Marvel's Wolverine Director Is Fine With the Backlash, Actually
Mike Daly says criticism 'comes with the territory' after extended gameplay footage drew comparisons to Ben 10 and X-Men Origins. Insomniac's focus stays on making the best game for the character.
The Internet Found Something to Complain About. Insomniac Is Okay With That.
If you have spent more than five minutes on gaming Twitter, you know how this goes. A studio drops new footage. The footage is picked apart frame by frame. Comparisons are made to games from 2007. Someone brings up Ben 10.
That is more or less exactly what happened this week after Insomniac Games shared extended gameplay footage of Marvel’s Wolverine, the studio’s upcoming PS5 exclusive. The showcase covered story beats, character interactions, traversal, combat, and a boss fight against a Sentinel. The internet got to work immediately.
Speaking with TheGamer in the wake of the response, game director Mike Daly was, by all accounts, pretty relaxed about the whole thing. He said Insomniac is “pretty used to” these kinds of reactions, calling it a “good problem to have” and noting that such criticism “comes with the territory” when you are building a game around characters people have loved for decades. He added that knowing the studio can make a “great game that a lot of people love” does not stop critics from “finding stuff to complain about.”
“I rest easy about this, knowing that our goal for the game wasn’t necessarily to accomplish these things that people complain about,” Daly told TheGamer. “Our goal really was to focus completely on making the best game for the character.”
So What Exactly Set Everyone Off?
A few things stacked up to create the pile-on. The first was a red scent trail Logan uses to track enemies, which commenters immediately framed as yet another form of hand-holding navigation, drawing obvious parallels to the yellow paint controversy that has dogged action and adventure games in recent years. The second was a contentious exchange between Wolverine and Sabertooth, where the voice acting drew pointed criticism online. Several viral posts mocked the delivery with video comparisons that did not flatter the game.
The Sentinel boss fight, though, became the loudest flashpoint. One widely shared tweet compared the brawl to a boss encounter in Ben 10: Protector of Earth, the 2007 PS2 tie-in game. Another noted that the fight felt less inventive than a similar sequence in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which came out in 2009, calling out the 17-year age gap in a way that was clearly not meant as a compliment. As reported by IGN, these posts racked up significant engagement and kept the conversation negative for several days.
What Insomniac Actually Said
Daly’s response lands somewhere between philosophical and pointed. Framing backlash as a sign of investment from a passionate audience is a reasonable position, and Insomniac has the receipts to back up some confidence here. The studio’s track record with Marvel’s Spider-Man and its sequel earned them a substantial amount of goodwill, even if that goodwill apparently does not extend immunity to Sentinel boss fight discourse.
The “good problem to have” framing is a little risky, though. It reads as breezy in a way that might not land perfectly with players who feel their specific concerns are being waved away rather than heard. Whether those concerns reflect genuine design issues or just the predictable physics of internet hyperbole is something only the finished game will settle.
For what it’s worth, IGN sat down with the Insomniac team for an extensive interview covering combat, hardware performance, and more. And according to IGN’s Mitchell Saltzman, a hands-on session with the game left the publication with a mostly positive impression. The distance between a viral comparison tweet and an actual hour of play tends to be significant, which is probably part of what Daly is counting on.
Why is Marvel's Wolverine gameplay getting criticized online?
Extended gameplay footage revealed this week drew criticism for several reasons: a red scent trail guiding players through levels drew comparisons to the much-debated yellow paint used in modern games, the voice acting in a scene between Wolverine and Sabertooth rubbed many viewers the wrong way, and a Sentinel boss fight was unfavorably compared to similar encounters in the 2007 PS2 game Ben 10: Protector of Earth and the 2009 X-Men Origins: Wolverine game.
How did Wolverine director Mike Daly respond to the backlash?
Speaking with TheGamer, Daly said Insomniac is 'pretty used to' these kinds of responses and called it a 'good problem to have' that 'comes with the territory' when making games based on beloved superhero characters. He said the studio's goal was always to make the best game for the character, not to satisfy every complaint.
What did IGN think of Marvel's Wolverine gameplay?
According to the article, IGN's hands-on time with the game left them with a mostly positive impression, in contrast to the general negative reaction online.