A reader believes that video games should follow the lower-budget path of The Blood Of Dawnwalker rather than the expensive, shallow approach seen in Marvel's Wolverine. The reader, who goes by the name Magma, wrote a Reader's Feature for GameCentral, expressing that the recent criticism of Wolverine may be partly due to residual anger over Sony's no-discs announcement and its general attitude lately.
Budget and development time compared
The Blood Of Dawnwalker reportedly cost only $40 million to make and was put together in three years, which the reader calls hugely impressive, considering that's half the budget of The Witcher 3 over a decade ago. In contrast, Marvel's Wolverine must have cost around $300 million, based on what Spider-Man 2 cost. The reader says that looking at those numbers, they barely have to say anything.
Although Dawnwalker doesn't have as good graphics as Wolverine, the reader is not particularly impressed by Wolverine's graphics, noting that all the characters' faces look weird. They mention that Jean Grey looks like she could be anywhere from 20 to 40, and there's something off about the perpetually dopey look on Wolverine's face.
Story and characters over graphics
The reader's main point is that Dawnwalker has a better plot and characters despite the lower budget and worse tech. They argue that what makes a story is the script, not the graphics, and script writers are not paid a lot, so you're not exactly blowing your budget to get a good one. The reader feels that all this money and the emphasis is always on the wrong things.
Having a big budget seems to trap developers into making only the most shallow and predictable games, the reader says. The more you spend, the more you have to make back, and that's not going to happen unless your game appeals to the widest number of people, meaning it doesn't have anything new or interesting in it. Comparisons of Wolverine with games like Devil May Cry and God Of War suggest that Wolverine is much simpler and therefore much more repetitive.
Successful examples ignored
The reader is annoyed that games like Dawnwalker, Star Wars Zero Company, and Onimusha: Way Of The Sword have done well recently, but they feel the games industry has learned nothing from the success of Elden Ring, which will likely sell more than Wolverine, despite being incredibly hard, difficult to get into, and having no kind of story that's easy to understand.
The reader wonders why successful games doing something out of the ordinary are always ignored, while boring and obvious things like Fortnite or live service games get copied again and again, even when it never works. They ask whether it would really have hurt to give Wolverine more complex combat and a better story, concluding that it just would've been unexpected, and that's not what publishers like Sony think you want.
