by Insomniac Games has spent the better part of a console generation building superhero traversal systems around a character who barely touches the ground. Marvel's Wolverine asks the studio to do something close to the opposite. Where Spider-Man is light and agile, Logan is, in the words of Insomniac's Mike Fitzgerald, "a berserker cannonball", someone who needs to "run through things and cause damage." That pivot cascaded into almost every technical decision the Wolverine development team made, from the character model itself to the way the engine handles blood, foliage and streaming.
It starts at the surface of the character. Rather than approximating Wolverine's wear and tear with texture work, the studio is pushing actual geometry. "It's not just shader faking," Fitzgerald says. "We're actually doing geometric changes to the character, so you really see and feel that on Wolverine." It's a meaningful increase in cost per frame for a single asset, and it signals where the studio decided to spend its budget this generation: on the thing the player is looking at for the entire game.
Destruction is the second pillar. Spider-Man had crates to throw and scattered breakables, but Wolverine treats the environment as a consumable resource. "We have a ton more breakable objects. They're all pre-fractured and authored in creative ways and tied into visual effects and audio," Fitzgerald explains. Break a spice merchant's cart in a market, and you get a bespoke VFX response. Crucially, the debris isn't canned: objects "inherit velocity and motion from the way you hit them and the direction you hit them," producing a "fun destruction playground." The goal is to fight through a big encounter and then "look back on the destruction and mess that you left behind." The team cites Astro Bot as an influence on that physics-toy sensibility.
On PS5 Pro, the headline gains come from two directions. The first is PSSR. "It brings a really nice sharp and clear picture to the game as you're playing", Fitzgerald says. The second is a Fidelity Pro mode that leans on the Pro's extra ray tracing throughput. Reflections move up to full screen resolution rather than the reduced buffer used elsewhere, ambient occlusion is resolved with rays rather than screen space to avoid artefacts, and the mode adds "little bounces of [global illumination] around the space that can bring touches of realism", affecting where lights are and how light bounces off materials.
What's notable is where those reflections pay off. RT reflections make perfect sense for Spider-Man's shiny New York skyscrapers and rain-slick streets, and they still work in the urban sections of Wolverine. But the studio found the benefit extended further than expected in the wilderness. Specular highlights in water and wet vegetation behaving correctly "brings a lot to the groundedness of the scene."
The most interesting technical choice is what Insomniac decided not to include. In short, the firm ruled out real-time global illumination, because the base PS5 used by a majority of players had to hold "a really, really clean" 60fps, while carrying the full suite of Spider-Man's Fidelity mode features plus Wolverine's upgraded character tech. "We didn't feel like real-time GI was going to be the best investment of the limited GPU power that we had," Fitzgerald says. That budget went instead into revisited skin and eye shaders, blood rendering, greater environment density and far more dynamic foliage - the team was "thinking more about the game features that would pay off for a Wolverine game and the Wolverine character more so than a generalised piece of rendering tech."
Blood is where that reallocation is most visible, and it has its own bespoke system. Conventional flip books and sprays "all felt transient," Fitzgerald says, which clashed with the comic-book lineage the team was drawing on - including the Black, White and Blood anthologies where red is the only colour on the page. The answer is a system Insomniac calls particle-based fluids, and it runs from authoring through to runtime. VFX artists build a full offline fluid simulation in Houdini - "a big arcing cut of blood, it might not be realistic, but like a comic book" - and the game plays that detailed simulation back before releasing the particles into the physics world. From there they are genuinely simulated: "they fly through the world, they're affected by wind, they can hit things and land on things." Droplets that hit a wall drip down it; droplets that land on ground produce the spray pattern naturally, "maybe stretched out a bit"; droplets that hit Logan stay with him; droplets that land in water or snow diffuse. The point isn't gore for its own sake. "It gives you a bit more sense of consequence to what you're doing. You don't play through an area and then it looks pristine afterwards. It's a mess that you made."
Moving from Manhattan to Canadian forest and Madripoor forced a second round of engine work, and Fitzgerald frames it as an authoring problem as much as a rendering one: "It's not just about how you render them, it's about how you author them. We wanted to make it easy for our team to sculpt rivers and shape a forest." Even then, something was off - it "was all looking nice, especially in screenshots, but when you played the game, it all felt a bit too static." The fix was to rig the vegetation. Trees and bushes became "animatable series of branches and trunks and branches and leaves," each element responding independently to wind and to the player pushing through it. Elsewhere the team leaned on procedural generation and baked lighting for scale: the motorcycle sequence past a Trask convoy is, in engine terms, "an extremely long road with a lot of forest around it, with a lot of road geometry that was procedurally built and placed."
The last piece is streaming, and it's a direct dividend from Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. The portal tech developed there resurfaces as Wolverine's nightmare doors - "you sort of go from a forest into this cabin, or city into this cabin" - but Fitzgerald is prouder of the fact that there are no real loading times, letting players "live in the game and that world, and just not be thinking about the gaminess of what's going on behind it." And there is still headroom left. "In some ways we're six years into the console generation. In some ways we're only six years into figuring out the best way to use the hardware," he says, pointing to engine staff with demoscene backgrounds who still extract new tricks from 1980s silicon.
If you want the small detail that makes the case, look at the collectible whiskey bottles in Madripoor's Princess Bar, where tech artists sweated the reflection and refraction of the liquid: "It's actually pretty convincing when he's holding a bottle and there's liquid sloshing inside. He can take a drink and there's less when he puts it back down." It's not the first time that we've seen that sort of tech - Grand Theft Auto 6 and Half-Life Alyx both come to mind as being examples of eye-catching drink simulation - but it's emblematic of the effort that Insomniac has gone to with Marvel's Wolverine. Sometimes, it's not about reinventing the wheel, it's about ensuring a smooth ride - and that is very much the feeling here.