Video games should be more like Blood Of Dawnwalker and less like Wolverine – Reader’s Feature

With Marvel’s Wolverine receiving unexpected levels of criticism, a reader wishes more publishers followed the lower budget path of games like The Blood Of Dawnwalker.

There’s been recent questions about whether there’s an internet conspiracy against Marvel’s Wolverine, which is an interesting idea because I do think it’s one of those things that everyone has decided to hate on all at once. I have my own reason for disliking the game, but I think the trolling of it is mostly residual anger about Sony’s no discs annoucement and general attitude lately.

Sony didn’t do the game any favours with the previews, as a lot of the footage looked on the rails. I haven’t played the game though and I don’t imagine I ever will, so I can’t really comment on that. I have nothing against it personally, especially not being a Marvel fan, but I am glad to see that it’s not the automatic hit that Sony expected.

If it’s a deserved hit then fine, I have no problem with it, but all the complaints I read are that it’s very shallow and that despite all the time spent with storytelling that’s not got much depth to it either. In other words, it’s a typical, big budget Western game, especially of the sort Sony used to make.

I read with interest that The Blood Of Dawnwalker cost only $40 million to make and they put it together in three years. That’s hugely impressive considering that’s half the budget of The Witcher 3 over a decade ago, and something like Marvel’s Wolverine must’ve cost around $300 million (based on what Spider-Man 2) cost.

You look at those numbers and I feel like I barely have to say anything. Obviously Dawnwalker doesn’t have as good graphics as Wolverine, although I can’t say I’m particularly impressed by Wolverine’s graphics, as expensive as they look. All the characters’ faces look weird. Jean Grey looks like she could be anywhere from 20 to 40, and I have no idea which it’s supposed to be, and there’s something off about the perpetually dopey look on Wolverine’s face.

That’s beside the point though. My point is that Dawnwalker has a better plot and characters despite the lower budget and worse tech. At the end of the day what makes a story is the script, not the graphics, and for better or worse (worse really) script writers are not paid a lot, so you’re not exactly blowing your budget to get a good one.

All this money and the emphasis is always on the wrong things. Having a big budget seems to trap developers into making only the most shallow and predictable games. After all, the more you spend the more you have to make back and that’s not going to happen unless your game appeals to the widest number of people, i.e. it doesn’t have anything new or interesting in it.

All the comparisons with Wolverine were with games like Devil May Cry and God Of War, except apparently Wolverine is much simpler and therefore much more repetitive. That’s the main reason I have no interest but the game’s whole attitude seem to be to provide as shallow an experience as possible, because that’s all that casual gamers will put up with.

This really annoys me when we’ve seen in the last few months games like Dawnwalker, Star Wars Zero Company, and Onimusha: Way Of The Sword do well. They’re not massively out there, concepts but they are something more than just mash the square button to win.

I feel the games industry has learned absolutely nothing from the success of Elden Ring, which will likely sell more than Wolverine, but is incredibly hard, difficult to get into, and has no kind of story that’s easy to understand.

Why is it that the examples of successful games doing something out of the ordinary are always ignored but the minute something boring and obvious happens, like Fortnite or live service games in general, they get copied again and again, even when it never works. Would it really have hurt to give Wolverine more complex combat and a better story? No, it just would’ve been unexpected and unfortunately that’s not what publishers like Sony think you want.

By reader Magma

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