Players will soon be able to sink their claws into Marvel’s Wolverine when it comes to PS5 on September 15. Ahead of its release, we had the chance to meet with part of the creative team behind the claws – Marcus Smith (creative director), Mike Daly (game director), Grant Hollis (senior art director), Brian Wyser (senior animation director), and Walt Williams (narrative director) — to learn more about crafting Wolverine’s final design, choosing which allies, foes and locations to feature, and how they knew they captured Logan’s essence.
PlayStation: Insomniac has built this incredible reputation for comic book adaptations. Your version of Spider-Man, both Miles and Peter, has become iconic in its own way. What was it like to start that process over again for another character?
Marcus Smith: Exciting, honestly. Very exciting. When you have to craft a player experience, it means going back to the drawing board and redefining what the character is, how we can be true to that character. And what we recognized very early on was Peter Parker and Miles Morales are very different than Logan. Every decision that we made after deciding what was key to Logan took us down a different road that deviated from Spider-Man. So, while Spider-Man is an open-world game, he’s so tied to New York, with Wolverine everything is closer, more visceral, more contact with the world, more grounded.
What would you say is essential for designing Wolverine? What did you have to get right?
Grant Hollis: The claws, and therefore the combat. He’s a reluctant hero that will get the job done by any means necessary. And so, for us, both in the visuals and in the animation, it was figuring out what does it mean to be Wolverine. From a visual standpoint, we were like, “Okay, Logan is a tank. He’s a little messier, he’s a little clumsier, he’ll break more stuff.” So that was all what we did on the art: blood, destruction, damage. Damage to you, damage to the enemies. Getting all of that was really important.
Walt Williams: One of the great things about working on the story is that we had a fantastic actor, Liam McIntyre, who was our Logan. Crafting our version of Logan through him in lockstep and collaboration was such a key part to this. He has such an amazing range to be able to express the ferocity and the animalistic rage of Logan, but also, he can be such a gentle, kind soul. Which is really, I think, the most interesting thing about this character. There’s such a duality to him. The rage and the anger come from this deep well of emotional feeling.
I thought it was interesting in the [hands on preview], the moments where his rage lets loose seem to be driven by his humanity, where he’s really grounded in his feelings.
Smith: Absolutely. I think it was really important that this is a guy who has been dedicating his life being on Team X to protect mutants, and then seeing that mutants are being treated like science experiments and tossed away. That’s going to have an effect. That’s where he’s going to go crazy, seeing those that he would try to p