IGN: We’ve seen dismemberment in cutscenes, but is there dismemberment in the actual gameplay combat when you're in control, when you're actually pushing buttons, doing combos? Can you cut off someone's arm, their leg? Can you chop off someone's head? I appreciate I sound like a maniac asking this question, but I want to know!
Mike Daly: I mean, you're spot on. We wanted to deliver it in gameplay as well as in cinematics and be consistent in that way. So to the point of not going over the top, it's not like limbs are cartoonishly flying everywhere, but when you do an especially brutal move against an enemy that you've broken down their defenses on, some of the times you can chop off their limbs or do even more violent things to them. So that is part of Logan's combat moveset.
Marcus Smith: The trick for us with the violence was, it doesn't come off gratuitous in the sense that Logan enjoys it, right? It's really an expediency. He's just very efficient, and that might happen during the efficiency of his combat.
IGN: Also in the combat we see what looks like a rage system. There are some meters that you can build up and then you can do something that makes Wolverine go feral. It would be great to get a breakdown of how that works and what you have to do to build that up.
Mike Daly: Yeah, for sure. We knew we needed to represent Logan's rage in combat as a major element of the character. The way that works, the parts of it you see in the gameplay trailer, is when you're engaged in combat, all the moves that you do build up a little bit of rage. Getting kills gives you chunks of rage. And there are some special moves you can do, like the particularly brutal ones, like barraging an enemy who's already opened up, that can build it up even further. So there are ways to build up your rage, and it sort of represents the battle momentum between the enemies and Wolverine.
It comes into play in a few major ways where, as you get towards the middle of the meter, your combos become more powerful. And so, you have an incentive to play more aggressively, because in addition to doing damage faster, the rage starts to decay a little bit. If you work through that and build it up towards the top of the meter, then... you saw him go into this aggressive, really feral tier of rage where he can get kills really quick. He's able to do moves called Critical Strikes, where he just impales enemies with real brute force to take them out quickly. But at that level, his rage also drains very quickly. So there's a strategic aspect of choosing your targets, not worrying about defense, and being as aggressive as possible in order to sustain it and get as many enemies as you can before it runs out.
Now rage is also tied to another essential sort of Logan element of combat, which is his healing factor. When all of Logan's body energy is dedicated to fighting in combat, his healing factor is relatively slow, passively. And our Logan, if he takes enough damage, his healing factor is overloaded, his heart can stop, and that ends his healing. He will die. But if you have enough rage, the adrenaline surge can jumpstart your healing factor and let you do a Healing Surge to get back into battle.
So that's another element that changes the dynamic of combat depending on how much rage you have. At one end of the spectrum, you don't have enough rage to jumpstart your heart and so you're vulnerable. You need to be strategic, you need to be defensive, you need to focus on survival and rage build-up. And then at the opposite end of the spectrum, you need to be super aggressive. You need to focus on doing damage as quick as you can and focusing on the targets that you can kill quickly.
IGN: You say that the way that Wolverine dies in the game is his heart will stop. Fans have debated this for years: how do you actually kill Wolverine? Can he be killed? Even if you chop his head off, can he just grow back? Did you have to think about all of these nitty gritty Wolverine-type things that comic book fans have talked about for years?
Marcus Smith: If you split him down the middle, can you get two Wolverines?
IGN: What a great question!
Mike Daly: But yeah, the serious answer to your question is like, yeah, we think about that! Everybody knows this character to some degree, so early on in development, these questions came up all the time. How can we accurately represent this character when some people see him as truly, literally immortal? And everybody has kind of a different take. I think we have the benefit that his healing factor has taken many different forms over the many different media that he's encountered. And so we had a little bit of leeway to find the best fit for this video game that still was true to the character. And this is the one that we ended up on because basically it makes the game fun, while still giving you a chance to witness this insane regeneration factor up close.
IGN: There's another bit in the gameplay footage where he takes a real beating from a big enemy and you have this sequence where you have to hammer the Square button to heal. That looked different to me than the normal pace of combat where you're managing his health as you're playing as you've been describing. Is that a scripted moment in the game where you will have these sections where you just have to pass through it, or is it more dynamic than that? How exactly does that work?
Mike Daly: The way that works is, you've got your health bar, once it gets drained out, if you've got enough rage left, then Logan's down but he's not out. It's during those moments that you use that button mash sequence to convert your latent adrenaline back into health. So you get a second chance. You can come back, but you're all out of rage so you do not get another one. And how well you do at that sequence determines how much health you come out of the moment with. This can happen lots of different ways, basically just however the enemy takes you down.
IGN: It would be great to talk about the style of gameplay that's on offer and the size and scope of the game. This is obviously very different to Spider-Man. This isn't an explore an open world type of game. The footage I've seen, you have a decent size play space and there's an element of where do I go and how do I do this? And then it expands from there and moves into another section where it's a convoy chase. Is that typical of the entire game experience, or is that a one-off type gameplay experience just for that mission?
Mike Daly: So again, going back to the beginning when we asked ourselves, how do we make the best Wolverine game possible that represents that character? We thought about, Logan's a character who basically travels the world, has traveled the world many times over. He's pulled by a search for his past. He's pushed by a sense of duty. And to that end, we decided that a globe-hopping adventure was the right take for this game. Logan is not a character that's anchored in a particular place and spends a lot of time on it.
So what you can expect out of the game is that we've created a comic book-style pacing, dense story, that's like a rollercoaster and it grips you from beginning to end. And generally speaking, you're driven through all of these missions by important events and plot points that are happening. So in that sense, what you saw in the gameplay trailer was kind of representative. Logan's got a lead, he's got a direction, but he has agency in how he decides to approach it. The areas have different paths you could take. Stealth is optional; you could do it or you could not do it, you could jump straight into combat. And you can poke your nose around the nooks and crannies of the world to find things here and there, and some optional content and collectibles along the way.
We sought to have a large amount of variety in the feel of the different environments that you go to. And so that changes the pacing and the shape of how you navigate space and how you explore. And that leads to different flavors of gameplay as well, where some are more about observation and traversal, some are more about finding characters to interact with, and a lot of them are about stalking enemies and taking them out.
IGN: There's a moment in the footage where Wolverine can see the area that he's about to enter into, see enemies moving about, and then leaps into action. But that isn't necessarily a big sandbox area where there's lots of different things going on and you can make lots of different choices about how you're going about it. Would you say that's a fair assessment?
Mike Daly: Yeah. I can say we did not set out to make an open world game or a sandbox game. What we really wanted was high octane, high intrigue, linear single-player adventure, and the missions reflect that in their structure.
IGN: So that’s why he’s trying to help Leech in the gameplay footage. I assume he’s part of the Morlocks. There’s a moment in the game where Wolverine does a jump and he uses his claws to steady himself as he lands. Is that a thing that just happens, or are you more in control of when the claws come out?
Mike Daly: Things like that are employed at the discretion of our animators generally, where they want to have the most Wolverine emotions and that means utilizing the claws in basically cool, contextual ways. And there are plenty of those flourishes throughout the game. That being said, we know it is fun to have control over Wolverine’s claws. So although you really need them out all the time while you're fighting, if you're outside of combat, you can actually manually pop claws with the triggers and just sort of flick them out, take a look, put them back in. So it's under your control and you get a little haptic feedback. It's pretty cool.
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By Tudoran in forum Carti si Comics
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