Marvel's Wolverine will make sure squeamish players never have to see blood and gore: "We don't want to surprise anyone"

Story-driven action-adventure games have a special place in my gaming time, because my wife and I have been bonding over them for years. What started as a desire to show her why I was so obsessed with Metal Gear Solid eventually became a couples' tradition, where she'd sit in and we'd enjoy the twists and turns of games like Uncharted and Yakuza together. When Insomniac announced Marvel's Wolverine, I instantly figured it'd be perfect for our gaming time together.

That thought was instantly wiped away when I saw how violent Wolverine is going to be. I can't blame Insomniac for wanting to be true to the character's violent lore, but my partner has an intense blood phobia. Even a quick glimpse of the goopy gore that permeates the game's trailers would likely be enough to push her to the edge of a panic attack.

So when Insomniac announced that it was introducing a new accessibility option for Wolverine which will allow you to toggle off blood and gore, my interest was more than academic. Alongside my hands-on time with Marvel's Wolverine, I had to get the developers' insights into implementing this option and finding new ways to cater to players – and watchers – with diverse needs.

What I do isn't very nice

While I don't have direct access to the violence options in my hands-on, creative director Marcus Smith demonstrates them ahead of my demo. "Yes, we are making a Wolverine game," he says. "Yes, it is extremely bloody. But we also understand that not everybody has the same level of squeamishness where it comes to blood. So we have settings where you can disable blood, disable gore, disable [dismemberment]."

He shows a screenshot of a character on the wrong end of Wolverine's claws. This enemy soldier is spattered with blood, with gore shooting absurdly from the spots where you'd expect. In the next screenshot, everything's the same – all the visual and emotional content is there – but the red stuff is gone. It's not a haphazard edit. It genuinely looks like a version of the game that was targeting a T for Teen rating from the start. There are other content toggles, too, like an option to turn off profanity if you simply want to make the game's dialog a bit more family friendly.

Offering these kinds of options is a big technical challenge since the gore itself is built from "a very complex set of systems," according to head of technology Mike Fitzgerald. "The way it affects characters is one thing. The way it affects environments is another thing. The way it sprays out of the characters is another thing. A lot of cinematics have custom authored blood that's independent [to what] someone very carefully painted onto a character or object. Finding all those places, making them all relate into the accessibility system the right way, took quite a bit of work, effort, and testing."

No surprises

When I first heard about these sorts of accessibility options, my instant fear was that not every edge case would be accounted for. There are, after all, cutscenes where characters get beheaded, or we see Wolverine get shredded to the bone by gunfire. In cases like those, the game simply blurs out scenes with content you don't want to see.

People like my wife have "a real reaction to that stuff," Fitzgerald acknowledges. "We don't want to surprise anyone with it when they think they have it turned off."

A part of me does wonder if these gracious nods to accessibility might undercut something of the game's bite. "The tone of this game is a bit darker, more mature than recent Insomniac games," Smith says, "and the reason for that is because we need to stay true to these characters. They have lived long and complex lives, and the only way to represent them with authenticity is to do so unflinchingly." Is a blood toggle a flinch?

"Wolverine is a brutal character," senior project director Jess Reiner-Reed acknowledges. "That's a part of the DNA of Wolverine. It is rated mature as far as topics, and as you mentioned, as far as violence, but Logan is not somebody who is ever glorifying violence. He's not cutting up people for violence' sake. He's doing it because he got into some situation. He has to defend somebody who can't defend themselves. He has to fight [against] injustice."

That distinction, I think, is why letting people play a substantially less violent version of Wolverine makes sense, even within the themes of the character. This Logan lives in a brutal world, yes, but his own brutality exists as a shield to protect others from having to endure the same hardships. And personally? I'm just glad my time playing Wolverine won't be as lonely as I feared.

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