r/videogames • u/Least-Path-2890 • Sep 11 '26

Image / Video Insomniac's Wolverine automatically completes quick time events for the players if they miss them

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434

u/CyberTyrantX1 Sep 11 '26

I really just can’t believe how insulting this is. Insomniac wanted to make a game for adults but used it as an opportunity to treat adults like babies.

84

u/McFlyyouBojo Sep 11 '26

Ive read somewhere that someone at Insomniac said it was Sony's request to dumb things down

119

u/Correct_Gift_9479 Sep 11 '26

Incorrect. I made a good thread under the PS5 subreddit for the game reviews on this subreddit about the development for this game.

Sony echoed current player sentiment, such as viewing the tall grass and detective mode stealth as too derivative, and overutilized. Sony shared helpful feedback to Insomniac but those features still landed into the final game.

Insomniac chose to cut their own ideas, such as claws being controlled by left and right trigger with half pressure and full pressure creating alternate combos, destructable environments (reworked to crates/small breakables), throwing back shurikens lodged in you at the enemy (reworked into a finisher animation), jean gameplay (this was prototyped) and more. Marvel forced them to constantly rewrite the story, but Sony echoed good advice.

89

u/say_Christ_IsLord Sep 11 '26

Claws controlled by triggers sounds so cool, can't believe they cut that down, incredibly unwise

43

u/FondantCritical8017 Sep 11 '26

apparently I read it was changed for "accessibilty", which kind of represents as whole the misguided direction the game took

23

u/say_Christ_IsLord Sep 11 '26

They were cowards after all

16

u/driving_andflying Sep 11 '26

They were cowards after all

Agreed. That's the thing that studios and devs don't seem to understand now: You can't make a game that pleases everyone. And the more they try, the worse it gets.

8

u/say_Christ_IsLord Sep 11 '26 edited Sep 11 '26

they've been having this problems for years, it's incredible they still don't understand, stubborn egotistical babies.

1

u/mex2005 Sep 12 '26

Cowards for what though? Its not like they would get any real pushback if they did go that way and just get more praise than anything.

4

u/say_Christ_IsLord Sep 12 '26

cowards for not taking risks, they prefer to cater to everyone instead of focusing on the fans, a problem this devs have had for years

4

u/round-earth-theory Sep 12 '26

The toxic positivity crowd got in there. Everyone wanted to one up each other on accessibility it seems. How else do you get alert icons on your scent trails.

2

u/Ristray Sep 12 '26

Nah, having accessibility is fine and needed but it needs to be put in a menu that has all the options turned off by default so the majority that can handle things can bypass it entirely.

1

u/MadeForFunHausReddit Sep 16 '26

Damn those arthritis havers for ruining my game /j

1

u/Ok_Dragonfruit_8102 Sep 11 '26

I have mixed feelings on it personally. I hate the idea of things being dumbed down to the lowest common denominator, but then from a person standpoint I have a rare neuromuscular disorder that includes muscle weakness, and I recently got a PS5 and there were parts of Astro's Playroom that used pretty high strength on the adaptive triggers that I just couldn't do, and I googled it and apparently a lot of people even without disabilities say the same thing that the adaptive triggers can cause hand pain. So I can see why they'd choose not to put the primary attack buttons in a 20+ hour game on those triggers, personally.

2

u/Tommytrist Sep 11 '26

Saros has different abilities based on how hard you push down the triggers. It’s fun for about 5 minutes, and then it’s just annoying and painful.

1

u/Strider76239 Sep 11 '26

My right hand has a permanent injury and I can't make all the required hand gestures for some VR titles on the Quest. I'm a very small minority and it doesn't upset me that game mechanics weren't designed for a very small group.

1

u/Ok_Dragonfruit_8102 Sep 11 '26

I didn't say it upset me, I quite explicitly merely said I could understand why they chose to change it for accessibility.

0

u/Correct_Gift_9479 Sep 11 '26

Haha I was the one to define it accessibility, can’t believe about 200K people viewed my thread. Later I clarified it being the fact that the game being M rated needs to stray away from quirky game mechanics. People over 50 have more issues related to motor control, having trouble using the combat buttons would be a PR disaster, with people calling it an ableist game. They tried developing an alternate face button scheme but my guess was incorporating left and right claws on faces proved challenging and they opted to just simplify the scheme.

