We get the feeling that if someone were to throw a Wolverine Fastball Special at Dan Vondrak, he wouldn't try to dodge it. The project lead on X-Men Origins: Wolverine at developer Raven Software isn't stupid (we don't think, anyways). He's just not afraid to take things head-on.

That's the vibe we got when we interviewed him about Raven's latest, which has drawn a fair amount of praise from gamers and the press -- a rarity for movie-licensed fare. But no game's perfect, and when we questioned him about some of Wolverine's shortcomings, Vondrak was more straightforward with us than we were expecting.

Read on for his thoughts on the influence a certain bald-headed god has had on his game, why quick-time events suck, and a seemingly out-of-place World of Warcraft Easter Egg....

Let's get the obvious out of the way first. Wolverine is a good game, no doubt, but it also ripped off God of War in a lot of different ways. What are your thoughts on that?

Dan Vondrak: When we started talking about Wolverine, the first thing we did was look at what we considered the top-tiered action games. So that was Devil May Cry and God of War.... What we loved about those games is the free-form combat.

We were fans of [God of War], right? So it was hard not to play the game every single day and go, "Oh, I really like the way this feels -- can we do this?" So that's where we started getting more of the God of War similarities.

I totally get what people are saying about Wolverine being similar to God of War, because it is...it was a major influence on us. We're not going to be sorry for it. But we also said, "Let's be inspired by it, but let's also go beyond it."

Is this the reality of developing movie-licensed games? Rather than blazing a completely new trail on your own, you have these bigger time constraints, so you have to take in more outside influences?

Dan Vondrak: I think that's part of it. When we first started working on Wolverine, it was a year and a half development cycle. We've just come off Marvel Ultimate Alliance, we're going to start a brand-new engine with the Unreal tech, we're going to start a brand-new type of game.... So [studying God of War] helped to ground us.

As far as the time constraints of the movie, anytime you're going to make a brand-new game -- whether it's a movie game or not -- unless you know you're going to have a good three or four years, it's hard to try and sit there and think of something totally brand new and totally out of the box.

For us, we just wanted to see something new done with Wolverine. But we knew we couldn't do something that was so totally new and different, it would fall flat on its face because of the time we were given.

Most licensed games, like Watchmen for example, take the simplistic "beat-em-up" brawler route, while Wolverine was a lot more ambitious with its upgrading system and light RPG elements. What was the impetus for these ideas?

Vondrak: We're kind of big RPG fans here at Raven, and we very much enjoy being able to play a game for three hours, then come back and realize that those three hours that you put into it mattered, that it allowed you to make your character better.

Since we knew players had to play this character, the thought was, "Well, how much freedom can we give within this character?" So that's where that came from.

We had a lot more crazy and ambitious ideas about how to level up Wolverine -- maybe pull his costumes into it -- but that ended up being a matter of time. We needed to make sure we got the combat correct.

Why don't more movie-game developers try new things like this? It's obvious you guys did something that resonated with gamers.

Vondrak: I think a lot of times these games are given to someone who doesn't have a lot of time to do them. And it might not be a passion for them. If you get a guy working on a Wolverine movie game who isn't really a fan of Wolverine, he won't put as much into it.

But we're big fans of Wolverine, so the whole time, we're thinking about what would be the best thing for this character. I think that's the difference. Some people just aren't passionate about the license that they get.

Speaking of the license, how do you figure out as designers what Wolverine can or can't do in the game? What I'm referring to is Wolverine being able to survival a fall from orbit, yet he would die if he fell off the edge of a 20-story-tall tower. Gameplay-wise, a player has to be able to die, so how do you handle those character-design dilemmas?

Vondrak: [Laughs] If I can count the number of hours we spent arguing about these things.... We had to suspend the players' disbelief from time to time to make the experience worthwhile.

For a long time, we had it in there where Wolverine couldn't die, and you could get back up with a quick little button-press sequence.  It didn't make the time when you played well feel rewarding. So we kept making him more vulnerable as we went along, so that when players did do the right thing, they felt better for it.

Even as the game shipped, there were arguments here at Raven about how Wolverine can die. What it came down to was in the "big badass moments" as we called them, we want to make sure Wolverine felt like that true superhero who could do the skydive/Sentinel sequence [from orbit]. Let's not make the gameplay about dying from that kind of damage.

But when you're doing some of the platforming and some of the fights, we had to have that standard game death, or else it just wouldn't be that rewarding.

A lot of games these days, including Raven's Marvel Ultimate Alliance, tend to rely on quick-time events too heavily. Was it intentional on your part not to include too much of that in Wolverine? There were scenes where I was expecting them, like the helicopter fights, but they were more interactive.

