Inside Look: Rage

April 28, 2009

Everyone knows about Wolverine’s claws, regeneration and adamantium skeleton. But one of the really defining characteristics of Wolverine is that he is teetering on the verge of losing it, and it’s been a battle for him to keep a check on it. And when he loses it, it’s nasty. When Wolverine goes into a berserker rage, people get all kinds of messed up.

This was something we felt we had to include to really nail his character, and it also gave us the opportunity to let Wolverine do some truly crazy stuff. On the one hand, making a Wolverine game is like a dream come true because he is the ultimate melee badass. On the other hand, he’s only got claws which are short range and not that versatile. The Lunge feature addressed the short-range issue, and Rage really let us do some attacks that are powerful, cool-looking and serve unique tactical purposes in our gameplay mechanics.

Fairly early on, we had the player building Rage during combat; that was the fairly easy part (though, like everything, it went through some iterations until we got the balance right). And we decided to make the control scheme for using them similar to the powers in the X-Men Legends games and Marvel Ultimate Alliance: hold the right trigger and you’ll see onscreen how each face button maps to a different power.

These Fury attacks (which are powered by Rage), though, took some time to pin down. We wanted to do cool and unique moves, and we also wanted them to let Wolverine attack in ways that his standard attacks didn’t. We tried a lot of different moves, and some just didn’t feel right, so we replaced them. Some showed promise, and we built on them. At some point, we just said “screw it” and went totally nuts with them. We set aside any limitations we had and decided to just make them as powerful and useful as possible. That’s when the moves really started to click. They were overpowered, but they were fun as hell. From there, we were able to balance them out but keep the fun factor.

Each attack has a tactical purpose, and we tried to give the player control over them so they felt engaged in it.

The Claw Spin, for instance, can damage lots of enemies around you for relatively small amounts of damage each, but you can keep tapping the attack button to keep it going and steer yourself so you can make sure you’re hitting the guys you want.



The Claw Cyclone does a sequence of radial damages and, likewise, you can aim it and chain it to keep it going and end with a powerful finisher.



The Claw Drill is great for taking down a single tough enemy. And Berserk offers both an offensive and defensive advantage for when you’re in trouble and need to turn the tide of battle.

We also made each Fury Attack upgradeable so that it gets more powerful and cooler as the game goes on – another way the player has control over these special moves.

So it took a while to get it right, but these moves were important to us and, in the end, we think they add a lot to the game. Especially with all the polish put into the moves in terms of animation, camerawork and FX, they’re some of the cooler combat moments in a game literally chock-full of cool combat moments.