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Insomniac Games says the X-Men don't exist in Marvel's Wolverine since mutants aren't safe in this world
Narrative director Walt Williams says mutants are outsiders, and Logan's POV is the perfect fit for this story
Williams says, "We wanted to bring players back to that mindset of that these are characters who exist on the outside"
Insomniac Games has finally explained why the X-Men don't exist in Marvel's Wolverine , and it's all about telling a story where mutants aren't safe.
In the upcoming superhero game, Logan, aka Wolverine, is a former member of the mutant black ops unit, Team X, which also includes Sabretooth and Mystique, meaning the X-Men haven't been established in this world.
"So Team X is canonical. It is Logan's first team in his history," narrative director Walt Williams said in an interview with IGN . "It was a black ops team from the '70s made up of wetworks mutant workers. So in telling Wolverine's story, we wanted to bring it back to the beginning of where his story really began in that long string of teams. Because as we know, he's been a member of many teams by this point in his 50-plus year history.
"But really what we were looking to do is, because superheroes have become so mainstream at this point in just pop culture and everything through TV shows, comics, movies, and everything, that even especially with our own Spider-Man games, these are characters with superpowers that a lot of the world has accepted, that they are celebrated. They have parades, they are honored and stuff. But mutants at the core are outsiders, even within the Marvel universe. And we have not really had that aspect of them be brought out a lot lately in the stories that we get in the bigger mainstream."
According to Williams, the studio wanted to tell a story where mutants are still outsiders and don't have a safe place to go, such as the X-Mansion. Logan's point of view, he explained, is the "perfect" way to get that across to the player.
"We wanted to bring players back to that mindset of that these are characters who exist on the outside," he continued. "They are not superheroes. They don't have a safe space. They are people who are living in shadow. They are people who are hiding their powers from the world because they are afraid of what would happen if people would discover them.
"And so if we had started this story with the X-Men in existence, there would already be that aspect of a safe place for them. And we wanted to remind people that existence for a mutant is not safe. It's hard. It's scary. And entering that world through Logan, it really felt like the best POV possible."
Williams goes on to describe Logan as an "incredibly complex, layered character that has so much potential to write," but he's also "an outsider's outsider," even among other mutants.
"He was that perfect POV for us to be able to enter into that mutant world and begin to understand just how much mutants do not feel as if they belong anywhere," he said.
Marvel's Wolverine launches exclusively on PS5 on September 16, and its Performance Mode will run at 60 frames-per-second (fps) with ray tracing enabled on the base PlayStation 5 .
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