One of the most striking things about the upcoming Marvel’s Wolverine game is the level of sheer violence in it – something now underlined in a State of Play gameplay trailer aired tonight. While developer Insomniac’s enormously successful Marvel’s Spider-Man series saw its heroes fight in a more family-friendly way, never spilling a drop of blood, here the blood erupts in geysers.
Insomniac’s Wolverine thrusts his claws through torsos and faces and drenches himself in the blood of his enemies. It’s as though the game delights in brutality in the same way a Mortal Kombat does, pulling the camera in close to show savage, scripted animations: Wolverine pounding enemies with blood-spurting body blows or thrusting a fist up under the chin of an opponent with claws extended. There’s so much blood, Wolverine has to shake his blades to flick the dripping viscera from them. Blood and gore are Marvel’s Wolverine.
It’s a jarring departure for the studio famed for the cartoony Ratchet & Clank series and the Marvel’s Spider-Man games, which have appealed to a wider and younger age-range of people. And I’ve no doubt the violence will be a major talking point around Marvel’s Wolverine. So when I had a chance to talk to creative director Marcus Smith and game director Mike Daly recently, I wanted to know whether they were prepared for it.
Marcus Smith begins: “Ultimately we wanted to make the quintessential Wolverine experience, and it would be very, very difficult to do that – with a guy with razor sharp, unbreakable claws as his major interaction with the world – to not delve into blood and violence. It’s a very up-close and visceral experience. It’s also a mature-rated game for that reason. It was behoven to us to remain true to the character – ultimately that’s what we’re trying to do whenever we make a game. We wanted to put players in the webs of Spider-Man, we wanted to put players in the claws of Wolverine, and in order to do that, it was going to get bloody.”
A positive side-effect of Wolverine’s mature rating means freedom to explore more mature narrative themes in the game as well. “We can delve a lot deeper into emotional darkness and ambiguity and conflict and whatnot,” explains Smith, “and for a lot of us that was really exciting to be able to explore areas that we hadn’t been able to do before.”
But there’s an important caveat regarding the game’s violence, and that is you can turn much of it off. Not only can you stop blood spurting everywhere, you can apparently stop limbs being sliced off and even blur fixed camera animations when Wolverine does a clawed uppercut, for example. “I’d be remiss not to mention we do have an accessibility feature that people can turn off the blood if that is a squeamish point to them,” Smith says.
“We can disable the dismemberment and censor the things that can’t otherwise be removed from the game easily” -Mike Daly
Mike Daly explains further: “So one of the main things is turning off dynamic blood. We have a cool system for physics-based blood that flies out and splatters everywhere – it hits the characters, it dilutes in water and all that sort of cool stuff. Turning that off is the low-hanging fruit.
“You also do a lot of other crazy things like dismembering limbs or putting your claws through people’s heads; there are cinematic moments that have high violence in them. And for those things we can disable the dismemberment and censor the things that can’t otherwise be removed from the game easily, so the claws through the face are one of those things that we blur out.”
Aside from the gore, the ability to see Wolverine’s supernatural regeneration happening in real-time before your eyes is another impressive technological feature. As Wolverine fights, he’ll be bloodied and seemingly grievously wounded – huge gashes can appear on his body – but slowly they’ll knit themselves back together. Wolverine the character was a gift for enabling such a system.
“We wanted regional accurate body damage so enemies can get big tears, big chunks, lose parts of their armour, have their suits torn open, and see gashes in their torsos,” Daly says. “The same goes for the hero. And for the hero, we had to take that a step further, because not only does he need to be able to be damaged to a very extreme degree, he also needs to be able to heal that damage before your very eyes.
Attribution
Smith adds: “Something so key to the character that fans really love and appreciate is not that he’s invulnerable and he can just go in and do anything, it’s that he feels every bit of pain that comes with every stab wound, every bullet hole, and he still goes in. That’s what makes him heroic to me, because I stub my toe and I don’t want to go on. But that’s why it was important for us to be able to build in that localised damage state and see him healing up: it’s paramount to the character.”
Note, however, that while Wolverine is borderline invincible – courtesy of his extremely tough adamantium skeleton and regeneration capabilities – he can be killed in this game. But there is a second-life mechanic we see in the latest gameplay trailer that helps bring us back from this.
“If his heart stops because he runs out of health, his healing factor turns off and he will die” -Mike Daly
“In our case, our Logan can die,” Daly says. “If his heart stops because he runs out of health, his healing factor turns off and he will die. But if he’s got enough rage, the adrenaline in his system can reboot his heart and give him a surge of healing to bring him back into the game; so that was that ‘last stand’ moment you saw in the gameplay trailer, where we come in close and focus on the process going through Logan’s body to convert this adrenaline into health. And it’s followed by this vulnerability period of ‘Your rage is gone now; if you go down again, that’s it.'”
Extreme violence and Wolverine, as far as Insomniac is concerned, go hand-in-hand. It’s something the team decided on the moment discussions about the game began. “There wasn’t really too much hand-wringing about it,” Daly says. If a Spider-Man crowd or a Ratchet & Clank crowd doesn’t like it, so be it.
Smith says: “That’s something that we’ve learned through the years. It’s impossible to tell what the audiences are expecting. Really the best way to go about making a game is to be as true to the characters as possible and then players will come to it. If there are people who are not looking forward to that experience, they just won’t play that game.”
But there is more to Wolverine than violence. One of the reasons we’ve returned to the character so much across various forms of media in the 50 years he’s been around is because there’s something in Wolverine – in the human Logan – that we relate to. There’s something in him that allows writers to place Wolverine at the centre of compelling stories.
He is unrelenting and savage and supernaturally strong and tough and able to regenerate, but there’s a person in there too – a troubled person, sure, but a person all the same. “The biggest thing is he’s got a really big heart,” Smith says, “despite the fact that he’s really gruff, that he’s kind of a jerk sometimes to people, even that he loves. It’s all defence mechanisms.”
Daly adds: “Logan’s stories, because he has a big heart, are heartbreaking, and that to us was a very important element to deliver.”
Marvel’s Wolverine will be released 15th September exclusively for PlayStation 5.