Marvel’s Wolverine developer Insomniac has clarified the game will be “fully playable” on disc when it releases for PlayStation 5 on 15th September. It won’t, in other words, be a disc-in-a-box that still requires you to download the game in order to play. This may make it one of PlayStation’s last fully disc-based games.
“Marvel’s Wolverine will come out in digital and physical [versions] and the game will be fully playable on the disc when you purchase it,” senior project director Jess Reiner-Reed told Eurogamer at a Marvel’s Wolverine preview event – our preview from which you can read now.
“With that said,” Reiner-Reed added, “we want people or encourage people to download that day-one patch because we are right now working on – or we’re continuing over the next few months before release – to work on polish and some bug fixing.”
“I would say we’re perfectionists,” head of technology Mike Fitzgerald went on to say. “We take every minute we can get to just tweak this little thing, make everything a little bit better – we’re gonna squeeze as much out of it as we can. And so if players download that patch, they get that little bit of extra time.”
Controversy around disc-based releases arose when Insomniac owner Sony announced it would stop producing discs for games from January 2028. It’s a move that will kill-off second-hand sales for new games, make disc drives redundant and therefore extinct, and it means Sony will have a near monopoly on game pricing on their digital stores. “This is all about control,” industry experts told us of Sony’s move when it was announced.
As such, it’s a decision that’s been met with a fierce backlash, resulting in petitions and protests. Even Insomniac, which has already clarified that Marvel’s Wolverine will come on a disc, has felt the residual effects of it, as cinematic trailers for the game are swarmed by people unhappy with Sony’s decision.
Our reporter at the Wolverine preview event, Emma Kent, asked Insomniac how it felt about this but was steered back to talking about the game. “Today we just want to focus on the game,” Mike Fitzgerald said. “We have been working on this for so long, we’re so excited to have everyone in the office getting to spend time with the game, and I want to make sure we spend time talking about that.”
Marvel’s Wolverine deviates somewhat from the template Insomniac used for its Spider-Man games in that it’s a much more linear experience – there’s no city or hub area to explore – and it’s much more violent. Given the superhero involved, the angry and stabby Wolverine, Insomniac said it needed to be. The studio has also explained in the past that while characters like Wolverine and Jean Grey feature – as does Spider-Man to a degree – the X-Men themselves do not exist in this interpretation.
It’ll be interesting to see whether the new approach works for Insomniac, especially in light of the resurgent success of its Spider-Man series after Spider-Man: Brand New Day’s tremendous box office success.
