details about the game’s pacing and structure. In an interview with IGN, he compared the title’s pacing quite directly with what we typically get from comic books.
The reason behind this largely comes down to the studio asking itself what would make for the best Wolverine game possible that also happens to appropriately represent the character of Logan.
“We thought about, Logan’s a character who basically travels the world, has travelled the world many times over,” Daly said. “He’s pulled by a search for his past. He’s pushed by a sense of duty. And to that end, we decided that a globe-hopping adventure was the right take for this game. Logan is not a character that’s anchored in a particular place and spends a lot of time on it.”
“So what you can expect out of the game is that we’ve created a comic book-style pacing, dense story, that’s like a rollercoaster, and it grips you from beginning to end. And generally speaking, you’re driven through all of these missions by important events and plot points that are happening.”
This also means that the gameplay showcase during Sony’s recent State of Play is “kind of representative” of the whole game. Throughout Marvel’s Wolverine, players will find themselves exploring new regions, since Logan is often pulled to entirely different parts of the world. Daly has also confirmed that stealth will be completely optional, and that the game will be more than happy to let players constantly jump into combat encounters.
“So in that sense, what you saw in the gameplay trailer was kind of representative,” he explained. “Logan’s got a lead, he’s got a direction, but he has agency in how he decides to approach it. The areas have different paths you could take. Stealth is optional; you could do it or you could not do it, you could jump straight into combat. And you can poke your nose around the nooks and crannies of the world to find things here and there, and some optional content and collectibles along the way.”
“We sought to have a large amount of variety in the feel of the different environments that you go to. And so that changes the pacing and the shape of how you navigate space and how you explore. And that leads to different flavors of gameplay as well, where some are more about observation and traversal, some are more about finding characters to interact with, and a lot of them are about stalking enemies and taking them out.”
When asked about whether there will be many sandbox-styled areas in Marvel’s Wolverine, Daly confirmed that the studio had never set out to make an open world or sandbox-styled game to begin with. “What we really wanted was a high-octane, high-intrigue, linear single-player adventure, and the missions reflect that in their structure,” he said.
Marvel’s Wolverine is coming to PS5 on September 15th. For more details, check out the fact that the title allows players to turn off the gore, and how the relationship between Logan and Sabertooth will play out.
