Claws and Effect: Talking Marvel's Wolverine with Insomniac Games' project director Jess Reiner-Reed
Jess Reiner-Reed is a Senior Project Director at Insomniac Games currently working on Marvel's Wolverine. She has been a part of PlayStation Studios for over 15 years working on multiple franchises including Marvel's Spider-Man and God of War. Jess is a lifelong gamer and a highlight of her career was leading the release of Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales on the PlayStation 5.
She was in New Zealand for the preview day for Marvel's Wolverine and took some time to discuss the game, the expectations and the brilliance of Liam McIntyre's performance as Logan.
You've been working on this for quite a while now since 2020. Is it good to be killing again? Because, I mean, all your titles before have been previously quite family-friendly? Jess: Yeah, you're, you're very correct. When we're working on Spider-Man games, Spider-Man classically doesn't kill and he always has to web enemies to the side of a building or something. Now Wolverine can actually kill enemies,
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It's pretty bloody and pretty gory This is what the Wolverine fans will want. But was there any moments you thought we might need to pull it back a little bit?
We wanted to make sure that it was an authentic Wolverine experience. Once folks heard that we were making Marvel's Wolverine, they immediately go, "are they going to make it teen? Are they going to make it, uh, mature?" We wanted to make it authentic, which he does live in a brutal world. It's going to be violent, but Wolverine is not someone who glorifies violence. He's not doing it just for the fun of it. He's doing it because it, what he has to do. Through development, especially our animation team, they're coming up with a bunch of cool ideas, taking reference from many different places.
And there were some kills that we decided to take out that pushed it a little too far where it started to seem like, is he like playing with this enemy before they die? Is it seem like he's having too much fun? No, Logan's a more like efficient dude. That's just getting in there, getting the job done. So there definitely were times where I felt like, okay, that's not right for this character and not right for this game, so we're going to pull it back a bit.
There are a few scenes as well, where you sense that he is struggling with it. Is morality playing quite a big part in this version of your Wolverine.
Logan was part of Team X, this group that's trying to defend mutants. But at the start of our story, he left Team X abruptly a few years ago for some reasons that you find out through the story. And at the start of our game, he's just coming back to Team X. Even just being back in this setup is a conflict for him morally, of like, "do I want to be working in a group with these people defending mutants?"
Logan is trying to grapple with where does he stand when it comes to the, as you mentioned, the morality of defending mutants versus taking out the enemies.
Where do you start with a story like this? I mean, you mentioned earlier that it's an original story. There's a lot of canon material out there. So how hard is it to come up with a standalone idea and progress that rather than worry that you're going to cross over into areas that you shouldn't need to?
Everybody has these different ideas of Logan. They're like, I remember watching the comics, excuse me, watching the cartoons when I was a kid. Or I only know Logan from the comics, etc.So we couldn't make everybody's Logan. We couldn't. That's too, you'd end up with just an amalgamation of nothing, right?
Same as you couldn't make everyone's Spider-Man really...
Exactly. You have to make, so early on, we worked with Marvel Games and put together like, what are the things that we need to get right? And what are the things that we really want to tell out of this story? We wanted to have an emotional journey that Logan is discovering his mysteries of his past along with the player. They're both figuring things out throughout the course of the game and really have the story mean something.
It's not just a game where you just kill things with claws. There's a whole narrative side of this and really understanding these characters. Long answer to your question is, we early on had to hone in on what's that clear vision of the story? And even when the trailers come out, of course, fans have ideas and they start saying things.
We always have to keep, what's the story we want to tell? And you asked earlier about different kind of moves in the game. We're always going, is this right for the story we're telling today? Because there's so many different things you could add in. You really have to refine it to what's right for the game.
It seems like you've evolved and tweaked the mechanics of combat and Spider-Man. There are a few kind of crossovers in terms of where gunfire is done and fighting stealth, but how did you go about making it uniquely a different vision for this one in terms of the combat?
With Spider-Man, he's more of a gadgets guy and he always has different gadgets and whatnot that he's able to throw out. When we started Wolverine, he has claws. He is not a gadget man, he's not tech guy. So we knew we wanted to nail claw combat. We knew we wanted to get his mutant powers really involved with the gameplay mechanics. Things like his healing factor and enhanced senses. And we went through a lot of play testing to make sure that we got those right. Overall, as long as we have at the end of the day that the player feels like they had some claws and they got that Wolverine fantasy, they get the destruction of the environment and stuff, then we nailed it.
It feels like you've developed two versions of the game with the gameplay settings which allow less gore and less violence. So how does the less violent version of the game differ and how much extra work did that kind of cause?
