Marvel's Wolverine is a globe-trotting campaign built from several purpose-made areas rather than one open map. Marcus Smith has tied that to the character: Logan is not anchored to a home city, so the game moves through a lot of smaller areas instead of one big open world. See Story and Setting.
Location | Role in the campaign |
|---|---|
Telambang | The opening mission. A Trask facility in dense wilds. |
Canadian wilderness | Frozen West Coast Canada, including Vancouver as a mission area. |
Japan | The narrow streets of Tokyo and other Japanese settings. The Hand are the faction attached to this part of the campaign. |
Madripoor | An island nation split into the Hightown and Lowtown districts. The Princess Bar is in Lowtown. |
Trask's makeshift town | A fake town built for one of Trask's experiments; a stealth section. |
The Essex Institute | Described as a traversable hub between missions. Single account, not detailed by Insomniac. |
Telambang
Telambang is where the game starts. Team X infiltrates a Bolivar Trask facility there to free Nathaniel Essex, and Logan fights through Reaver forces and a run-in with Omega Red to reach him. The area is presented as wilds around the facility rather than a settlement. See Enemies and Factions.
Canada
The frosted Canadian wilderness is one of the game's headline settings, and Insomniac has been specific about where in Canada it is. Marcus Smith has ruled out Alberta directly and said the game is mostly West Coast, and has confirmed outright that the team decided to use Vancouver for one of the mission areas.
Landmarks identified in the extended gameplay footage back that up: North Vancouver, the sulphur pile on the waterfront, Canada Place, the Vancouver Lookout at Harbour Centre, and Squamish named on highway signage. Smith confirmed the sulphur pile directly, noting how confusing it is to see a giant yellow pile like that.
The research ran the other way round from how it might look. Insomniac chose the settings for narrative fit first and then researched them, helped by the fact that art director Gavin Goulden lives in British Columbia. One reference photograph of the sulphur pile came from an artist's holiday.
The same extended gameplay footage contains a highway set piece in which Logan rides a motorcycle through a Reaver convoy, slashes tyres, hurls enemies off the road, and leaps between vehicles while fighting Reavers and Brutes. An earlier mission set in Vancouver also features a Sentinel, which in-game dialogue presents as a smaller version of the Sentinel Prototype fought later.
Vancouver holds at least one piece of optional content of its own. A journal belonging to a character named Callisto can be read in her garage there, which is the only published detail about either her or the garage. See Characters.
Trask's makeshift town
One previewed area is a fake town Trask built for one of his sadistic experiments. It plays as a stealth section in which Logan destroys Trask's generators, moving through claustrophobic house interiors between them. See Combat for how stealth works.
Japan
Official material names the narrow streets of Tokyo as one of the campaign's settings, and The Hand are the faction associated with that part of the story. The accessibility options include a Single Language Audio toggle that swaps dialogue spoken in other languages to match the chosen voice language, which is consistent with sections set in Japan.
The country is named as well as the city. Official storefront copy lists the campaign's settings as Canada, Japan and Madripoor, and singles out the narrow streets of Tokyo as the Japanese location shown so far. Trophy data adds a bar in Tokyo, complete with a novelty toilet to set off in its bathroom, and an encounter with The Hand somewhere in Japan. That is as much detail as has been published.
Madripoor
Madripoor is the island nation whose Hightown and Lowtown districts official material now names directly. Logan spends time in Lowtown, and the chase sequences here are among the most-shown parts of the game.
The rooftop chase runs over railings, across gaps between buildings, and along ziplines with the markets running below. Previews describe the area as scoped up into a couple of detailed city blocks rather than an open district, which fits the game's linear structure. A glowing red trail marks the route during a chase.
Princess Bar
The Princess Bar in Lowtown is Logan's preferred watering hole and, after the first act, a walkable hub. You can explore it room by room, talk to the people in it, and find easter eggs, and it is the setting for the Never Have I Ever scene with Mystique and for Sabretooth body-slamming Logan. It is run by Tyger Tiger.
The Essex Institute
The Essex Institute has been described as a space Logan can move through between story missions, resembling a school for gifted mutants. It is the one candidate for a persistent hub outside the Nightmare Cabin that anyone has described, but it rests on a single account and Insomniac has not shown or detailed it. Nothing about its layout, its purpose, or who else is there has been published.
Real-world reference
A separate thing worth keeping distinct: Insomniac has published an account of a location-scanning trip through Japan, taking in Tokyo, Joetsu, Tsumago-Juku and Magome-Juku, and Kyoto. Those are the places the art team photographed as reference material, and they are not a list of playable areas. The studio has said outright that the scanning also feeds locations that are fictional. Canadian reference was gathered the same way, around Squamish, North Vancouver and Whistler, and Vancouver as it appears in the game is described by its own art director as an artistic rendition rather than a reproduction. The trips themselves are covered on Cast and Crew.
Nightmare locations
A separate set of spaces sits outside the campaign's geography. Nightmare Doors transport Logan to a dreamlike cabin and then into timed trials that reimagine real locations from the game as vertical dreamscapes. They reuse the world rather than adding to it.