Vondrak: Yeah, that was 100-percent intentional. We did have a couple of quick-time events planned at first, but it comes down to this: You're asking a player to do something that's not [intuitive]. They're not going to know what button to press because they've never seen this hero doing these amazing things before.

In other quick-time events, whether in God of War and in the millions of games that are doing them now, it's just this weird situation where the hero's doing such strange things. The player isn't going to understand that "jump" is suddenly going to make him flip in the air and stab something when that button has never done that the whole game.

We got one partially in, and we just hated it. I was so sick of seeing these every single time. The helicopter thing and the spillway sequence and stuff like that...it was a lot of effort from the team to make sure the player was doing everything, even if it's a mild amount of control.

The tough thing with that is teaching the player that, yes, you're on a helicopter now and guess what? Moving left dodges this way and attacking does this, so we still faced the challenges of this being a little confusing for the player. So in the end, we ended up restricting the controls enough so with a little a bit of experimentation by the player, he can figure out what he can do with Wolverine.

Pretty much the only button stuff we did was the "tappies" because we felt they were appropriate for times when you had to struggle with something. And with the Sixaxis and the Wiimote, we could get more visceral without doing a button tap, per se.

Did you just call it the "tappies"?

Vondrak: Yeah, well you know, so the "tappies" would be when the button goes on the screen and goes up and down rapidly. [Laughs] I don't know what the official name for them is, but we always called them "tappies" here.

From now on -- we already talked about it -- we don't want to have to do anymore button events...at all. If we're going to do Wolverine 2 or whatever we're going to do next, we want to do something beyond button sequences, the button events.

Well, you have my full support on that. Why did we have to fight Leviathan-style bosses so often in the game? It got pretty repetitive.

Vondrak: You know what's funny about that, I think people would lump the Leviathan together with the W.E.N.D.I.G.O. Prototype, because they both had that "get on its back [and attack]" mechanic. What's unfortunate was -- and hopefully most people realized this but I'm not sure they did -- you didn't have to get on the back of the Prototype [to kill it]. So it made it seem like there was this same enemy that you had to fight a dozen times.

[The Leviathan] started off as different characters. Over time, they slowly melded together.

The Uncaged Edition is one of the most violent games we've ever seen. Was everyone, including Marvel, fully behind that? Were there any concerns about all this violence in a retail product?

Vondrak: It wasn't like we set out to make a Mature [-rated] Wolverine. We just wanted to make Wolverine as true as possible. But we all know what that means. It means it's going to end up being Mature. And Marvel was totally cool with it. Right away, they were, "Let's do it. We trust you guys. We want to see something that hasn't been done before."

Activision at first was a little skeptical, and we knew going in [a Mature rating] had a chance to hurt sales, but we kept telling them, "Listen, more than anything else, more than sales, can we say once this is over, we've delivered the most definitive Wolverine game?" Activision ended up agreeing.

Fox on the other hand -- understandably because theirs was a PG-13 movie -- they were worried about people being confused seeing the mature level of the game and thinking the movie would be like that. I think if Fox had its choice, they would've had us make a Teen-rated game. But that wasn't going to stop us.

But pretty much 95% of the team all said, "Well, this is what Wolverine would do, so let's just go for it."

So who's the World of Warcraft fan on your staff that put in the Achievement for finding Arthas' sword? It wasn't even subtle...it's practically a WOW Achievement.

[Editor's Note: The Achievement for finding this hidden Easter Egg sword is called is "Wow!" and the description reads, "You feel cold as you examine the skeleton and read the name ‘Arthas' etched into the nearby sword."]

Vondrak: [Laughs] I'm a huge WOW fan, but it's not just me. There's a bunch of guys here who are fans.

The funny thing about that Achievement was we originally just put in a plain sword. It wasn't originally Frostmourne. We doubled checked and said, "Hey Blizzard, is this cool?" -- and they were fine with it. They just said, "If this is supposed to be Frostmourne, it really doesn't look like it."

And all of us were like, wow, we totally weren't intending it to be Frostmourne, but once we heard that -- holy cow. The 3D modeling dudes went nuts and modeled this totally sweet Frostmourne, and the effects guys were putting in a big glowing blue light with dust specks all over it...that's how it came alive.

So I have a problem. I played through the entire game, and I missed one dog tag somewhere, and I don't know where it is. Can you help?

Vondrak: [Laughs] Oh man, I feel bad for you. No, I cannot help you with that. I'm very sorry. Good luck.

In retrospect, we had plans for a tracking system for the dog tags, but it didn't get into the final game. I can send you a dog tag from the team?

That won't help me with that Achievement....