Insomniac May Skip Marvel's Wolverine Sequel for X-Men Game

Ever since Marvel's Wolverine hit shelves, you've probably seen the same question floating around everywhere: is Wolverine 2 actually going to happen? Between the story beats that clearly set up Apocalypse, hints at a possible Jean Grey game, and an obvious runway to a bigger X-Men story, there's a lot to unpack, and it's worth looking at from more than one angle.

If you're the type of player who just picks up a game and plays it without thinking about sales charts or review scores, you probably don't care whether Marvel's Wolverine moves six million copies or fifteen million. That's a fair way to enjoy games, honestly.

The business side of things still matters, because it shapes whether you ever get a sequel at all.

This release got a mixed critical reception at launch, and that reputation has stuck. It's a real factor in whether Insomniac gets to continue the story; publishers weigh that kind of reception when deciding on sequels, whether fans like it or not.

Here's a take that might rub some people the wrong way: a direct Wolverine 2 probably isn't coming. Given how long modern game development takes, and knowing there's already a planned X-Men project sitting on the horizon, it makes far more sense for Insomniac to funnel everything into that instead of building out a second standalone entry first.

You can frame the game's rocky road however you want. There was turmoil during development, leaked footage, key people leaving the project, and content that got scrapped before launch. Jean Grey was originally supposed to be a fully playable character, and that never made it into the final release.

Looking back, you could still call this a solid standalone effort, even years from now, and appreciate what it pulled off despite everything working against it. There's still room for smaller additions too, like a Jean Grey-focused piece of DLC that lets her get more time in the spotlight without needing a whole new game built around her.

None of this means Insomniac should never revisit Wolverine as his own character again.

If they eventually want to make a true sequel, nothing is stopping them. But you also have to think about the bigger picture in the games industry right now. A project like this arguably didn't need five or six years in development. Something closer to three years would have kept the budget down and eased a lot of the pressure that built up around the release.

Even if the final product ended up being identical, a shorter development window and a more modest budget would have framed the whole thing in a much better light from the start. So the more realistic outcome is that you accept this one as a good enough effort and lean on the old idea that Logan will always return eventually. That doesn't mean abandoning these characters.

The bond between Logan and Jean is genuinely the emotional core of the game, and it's handled well even when the pacing loses track of it here and there. These two have a history spanning decades of story, and fate keeps pulling them back toward each other no matter what happens.

Jean comes back from the ashes again and again, and Logan has had to make impossible choices involving her more than once, yet they always find their way back. That dynamic works, and it's a big reason people connected with the game.

On top of that, actually playing as Wolverine feels great from a pure gameplay standpoint.

Liam McIntyre's voice performance as Logan deserves a lot of credit here, and it would be a shame to lose that if the character gets folded into a larger ensemble cast. Ideally, whatever comes next finds a way to keep him involved.

That brings up the bigger question of what an eventual X-Men game should even look like. Instead of a sprawling multiplayer structure or a co-op format where you're constantly jumping between characters, a tighter, linear approach similar to Marvel's Wolverine would probably work better, with more variety in pacing from scene to scene.

One idea worth considering is shifting perspectives between characters throughout the story, almost like the structure used in Until Dawn, where characters can face real danger without necessarily being locked into a single permanent fate. Wrap that around a full Marvel superhero action framework, and you've got an easy way to keep both Jean and Logan front and center while also bringing Sabretooth and Apocalypse back into play.

Apocalypse fits naturally as the primary antagonist, Sabretooth works well as more of an enforcer figure underneath him, and characters like Magneto or Professor X could be introduced later by jumping the timeline forward a few years.

Timing is actually one of the biggest reasons a direct Wolverine 2 probably doesn't happen before an X-Men game.

Based on Insomniac's known release pipeline, jumping straight into a true sequel and then circling back to an X-Men project afterward pushes things out toward 2030, 2032, or even 2033. Going the other direction, tackling X-Men first and saving a numbered sequel for later, still lands you somewhere around 2033 by the time everything is factored in.

That's a massive gap either way, and it raises real questions about long-term sales performance too. This game reportedly needed to clear a six-million threshold tied to licensing terms just to hit a baseline expectation, and for Insomniac to call it a true hit, something closer to ten million copies feels like the real target.

Early numbers looked promising, but long-term legs determine whether a game gets remembered as a success. Going the X-Men route first is simply the cleaner path forward. If Insomniac tries to return to Wolverine as a solo character after finishing an X-Men game, you're realistically looking at 2033, and the cast would have aged roughly a decade by then.

Waiting seven to ten years between mainline entries says a lot about where the AAA industry currently stands compared to previous console generations. Even something like Marvel's Spider-Man had a five-year gap between its first game and its sequel, and that's considered a relatively fast turnaround by today's standards.

Compare that to something like the original Uncharted trilogy, which released three full games across just four years.

That kind of pace basically doesn't exist anymore. Realistically, the best-case scenario now is three games spread across six to eight years, meaning a full trilogy built around one franchise could easily take two decades from start to finish. Given all that, it makes more sense to view this release as a decent outcome rather than an outright failure.

The effort was there, it performed reasonably well, and there's still a clear path to bringing these characters back through a future X-Men game. The current gaming landscape tends to label anything short of an enormous blockbuster hit as a disappointment, and there's a chance people look back on this one unfairly in a decade.

But if the characters carry forward into something bigger, that's not really a loss. It's a foundation that survived a genuinely difficult production and still came out the other side in decent shape. This whole situation echoes something like Uncharted: Drake's Fortune or the original inFAMOUS, games that even tougher critics viewed as solidly average on release, even though plenty of fans would argue it deserves more credit than that.

It built a real foundation to work from. If this exact release had come out back in 2007 or 2010, a sequel arriving two or three years later almost certainly would have been a massive improvement, similar to the leap between the first and second entries in franchises like Gears of War or inFAMOUS.

Building that foundation so slowly already makes the game feel dated.

It's a little ironic that people already describe this game as feeling like something from fifteen years ago, because if it genuinely had released back then, a follow-up a couple of years later would have had a real shot at being a Game of the Year contender. At the end of the day, the connection between Logan and Jean is worth protecting, and losing that dynamic entirely would be a real shame.

As long as a future X-Men game keeps both of them meaningfully involved, Insomniac still has plenty of room to work with. Factoring in typical industry delays, an X-Men project realistically tracks toward 2031, pushing any potential Wolverine follow-up to 2033 even on an efficient production schedule.

That's a long time, and a lot can shift before then. Insomniac has other franchises it could return to in the meantime, and there's no guarantee Wolverine stays at the very top of the priority list the entire way through. Plenty of factors could still change the plan between now and then.