Marvel's Wolverine Stair Clipping Sparks 3A Debate

A Reddit clip comparing stair animations in Marvel's Spider-Man 2 and Marvel's Wolverine has players debating whether a big-budget linear game should nail such basic details.

A side-by-side clip of Marvel's Spider-Man 2 and Marvel's Wolverine has blown up on Reddit, and it's all about something pretty small: stairs. Specifically, how the characters' feet behave when they walk up and down them. In the Wolverine footage, his feet visibly clip straight through the steps, making it look like he's gliding up a ramp rather than actually stepping on each stair.

That might sound like nitpicking, but the comparison has kicked off a bigger argument about polish in modern AAA games. Because Marvel's Wolverine is a linear, story-driven game, some players figure the dev team should have an easier time predicting exactly where the character will go. That, they argue, makes this kind of oversight harder to excuse.

Critics are pointing at the money involved. When a game carries a budget in the hundreds of millions, they say, players have every right to expect a higher level of finish. Folks in the comments even dug up older titles like GTA 4 and Metal Gear Solid 2, noting that games from ten or even twenty years ago already handled stair traversal just fine. Others brought up foot inverse kinematics, a technique that's been around for ages and could theoretically be tuned for key scenes in a linear game.

On the other side of the fence, plenty of players think the comparison is a bit of a microscope hunt. Spider-Man leans heavily on flying and web-swinging, after all, so you rarely need to climb stairs the normal way. And stair animations don't touch combat, exploration, or the story. Some folks would rather focus on the actual core experience than whether every toe lands perfectly on a step.

Still, the discussion didn't stop there. Players also held up games like Red Dead Redemption 2 and The Last of Us Part 2 as examples of what top-tier animation looks like, arguing that the best AAA titles tend to make these tiny, unglamorous details feel completely natural.

So here's the question: for a massive-budget, fairly linear AAA game, does walking up stairs really need to be perfect? Is this a reasonable cost trade-off, or a sign that Marvel's Wolverine isn't quite as polished as it should be? Drop your take in the comments - we're curious where you land.