Is this why? Wolverine’s hidden “open world” sparks theories about the game’s development
A streamer has found a way out of bounds in Marvel’s Wolverine, and what he found on the other side has fans asking whether the game was originally meant to be much bigger.
Streamer Kidshadoe found a way past the game’s intended boundaries and stumbled onto what looks like a huge, explorable open world. In a video on his discovery, he shows himself roaming areas that players were never supposed to reach, and they’re far more detailed than you’d expect from leftover background scenery.
More than just set dressing
What stands out most is how much is actually there. Kidshadoe shows cars that can be interacted with, and buildings that are furnished with items instead of being empty shells. Developers usually save that kind of detail for spaces players are meant to explore. You don’t normally see it in areas that only exist to fill out the skyline.
That’s what led Kidshadoe to his theory: Wolverine may have started out as a full open-world game, and the scope was cut back when deadlines started to bite.
Does the theory hold up?
Plenty of fans think it does, but there are other ways to explain it. Out-of-bounds areas in big games are often more detailed than players expect. Studios reuse assets, keep spaces for future content or DLC, or build areas as development tools that never get removed from the final game. Interactable cars and furnished interiors could also come from shared systems and assets carried over from other projects, without ever being part of a planned open world.
Still, it’s not unusual for big games to change shape during development, and features, areas and whole mechanics get cut all the time to make a release date. If Wolverine did start out with bigger open-world plans, it wouldn’t be the first game to scale back to ship on time.
The developers haven’t commented on what Kidshadoe found, so for now it’s just a theory. Either way, it gives fans a rare look at what might have been, and it may be a sign of where the series could go next.
What do you think? Was Wolverine meant to be an open-world game, or are fans reading too much into some unused space?