A big recent event in the gaming industry would be the leaks from Insomniac Games following the hacker group Rhysida’s ransom threat going unanswered. The Rhysida group stole around 1.67 terabytes of data from Insomniac and released what they had taken today, with one of the bigger leaks being an early gameplay prototype for the upcoming Wolverine game. While the crime of holding data for ransom is a deplorable one, and one we don’t condone, the leaks are very real and the information is now out in the public space.
As shown in the leaked footage, the game is a very early prototype, complete with prompts to inform the developers what sort of animations need to be filled in and what sort of facial expressions Logan should have, there’s even a short storyboard at the end, though more gameplay may have been leaked as well.
The gameplay, what very little of it we can glean from this, seem very inspired by Rocksteady’s Batman Arkham Asylum series, with Logan’s signature animalistic sense of smell being a stand-in for the typical detective vision that accompanies these games. The combat, on the other hand, looks to be a more dynamic gameplay featuring Logan jumping from enemy to enemy, and also featuring a type of rage mode, likely to enhance his damage and healing, there also seems to be a parry system included and all in all, things seem a bit like a character action game, with a controllable camera and combo system as well as what appears to be contextual enemy kills depending on where you deplete their health bar.
We can also take some things regarding the story from this small leak as well. Considering the character’s history and his dialogues in this leak, it seems that Logan is suffering from amnesia, and the game will revolve around recovering his memories, with tracking down classic X-Men enemy Mystique and confronting The Hand ninjas being an important step to this process. We even see Logan recover his iconic Wolverine costume from a locker at the end of the storyboard concept.
Again, it is quite unfortunate that this has been leaked by a malicious hacker group, and it’s terrible that they tried to exploit Insomniac by hanging this date over their heads for money. But all we can do in this situation is make the best of a bad situation, those excited for a Wolverine game can look at the leaks and determine whether or not this is something they’ll be interested in in the future, and hopefully moving forward the industry becomes more insulated against cyber crimes.