A new retrospective built from material exposed in the 2023 Insomniac Games hack has laid out a long list of ideas that were reportedly tested, argued over, and dropped during the making of Marvel’s Wolverine.
The headline item: a crossbow.
According to the retrospective, Sony gave feedback that Wolverine’s combat needed more variety and that Logan needed some way to deal with enemies at a distance. Insomniac reportedly spent real development time prototyping a crossbow, possibly tied to crafting, while knowing full well it would be divisive.
Marvel then shot it down. The verdict was reportedly simple: it didn’t fit the character.
The studio is said to have solved the same problem another way: a powerful leaping attack that lets Logan close the gap fast and drag ranged enemies back into melee. That mechanic has shown up in more recent footage.
Each claw had its own trigger
The strangest reported prototype involved the DualSense. L2 and R2 were mapped to Wolverine’s left and right arms, so each trigger swung a different set of claws.
The adaptive triggers reportedly used pressure levels too. A half press did one thing, a full press did something heavier. Descriptions differ on the exact mapping, with some accounts linking half presses to punches and full presses to claws.
People who claim to have played that build said Logan could also retract and deploy his claws mid-fight, mixing fists and blades.
Early testers reportedly complained the triggers felt too slow and stiff for Wolverine’s speed. The team lowered the resistance and internal feedback improved, but the system was eventually replaced by a standard face-button light and heavy attack setup.
No official reason has been given. The retrospective points to a mix of factors: mainstream appeal, hand fatigue during long melee fights, the difficulty of telling half and full pulls apart at speed, and accessibility concerns.
Open zones and a “cut anything” plan
Early builds reportedly featured open or semi-open areas, district-style hubs and self-contained sandbox spaces that Logan could explore before pushing the story forward. Recent previews describe a much more linear, mission-based game. Whether every explorable space is gone hasn’t been confirmed.
Early planning also included a broad “cut anything” philosophy, letting adamantium slice through walls, buildings, and props. Leaked footage reportedly showed characters smashing through apartment walls. That appears to have been scaled back to controlled, designed destruction.
Sony reportedly also criticized Wolverine’s scent-tracking mode as too close to the “detective vision” seen in dozens of other games, with tall-grass stealth getting similar notes as far back as 2021. One enemy concept had cloaked opponents that could only be tracked by smell.
Nightcrawler and Jubilee were on the list
Early story work reportedly considered Nightcrawler or Jubilee as Logan’s guide during the Madripoor section. Marvel apparently didn’t want big X-Men names introduced only to be stuck in a small chunk of the game. The role reportedly went to Tyger Tiger instead, who is far more tied to Madripoor in the comics.
Spoiler warning for scrapped story content: one early story summit entry described a Lady Gorgon boss fight where she stabs Logan with the Muramasa blade. The wound triggers a playable flashback revealing Logan had obtained the sword to kill himself, before a character named Essex talked him out of it. The fight then returns to the present with Jean forced to choose between killing Gorgon and saving a bleeding Logan. That arc is believed to have been cut.
Other details include a late-2023 internal target of roughly 15 missions and a 15-hour campaign, a scrapped Wolverine teaser for Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, and placeholder assets borrowed from other PlayStation studios, including a bear model linked to God of War Ragnarök and Bend Studio material used to block out a forest.
The material is years old and mixes meeting notes, brainstorms, and playable code. A note on a whiteboard isn’t a feature, and none of it was ever announced. Neither Insomniac, Sony, nor Marvel has commented.
