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While Marvel's Wolverine clearly builds on developer Insomniac's previous Spider-Man games, there's one key area where it's very different: this is not an open-world game. Insomniac has now fully confirmed that Wolverine is a linear game, and that decision is to ensure that the story properly captures Logan's essence.
"We did not set out to make an open world game or a sandbox game," game director Mike Daly tells IGN. "What we really wanted was high octane, high intrigue, linear single-player adventure, and the missions reflect that in their structure."
I think that's a very good thing. The Marvel's Spider-Man games are excellent in part because of their open worlds, as getting to explore the digital New York City makes it feel more real, and Spider-Man's speedy web-slinging makes the checklists breezy and entertaining to complete. But not every AAA game needs to offer an open world, and doing it here wouldn't really serve Wolverine's character.
"Going back to the beginning when we asked ourselves, how do we make the best Wolverine game possible that represents that character?" Daly muses. "We thought about, Logan's a character who basically travels the world, has traveled the world many times over. 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."
Daly adds that the trailer we saw at PlayStation State of Play is "representative" of the pacing of the action in the full game. "Logan's got a lead, he's got a direction, but he has agency in how he decides to approach it," the director explains. As we see in the video, you'll have the option of whether or not to engage in stealth, and perhaps some different ways to approach a given encounter, as well as "some optional content and collectibles along the way."
The devs are also making sure that there are "different flavors of gameplay" along the way, too, 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."
Spider-Man's open world made sense, since he's a character known for sticking to one place and becoming a part of its identity. For Wolverine, who we more often than not see on the road, rambling from place to place, sticking him on a roller coaster feels a lot more natural.
