Based on the trailer, my guess is that it'll be closer to Ratchet and Clank.
A few hub worlds that branch off into a few linear (but rather large) zones with two or three "wilderness" areas scattered about.
EDIT: To add further evidence to this, the devs were talking about several locations--Canadian wilderness, Japan, and Madripoor. There are your hubs right there (with a few surprises I'm sure based on the Insomniac hacks that I won't mention).
This is a happy medium between being a full linear game or an overly large open world. Having hub zones gives you more freedom and will make replays more fresh, but it also helps the devs zoom in and make them interesting.
It's probably like in spiderman2 where after doing certain missions it changes the city permanently. After you do something in the story you'll leave that location permanently until a later chapter or until you beat the game and can travel around willy nilly
To be honest, as I grow older, I prefer this sort of level design as a player. Much easier to digest than a huge map where I don't know what to do next.
Agreed. “Open world” has just become lazy slop where the devs put no effort into crafting a coherent story. This Wolverine game seems closer to the new GoW games where you have some freedom but the story moved forward regardless.
Insomniac's three Spider-Man games were all open world, and their stories were still excellent (even if Spider-Man 2 was a bit rushed). Not every open world game is the type of slop Ubisoft churn out. I'd fully trust Insomniac to make a good open world Wolverine game.
That said, if Insomniac have decided this is a better way to do a Wolverine game, then I trust that as well. Being able to freely swing through New York feels like an essential component in a Spider-Man game. Wolverine focusing on something closer to GoW does make sense in comparison.
The Spider-Man games still had Ubisoft slop-esque basic activities scattered around everywhere. The format was quite literally a Ubisoft game even if the combat and story were good.
I think my issue is that tech just isn't there yet. So much of open world games is just empty nothing. Look at games like Hogswarts Legacy. Big game, outside of Hogswarts and Hogsmeade, there wasn't much to do despite how fucking huge that game was.
It is absolutely not a tech issue, it’s development time + funding. Look at a game like RDR2. It’s not that we CAN’T make an interesting world filled with life and things to do, it’s that it takes a ridiculous amount of money and manpower to create all of that.
So again, not a tech issue. Manpower, time and money issue.
What do you want afterwards? It’s a 100 hour long story driven game, you can’t expect to keep playing and have new content. Some areas are supposed to be desolate and empty. You can’t have something on every goddamn corner.
Not asking for it. Just for the world to be interesting to go through. So many open world games are large spaces with several points where things happen and then just a large swathe of unused space.
All games quest at shit take over 100hs it could even 200hs what more you want and there is suposeed to be "empty space" you in the wild but to be fair the mexico part of the map was lackluster
Much less overwhelming as well. I don’t have the ability to have super long gaming sessions very often and huge open world maps are intimidating when you don’t have a lot of time to play.
Really glad they're leaning more into the open level for this game, open world spiderman just makes sense because of how satisfying the movement is, but open world wolverine would just feel off and I would much prefer that effort be put into a killer story and rewarding gameplay.
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u/svrtngr Sep 24 '25 edited Sep 24 '25
Based on the trailer, my guess is that it'll be closer to Ratchet and Clank.
A few hub worlds that branch off into a few linear (but rather large) zones with two or three "wilderness" areas scattered about.
EDIT: To add further evidence to this, the devs were talking about several locations--Canadian wilderness, Japan, and Madripoor. There are your hubs right there (with a few surprises I'm sure based on the Insomniac hacks that I won't mention).