Marvel’s Wolverine would’ve still been swept under a rug of utmost secrecy if it hadn’t been for the ransomware hack targeting Insomniac and it’ll forever be a shame that details, however small they end up being, were leaked before the studio ever hoped for the public to see them. Story details are still largely under wraps, though, and that’s for the best since that’s where the meat of Marvel’s Wolverine’s intrigue will be.

There were already expectations about how a modern Wolverine game’s combat might look before such footage was erroneously made public, for instance, but how Insomniac has chosen to depict the feral Canadian will hopefully provide the story’s most paramount moments of mystery. Wolverine is usually a stoic, closed book, but for a feature-length AAA game that will likely last anywhere between 10–25 hours based on the Marvel’s Spider-Man franchise it seems impossible for Insomniac to withhold too many details about his backstory, even if they are merely there to give much-needed context.

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Wolverine’s Mysteriousness Runs Perpendicular to Spider-Man’s Transparency

Wolverine’s backstory is much more ambiguous across interpretations and Marvel’s Wolverine clarifying its own would help cement its story. If Wolverine is going to have a colored suit then it’s likely he has an established history with the X-Men, for example, and it’d be important to hear if Insomniac has chosen to adapt the storyline where an animalistic James Howlett lived among wolves or how his admittance into the Weapon X program came to be.

Meanwhile, Peter Parker’s backstory is far more standard across interpretations and Insomniac’s history for Spider-Man is more concerned with Easter egg references and lore disseminated through backpack collectible world-building. It’s possible Marvel’s Wolverine could take a similarly subtle and supplementary approach to its lore, but there will inherently be more questions asked about Wolverine, his relationships, and where in his life players are meeting him during the events of the game.

It would be superb to see Insomniac’s Wolverine be wholly authentic with nothing predictable about him, but Insomniac will need to illustrate that and hopefully explain how he got to the point he’s at in Marvel’s Wolverine’s narrative. Wolverine’s past involvement with East Asian culture could be rewritten and recontextualized to favor whatever story Insomniac has planned, and how he met the X-Men would be exciting to learn about even if it doesn’t have anything to do with the game’s overarching plot.

Marvel’s Wolverine May Have More Questions to Answer Than Marvel’s Spider-Man

Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 featured flashbacks of a younger Peter, but these sequences were primarily to retroactively establish a friendship between him and Harry Osborn. The Daily Bugle and J. Jonah Jameson flashback, on the other hand, self-indulgently revealed how Peter and the Bugle’s editor-in-chief initially met.

Therefore, it’s not unheard of for Peter’s backstory to be delivered piecemeal and after the fact, while Marvel’s Wolverine will hopefully answer any crucial questions as early as possible. Marvel’s Wolverine can withhold these answers if they’ll somehow be significant to a later reveal or twist, but such questions are important for Insomniac to ask itself so that it doesn’t write Wolverine into an obscure hole and later need to unravel those threads by suddenly having a random character or piece of lore retconned in where no trace of it ever belonged before.

Marvel's Wolverine

Marvel's Wolverine is a third-person action game from Insomniac Games that is set in the same universe as the studio's Spider-Man titles.

Franchise

Marvel

Platform(s)

PS5

Developer(s)

Insomniac Games

Publisher(s)

Sony