8

u/newbkid Sep 11 '26

I'm not sure why this conversation keeps devolving into either:

  • We get complicated button presses

OR

  • Handicapped accessibility gameplay.

Why can't we, as the player, have the option to choose

If I want the complicated buttons, as the designers intended, then let me fail! It's okay to fail! And then I can always switch to the accessibility mode if I physically can't do it. These worries of being called 'ableist' are strawman arguments. Nobody is against accessibility and nobody is against interesting control methods.

3

u/Jrock2356 Sep 11 '26

This comment is an indicator of why video games tend to suck nowadays

1

u/fjdklsfjsfgjkdsdsogh Sep 12 '26

Trigger controlled claws yes, pressure sensitive inputs no fucking thank you. Litany of common finger injuries/ deficiencies that would make this feature unplayable aside, being careful to half-squeeze/push a button to properly do combos sounds like a nightmare in a high-speed action game.

2

u/say_Christ_IsLord Sep 12 '26

To keep everyone happy just do a toggle for it, and default without pressure sensitive, everybody enjoys.

1

u/fjdklsfjsfgjkdsdsogh Sep 12 '26

Yea prolly the best way to do it

27

u/Herr_Etiq Sep 11 '26

This is coming from the studio that decided Mary Jane stealth sections is something spider-man fans really want in a game, so im not surprised.

The suits are out of touch, yet again

4

u/dragonwithin15 Sep 12 '26

Am I the p ly one that liked the MJ sequences? Damn.

7

u/PeterMunchlett Sep 12 '26

Mechanically speaking, I actually did enjoy the ones in 2. They just don't at all gel with the narrative for me, given the ease with which she is dispensing goons and symbiotes that are far more mechanically complex for either Spider-Man to take out.

So I don't dislike them as a concept - they serve as a potential avenue of vulnerability for the hero and a means of adding real stakes where there ordinarily may not be. But if you do it, you gotta do it right. It's gotta conform to the logic of the story and gameworld, not the other way around

1

u/Correct_Gift_9479 Sep 11 '26

They were meant to break up the pace but still pretty dumb. Bryan didn’t want to just cave in and get rid of them in SM2 which is respectable, and instead looked into making them more fun which he did by not having a mission fail if you’re spotted, being able to take a few hits and being able to complete missions by running past guards.

People still complained which is my guess to why they cut the very fun Jean Grey missions in Wolverine that were basically finished. Apparently she played exactly like Jesse Faden in Control, so you could psychically move objects, mind control enemies into allies and more

8

u/[deleted] Sep 11 '26

[deleted]

5

u/Count_de_Mits Sep 11 '26

And why the fuck would you cut out playable Jean Grey sectors, in what way is one of the most powerful people in that world comparable to a girl with a taser gun ffs

1

u/eternity_ender Sep 12 '26

Those sections were fun tho.

1

u/carlonia Sep 11 '26

Do you mind sharing that thread? Sounds like a good read

1

u/SexcaliburHorsepower Sep 11 '26

People are shitting on Sony because of their business practices, but it's insane to say that the gameplay as developed by insomniac is reflective of Sony. One of the few good things about working with Sony is that they typically let you make and know how to advise on good games. I'm even seeing people retroactively shit on the entire Spiderman series, even though the first and Miles Morales were extremely well received.

Reddit, of course, is hyper reactive to the point of rewriting history if need be, but Wolverine being bad isn't the result of anything outside of bad game development.

3

u/Correct_Gift_9479 Sep 11 '26

Yeah it's extremely frustrating to be here and have one side being grifters or morons who fall for grifters thinking this game failed because they "went woke" and people are "waking up to the agenda" which is what I'm seeing on my youtube FYP. And reddit/X now claiming that all the Spider-Man games were meh or pushing this false narrative that studio meddling is the cause of their narrative decline. This whole mess is literally just Insomniac's poor management, likely due to the creative shift midway through development.

A game with the largest Sony singleplayer budget (Yeah, Wolverine became more expensive than SM2. Making it the most expensive Sony game in history.), and a 6 year development time having gutted content, poor ray tracing implementation (logan looks like a PS2 mesh in mirrors) an OK story and missing fail QTEs is not Sony's fault.

1

u/Vyxwop Sep 12 '26 edited Sep 12 '26

Yeah it's extremely frustrating to be here and have one side being grifters or morons who fall for grifters thinking this game failed because they "went woke" and people are "waking up to the agenda" which is what I'm seeing on my youtube FYP.

