Insomniac showed more gameplay from its upcoming Wolverine during PlayStation's State of Play on Tuesday, and while I expected the buckets of blood, I was truly surprised by the buckets of arm hair we saw on the game's rendition of Wolverine.
I'm not complaining– I get that Wolverine is canonically a hairy guy, and I appreciate the attention to detail on a character players will spend the entire game staring at. But I wasn't prepared for the sight of each individual hair, so attentively rendered, flowing along Wolverine's shoulders and forearms. I do a lot of thinking about my own personal shoulder hair--what middle-aged man doesn't--but picturing a bunch of professional artists spending so much time on an imaginary guy's shoulder hair is kind of blowing my mind.
It reminds me of how, when Red Dead Redemption 2 released in 2018, a lot of attention was paid to the fact its horses had balls that shrank and expanded with the weather. That felt like an attention to detail that was both impressive and excessive, too much labor for something so inconsequential while at the same time being a symbol of the heights of realism the game was reaching toward. A Marvel game doesn't have the need for the same kind of nitty-gritty, but it's clearly a game that wants to thoughtfully portray its characters and make you feel their physicality, and I think the arm hair really pulls that off.
I'm sure arm hair is a lot easier to manage than horse balls, both for the video game on a technical level and for the game's artists to create. And it still conveys the kind of not-strictly-necessary attention to detail that makes a video game feel big budget. My vote is in: arm hair for horse testicles. It's a win for everyone.
