Insomniac Games has released a new video for Marvel’s Wolverine, giving us a behind-the-scenes look at the development of the game. The video, just over four minutes in length, features many of the title’s development team, including animation director Brian Wyser, creative director Marcus Smith, and Marvel Games’ product development manager Laura Hathaway. Some of the subjects it covers include visual effects, comic book inspirations, and gameplay features.
Discussing the gratuitous violence and gore in Marvel’s Wolverine, courtesy of Logan’s combat style that involves his claws and healing factor, Wyser said that the team had the aim of making people cringe with how Logan dismantles his enemies. “As we started working on combat, I said to our animation team, ‘I want us to make the audience cringe. You could punch in the face, but it’s a little bit more cringeworthy if you slice the throat and rip out part of the throat.’”
Hathaway spoke about how, even in the early builds of the game that didn’t even have any levels, Insomniac was able to successfully tap into the fantasy of taking on the role of Wolverine. “It’s this moment a lot of us had growing up where we always wanted to be Wolverine. We wanted the claws to pop out of our hands. We wanted that power.”
Showing all of this violence wasn’t an easy task for the animators. As Wyser explains, to include things like “limbing” – a technical term for the in-game dismemberment – animators had to work with the character team to ensure that the limbs being cut off looked clean. The visual effects team also had to be brought in to make sure that the amount of blood or electricity that comes from the dismemberment wound is appropriate.
Smith wraps up the video by talking about how Marvel’s Wolverine is “a love letter to the fans. The way that our artists were able to represent mutant powers, it looks like something out of a movie, but it’s happening in real time. It’s running in frame. It’s incredible.” Hathaway adds: “You can really feel how much care and love has been put into this game.”
Marvel’s Wolverine was released exclusively on PS5 earlier this month, and has gone on to be incredibly successful. A report has indicated that it has already taken up the third-place spot in the best-selling games of the year list in the UK, coming in behind Resident Evil Requiem and 007 First Light. Another report has claimed that it has sold nearly 2 million copies in the first three days of its release, with one million sales being attributed to pre-orders for the digital version before the game even came out.
For more details, take a look at our review, where we gave it a score of 10 out of 10 thanks to its brutal and satisfying combat, excellent story and pacing, spectacular boss fights, and strong progression systems. Our only complaints were that it suffers from minor bugs and that its stealth gameplay systems feel quite underwhelming.
