Marvel’s Wolverine Game Director On X-Men Origins Inspirations, Lengthier Development Time, And The Online Backlash

Over the past few console generations, Insomniac Games has cemented itself as the most efficient team under PlayStation Studios. Even before becoming first-party in 2019, Insomniac was releasing games nearly every single year. That energy carried over into the PS5 generation with three massive projects launched in less than six years. Next month, that number finally jumps up to four with Marvel’s Wolverine.

Insomniac’s first crack at a game based on everyone’s favourite bub has been a long time coming. Originally announced alongside Spider-Man 2 all the way back in 2021 via a short teaser trailer, fans were left waiting a whopping four years until the game finally popped back up properly with a 2026 release date, giving it the longest development time of any Insomniac game that we know of.

Wolverine Was Announced So Early Because Insomniac Knew It'd Be Hard To Hide

Games take a long time to make, of course, but for a studio like Insomniac that’s become known for speedy development times, this wait came as a shock. Earlier this week, I had the chance to check out Wolverine for myself and chat to game director Mike Daly, and the unusually long gap between announcement and release was one of the first things I asked him about.

“We announced Wolverine very early because we knew it would be very difficult to keep a lid on it, and so we wanted to be able to cast the crew knowing that,” Daly tells me. “Insomniac does take on the very difficult challenge of working on multiple games at once, and we've tried to stagger our releases so that the team can help out where they're needed the most while allowing the other projects to proceed efficiently, which is one aspect of it.

“Another big aspect is that, since we're able to focus exclusively on the PS5, build on the technology we develop from game to game to game, and share code behavior and assets, it gives us a real leg up on sort of hitting the ground running with each new project.”

Daly went on to say that, during a game’s early stages, you want a smaller team that can experiment and “feel it out” with enough time and space. Despite being another Marvel superhero game, Logan is so different from Spider-Man that Wolverine was basically like “developing a new IP” for Insomniac, one that the team knew it needed time to get right.

Insomniac Learned From Spider-Man, But Wanted Wolverine To Be Different

Even though Wolverine and Spidey are worlds apart when it comes to gameplay, tone, direction, and pretty much every other element you can think of, that doesn’t mean that Insomniac’s time working on the wall-crawler didn’t help out with Wolverine. Daly notes that one of the bigger lessons learned from Spider-Man is that Insomniac needs to think “character first”.

If you’re expecting to see Wolverine jump around vast environments (which is a surprising number of people, based on all the backlash), you’re probably going to be disappointed. Insomniac understands that the core of Wolverine is combat over exploration and has made a more action-focused game with that in mind. As easy as it would have been to take what worked in Spider-Man and give it a Weapon X coat of paint, that simply isn’t what the team wanted to do.

“You don't start a new game and try and come up with the game mechanics you think will be most fun,” Daly explains. “You have to think of what are the things that are going to fulfil the fantasy of this character, best represent them, best make you feel like them, and then, once you've identified those things, make them as good as possible. So when you look at Spider-Man, it's got a lot of great, fun mechanics. We had to put a lot of those on the shelf because they didn't fit the character, and so in a way, like what we learned from Spider-Man was - let Spider-Man do the things that Spider-Man does. Don't try to do those things.”

Perhaps the best example of this is the jet-setting nature of Wolverine’s story, which sees him travelling from Madripoor and Canada to Tokyo and Telambang. This is in contrast to Spider-Man’s “friendly neighbourhood” schtick that sees him stick to New York City, something that Insomniac wanted to deviate from with Logan.

This design philosophy goes further than just giving Wolverine more locations to explore, though. As Daly points out, Insomniac also kept it in mind for things like the game’s camera, which keeps close to Logan throughout the adventure. As Daly puts it, “to really feel like Wolverine, you need to see the claws penetrate”.

This also plays into Wolverine’s gameplay structure, which is more linear and setpiece-focused than Spider-Man. Daly says the scale of the game was purposeful, as jogging around massive maps as Logan didn’t feel like a true “Wolverine experience”. That being said, my time with the game showed that there are some sections where you’re able to explore and experiment with combat and stealth a bit more.

“Knowing that we had a linear sequence of missions, pacing and variety was really important,” Daly says. “We wanted to have a sequence of missions that give you not necessarily prolonged, constrained set-piece action, but rather snippets of that interspersed with a widening and narrowing of the path and speeding up and slowing down at the pace, like storytelling versus action. These elements ebb and flow over the course of the game in order to keep it engaging the whole time.”

Wolverine Is Fittingly Focused On Combat, And It Went Through "A Lot" Of Changes

With exploration clearly not the focus of the game, that leaves it all up to the combat, which makes a lot of sense considering this is Wolverine we’re talking about. My preview showed that Insomniac has gone all out with fast-paced, bloody, and brutal action that feels very true to the character. Unsurprisingly, Daly tells me that combat was something the team worked on from the start and was making changes to it “more or less to the very end”.

