Following the release of Marvel's Wolverine, Game Director Mike Daly provided detailed insights into the game's narrative, structure, and combat design. The team opted for a linear adventure and enhanced sensory scent trails and hint options through patches to highlight Logan's distinct experience compared to the protagonist of Marvel's Spider-Man.
Logan possesses centuries of experience in the story but cannot fully recall his past, resulting in a weary and cynical personality. The team needed to translate his healing factor, claws, rage, enhanced senses, adamantium skeleton, and physical weight into gameplay mechanics that players could directly feel.
Instead of adopting an open-world city structure like Marvel's Spider-Man, the game advances its adventure through a more linear structure, maintaining comic book-style action sequences and narrative pacing in each segment. The combat system initially experimented with continuous health regeneration, but this mechanic encouraged players to retreat and wait. The team ultimately linked healing to rage: when health is depleted, "Last Stand" can trigger a healing burst; the higher the rage level, the more players need to maintain offensive pressure and quickly eliminate enemies.
The weight and lethality of the claws are conveyed through localized body damage, dynamic blood effects, dismemberment, specialized animations, sound, and haptic feedback. Some players felt after release that the enhanced sensory scent trails resembled abstract design guidelines, prompting the team to make the trails appear more natural via a subsequent patch.
The patch also allows players to disable sensory hints for optional collectibles or weaken scent trails until hints are actively requested. Daly stated that excluding assistance from other X-Men was intended to make Logan's personal growth more challenging; Sabretooth was determined to be a mandatory opponent from the early stages of development.