With accessibility features at Insomniac, we developed those throughout development. So we're not thinking about those at the very end. We worked on those throughout, like as we're making the game and as we're refining the blood and working on the different visual effects, we were working on those accessibility features. So the accessibility features I mentioned where we have the low gore setting, which that's going to turn off any blood sprays during combat. It's also during gameplay and cinematics going to turn off any blood that ends up on the character or ends up on Logan. Logan's clothes still get ripped up, so you can still tell he's been in a tussle, but you won't have blood. And then we also have the option to turn off dismemberment. So Logan with claws, there's some arms that get cut off. I think some legs maybe get cut off. Those can get, you can turn that off if that's, if you're squeamish and that's not your thing. You can also turn off profanity in English only.
Logan, he's a swearing guy.That came in in the end in kind of the last year, because that's when you're refining, finalising all of your VO. And we couldn't mute the swears until we had completed VO. But then afterwards we were looking and going, "wow, he swears a lot." When we signed up to do, everybody's swearing. Sabretooth has quite the mouth on him. I'm so glad we have it for people that want to. I'm glad we, I'm really glad we did that. But that was definitely a new endeavour that I didn't realise until afterwards how many words we signed up to mute!
You mentioned Wolverine there, and Logan and the character. Talk to me about Liam and his performance. Is there just something about Australians that they seem to tap into the Logan aesthetic with Hugh Jackman as well. And Liam, is there something intrinsic to that, that nation that you think they've got?
There's definitely something about Liam!
I'm so glad we have Liam McIntyre as our Wolverine. So Liam is someone who has been so involved in the development the last few years. And for those that don't know Liam, he's a fantastic actor from movies, TVs, and he's done games in the past. He is a charming guy. He's really nice. And he's also super gamer, like he loves video games. Throughout development, he would come to the office, play builds of the game. He would talk to us about like different cool ideas for combat. He would get really excited on the mocap stage and like want to do his own stunts and everything. Liam's just been fantastic to work with. When we were auditioning all the different people for Logan, I think what Liam brought to the table was somebody who wasn't trying to do a fake Wolverine voice. Like he wasn't bringing a character.
He just naturally spoke and has kind of a gruffness, but also the nuance of some emotion we needed. When we did auditions, we didn't tell the actors that it was for Wolverine. It was for like Johnny Knifehands or something, kind of subtly not Wolverine! But there were other actors that came in and they were like, "hi, I'm Johnny," you know, like tough, like kind of silly.
Liam brought a real honesty to the character. I can't imagine any other person playing Logan.
So was that, were those the moments that you feel he really nailed the character and that's when you thought we have our Logan? The voice he brings and being able to show anger, but also show a lot of kind of nuance in his facial expressions.
You've kind of keyed into it, but we did fully scan Liam's face. When we're capturing his performance, we're always getting all of the facial wrinkles and emotions.We scanned his teeth, like that is Liam on there. So I think it'll be pretty weird for him to play the game of himself.
Is this the first of a franchise do you hope for Wolverine? I love working on Marvel games. And right now, fully focused on just getting this one out the door in September.
Playing through, there's a lot more in common with Kratos and with God of War, did you draw on some of those elements from your past as well, the kind of conflict, but the rage and the fighting as well?
I can't say that, I guess, I think our team of developers takes inspiration from a lot of different, obviously all the different media, we're all huge gamers, and I'm sure there's inspiration from a lot of different bits. For me personally, there wasn't anything specific, other than just crafting, like honestly, with any games I've worked on, crafting a great story, married with, wow, this feels really fun to play, which I think the God of War games, I know do, and I get to continue to do that with our Insomniac games.
Can you tell us a bit more about the story, about what we can expect?
Yeah, so as we talked about story-driven adventure, I would say time, gameplay time definitely varies depending on whether you're doing a lot of different optional content. All of the nightmare trials, I can't say how many, but there's quite a few of them to be able to dig into. So I would say gameplay time definitely varies also depending on what kind of difficulty. And the team is still back there tuning, back there being back in the States tuning the game up. I'll be excited to see how peoples' playthroughs go in September.
What have you made of watching some people play? What are the bits that you've picked up that you hadn't expected to see?
Oh yeah, so we do so much playtesting at Insomniac. I've seen quite a few people over the years literally playing through this game. And I think some of the stuff that, are you saying like I'm surprised about, or was that what you were trying to get at?
Yeah, when you see people playing. What do developers make of seeing people actually playing their product?
