Marvel’s Wolverine was revealed during the PlayStation Showcase last week, and it looks pretty decent. It’s only had a short teaser trailer so far, but the general themes shown in that give me faith that the developers know what they’re making and want to keep it close to the source material. Wolverine is a complicated dude, and getting that across in a new way on consoles is going to be rather difficult. I can imagine that creating an original vision was the toughest starting point for any IP. I can’t help but wonder what this game would be like if it had a huge open-world like Marvel’s Spider-Man, so this is what I think could work.
First off, we have to accept that Wolverine is a not going to be zooming around the world with any sort of ability. He’s quite a grounded character, and while he’s agile and has some super levels of strength and jumping, he’s not Spider-Man. Because of this, he needs to either have a constant mode of transport to use, such as a bike or car, or he needs to be able to commandeer cars in the world. This would look similar to GTA 5 in that the characters basically steal the car, and then Wolverine can move to wherever he needs to. Of course, there should be fast travel points such as subway stations, but there needs to be more.
I think Wolverine would be able to climb quite high using his claws. We’ve seen this in all media, so it’s not a stretch for him to have an almost parkour-like running style. I think it would work better if he was more reckless though because he can heal from anything. Having to rely on trains though, that’s going to wear thin very quickly. Due to this, I think the world will need to be a lot more packed with stuff to do, since driving or traversing long distances will be a pain. If Insomniac Games takes a page from the Far Cry book, it could fill out the world with so much stuff that it’s impossible to move around without finding something to do.