And yet that's how many normal people feel but are too afraid to express.

You make it out to be that these opinions are only held by people who "fell for grifters" when in actuality those "grifters" are likely the only people who feel comfortable enough to even talk about things that people are feeling. Things that people like me have started feeling completely separate from what other people have been saying and can't express on platforms like this one because it's instantly met with extreme hostility and bad faith misrepresentation. Exactly what you're doing right now.

At some point you're going to have to accept the fact that certain design choices result in people feeling a certain way. You trying to pretend this could not possibly be is extremely disingenuous to the point it borders on full on gaslighting and I'm fucking sick of it.

The fact you've even gone so far as to insinuate that studio meddling could not possibly be a thing is fucking ridiculous. Studios and publishers middle in the work of others all the fucking time in order to either push some kind of politics or some kind of design choice.

This shit's going to blow over at some point if you keep trying to shut people up like this. Why do you think actual alt right grifters even manage to get people on their side so fucking easily? It's not because people inherently agree with their politics. It's because any kind of potentially "unsavoury" result of something you agree with is met with instant dismissal and then further stomped down by implying it could not possibly ever happen.

So what the fuck other recourse do people have where they can talk about these things?

1

u/ThorsRake Sep 12 '26

Fuck man. This post alone had me really questioning the purchase but knowing what should have been has me straight out. Waiting of PS Plus for this one now. What absolute morons.

1

u/ThorThulu Sep 12 '26

All those features sound like a blast, fucking insane that they self sabotaged

1

u/MilkOfCows3195 Sep 13 '26

It’d be cool if we can actually see the thread you posted bc you made your post hidden

-2

u/RacoonWithBenefits Sep 11 '26

"sony" makes shitty games

should just let insomniac run their own show

3

u/Correct_Gift_9479 Sep 11 '26

are you stupid? insomniac is the only reason this game was so shit. current player complaints are the same complaints Sony made. This game would’ve been slightly better if they listened to Sony’s criticism

3

u/Dick-Fu Sep 11 '26

Even if that's true, it doesn't really matter when they've been making games for toddlers at best for like 10+ years, depending on how you count it

3

u/CyberTyrantX1 Sep 11 '26 edited Sep 12 '26

To be fair, neither one of the Spider-Man games were anywhere near this bad with the handholding. Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart wasn’t even this bad and that game actually was linear.

2

u/Dick-Fu Sep 11 '26

Yeah I'll agree that Wolverine is looking to be even worse especially with hand holding, but most of their modern have been bare bones simple design

1

u/Competitive_Ad_5937 Sep 15 '26

games for toddlers must be the new meta because the last games they made people loved

funny that if you go outside it all looks different xD

1

u/Dick-Fu Sep 15 '26 edited Sep 15 '26

of course it's the "meta," that's exactly what I was saying. people love toddler games. they always have. or at least have for a long ass time.

3

u/anaknangfilipina Sep 11 '26

So? Just because somebody requested
you to suck their dick doesnt mean you have to honor it. Insomniac just wanted to Sony’s dick is what I’m saying.

1

u/gkfesterton Sep 14 '26

When the 'somebody' requesting is the $140 billion corporation that literally owns you then yeah, you kinda do have to honor it, they don't have a choice.

1

u/FourtyMichaelMichael Sep 11 '26

Second Screen Gaming

1

u/-Nicolai Sep 11 '26

They can push back. You gotta pick your battles, and this is one of the battles you pick.

1

u/XxACxMILANxX Sep 12 '26

Did they tell the same thing to the Ghost developers ? Stop lying and making things up

-1

u/CyberTyrantX1 Sep 11 '26

That wouldn’t surprise me with how Sony has been lately.

3

u/Correct_Gift_9479 Sep 11 '26

Well not true since Sony wanted them to try innovative stealth and puzzle mechanics, so not sure exactly what Insomniac did.

Wolverine would be the 2nd most expensive Sony game in history, behind Concord. Yes, it surpassed SM2 in budget, having a budget of $305M compared to SM2's $315M, but ballooning after a directive change midway through and a delay, and the longest dev time in Insomniac history. Really makes you interested in what happened behind the scenes.

1

u/1337F0x_The_Daft Sep 11 '26

Why does a Wolverine game need stealth and puzzle mechanics? That’s baffling to me

1

u/_shaftpunk Sep 11 '26

Cause he’s a widdle guy who can sneak around.