I think the thing that I always clue in on is when people are making any kind of like emotion, like laughing or kind of smiling, like which parts you're after a combat setup or after like a crazy kill. For me, I love kicking enemies off cliffs with Hold Square. And then exactly like some people, when we do playtests and things, we have a camera that shows their facial expressions. I like seeing what stuff kind of brought them a little spark. Those are my favourite bits.
Are there any that surprised you? Any moments that you thought, I wasn't expecting that kind of connection with it?
Oh, that's interesting. I think some of the, I've seen some bits with the emotional scenes with Jean, which I, you know, I knew those were going to resonate with players. But when you actually, when you see people seeing it for the first time, because I've seen it for years at this point, those are pretty exciting to have people kind of start to uncover the story as a first-time player.
There will be a lot of people wanting to know if they're going to cross over if we're going to see Miles, Peter and maybe Logan at some point, I'm guessing you can't comment on that.
I can, I can. I mean, I love Miles and I love Pete, but there's no crossover in Marvel's Wolverine. They do have a shared universe though. So we're in the 1048. There's some Easter eggs that people may notice, but there's no official crossover.
What are the moments that you're proudest of in the game?
I'm really proud of on the screen. I'm playing through the entire game in my head right now, just so you know. I just played through it last week before I came here. I'm just kind of playing through. Well, before I go into any specifics, I think one thing I am really proud of is that we're able to develop a game that Marvel fans are going to really like, but you don't have to be a Marvel super fan to enjoy this game. That's really important for me. I think for the team as well, is that folks coming into this don't have to have 50 years of prior Logan knowledge. We're going to teach you who these characters are. And if you just want to play an awesome roller coaster adventure, go for it, you're going to have a blast.
Or if you're a Marvel super fan, and you've watched every movie 30 times, you're also going to enjoy it. I'm really proud that we were able to kind of strike that balance. I think the other part I get really excited about are the different locations we got to go to.
After working on Marvel's Spider-Man for many years and being in New York, love it. It was really refreshing to have more organic spaces and talk about like, oh, footsteps in the snow, blood in the snow, you hit a guy into a tree and the snow falls off the tree. Cool. Like, we get to talk about foliage. And like, we had a team go out and take a bunch of pictures of different foliage for photogrammetry to bring that into the game. And also like getting to build up Madripoor and have that be a new, unique location.
I think as a developer, getting to explore some new spots was cool.
We heard you had been talking about a new foliage system you had to put in because of the weight of the characters interacting with the world around them, rather than Spidey being a light and lithe kind of character.
Yeah, exactly. We had technically called them bendy branches, but I don't know if they have a cooler name or something. But yeah, so like if so if Spider-Man is, you know, walking on something, he's very agile, but Logan is, you know, X number 100 pounds.So the branches kind of bend, etc. Yeah. So there's a lot of little bits like that, that kind of layer in to make this new game.
What would be an elevator pitch to people who've never played a game like Logan before?
Marvel's Wolverine is a story-driven rollercoaster adventure where you are going to follow Logan uncovering the mysteries of his past. And you are going to have a blast with claw combat and some other Marvel characters.
And just finally, it seems like the preview allowed us to pick up really on the kind of little moments you talked about. Such as the Trask soldier in one of the earlier fights, who Logan's about to take them all out and you just hear this little voice in the headphone going, "it's okay, I can do this."
It seems like you've put a lot of work into the NPC characters and their interactions with Logan as well.
I'm glad you noticed that. Throughout, I would say we wanted to make sure that the enemies are vocalising based on what's going on with Logan's position and things, because like I mentioned, you can go in stealthy and they're going to react a certain way versus just going in claws blazing type thing. But we also, with our NPCs in Madripoor, we have NPCs speaking different language to have kind of the different fabric of that area.I'm bad at the languages, but I believe it's Malay and Tamil and a few others. So that was cool. That was like a new thing we got to do is layer in different languages.
And also with the Japan location, we worked closely with Sony Japan to make sure that it had some authentic feeling of what it would be like to be in Shinjuku. It does feel like Insomniac's always trying to look to ways to develop what they've already got and push new boundaries as well. Yeah, I would say, I mean, Marvel's Wolverine gets to be an evolution of what we've learned from Spider-Man, whether that's storytelling or tech or gameplay.
That's the fun of game development is we keep figuring out new problems to solve, I guess. Like, okay, what are we going to solve this week? How are we going to figure it out? Cool. How are exit wounds going to work with bullet holes versus getting slashed with a sword? And yeah, every day is a different thing to solve!
Marvel's Wolverine releases exclusively on PlayStation from September 15.