One example that Daly gives me is Wolverine’s healing factor, which the team initially had so you’re constantly regenerating health. Insomniac found that this incentivised avoiding combat and letting yourself recover, slowing the pace down considerably and not really representing Weapon X as a character.

The other core element of combat that changed a lot was Wolverine’s Rage mechanic, which builds up as you kill enemies and has different tiers, including a third level that unlocks instant-kill finishers. The team initially envisioned players being able to activate that third tier à la God of War’s Spartan Rage, but found that didn’t work as well for Wolverine either.

“Rage is not supposed to feel like something you have control over,” Daly tells me. “It just builds and builds until it takes over. And so we found that automatic crossover made you feel more like Wolverine. Another revelation to tie these two threads together was once we tied the healing factor to rage, we found a way to represent this healing factor in combat and make it really important to your decision-making.

“The end result is, if we want you to feel like Wolverine in combat, we want you to be going for it. And by pulling in healing factor and pulling in rage, combining them together to give you that last stand mechanic, we ended up providing this nice spectrum of the rage meter.”

Yes, Marvel's Wolverine Was Inspired By X-Men Origins, Even If There's One Key Difference

It’s a different style of combat for Insomniac, but it’s one that long-time Wolverine fans might find familiar. 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine tie-in game is often considered the character’s best representation in the medium, and has already been compared endlessly to Marvel’s Wolverine. To be fair, there are a lot of similarities between the two, so I was happy to find out that the team did indeed use it as a reference point.

“We were definitely aware of that game, and we took inspiration from it,” Daly confirms. “The reference gathering part of the project had us really looking everywhere, and I think that game did a really fantastic job of asking and answering a lot of the same questions that we asked and answered. Like, how do you represent Wolverine as authentically as possible? I would say rather than we took ideas from the game, it's more like we had the same challenges as those devs and sort of arrived at similar conclusions.”

One thing that Marvel’s Wolverine does quite differently from X-Men Origins is regeneration. While both games see Logan get torn to pieces as he takes damage, Marvel’s Wolverine somewhat controversially has his suits regenerate alongside Logan’s skin, with Insomniac previously explaining that it didn’t want players running around in rags.

Daly tells me that it’s something the team went around in circles about, but that he’s happy with where it ended up even if fans still aren’t convinced. I asked whether Insomniac was considering taking the feedback on board and allowing some options for suit damage and, while nothing was confirmed, Daly did note that the team has listened to fan feedback before.

“I know that on paper, it doesn't sound like exactly what everybody wants, but I do think it strikes the right balance of the character looking good when they need to look good, and taking damage when they need to take damage,” Daly says. “I can say that when people saw the extended gameplay trailer, we did take a look at blood persistence, how quickly it runs off of his suit, and decided to extend it a little bit from there. So you know, we heard people's feedback.”

Online Backlash Is Nothing New For Insomniac, And Daly Wants A Spider-Man Crossover As Much As We Do

While criticising the suit regeneration might be fair, Marvel’s Wolverine and Insomniac have been facing a ton of negativity and complaints that are far less warranted. Everything from the game’s face models to the linear progression has been getting a ton of backlash online in recent weeks, no doubt fuelled by the hot water PlayStation has found itself in.

This certainly isn’t a first for the studio, who has faced the fury of Spider-Man fans multiple times by now, but it is reaching entirely new levels with Wolverine. Insomniac’s community and marketing director recently even called the backlash out as a “relentless onslaught”, showing that the team is sadly aware of what’s going on. Daly has seen the hate too, but doesn’t seem to be taking it to heart.

“It’s something we're pretty used to,” Daly says. “It is a good problem to have where there are so many passionate fans who care about these granular decisions, and we can look back at our experience with Spider-Man and know that we've made a great game that a lot of people love, and despite that, a lot of people find stuff to complain about. I do think that to some degree, it just comes with the territory.

“I rest easy about this, knowing that our goal for the game wasn't necessarily to accomplish these things that people complain about,” he continues. “Our goal really was to focus completely on making the best game for the character. There are a lot of things people look for in games, and we constrained ourselves to say, that's great, but we are really, really, really just focused completely on this character and prioritized that above everything else.”

To end my time with Daly on a lighter note, I asked him something that Marvel fans have been wondering ever since Insomniac was confirmed to be working on Wolverine - is there a chance of a Spider-Man crossover in either game’s future? While Daly was speaking on a personal note, his answer did give me a lot more hope than I was expecting.

“Well, I mean, they are in the same universe”, Daly points out. “Speaking from a fan perspective, and so this is not anything official, I think a crossover would be awesome. But at the same time, I will say there is not a crossover in this game. If the day comes, we want to make sure that that moment has its due.”