Over the years there have been some decent Spider-Man games, but we’ve also had our fair share of stinkers. The one everyone always seems to say was the best is Treyarch’s Spider-Man 2, which was released in 2004. It had web-swinging that everybody loved and since then there hasn’t been a game which could replicate that feeling.
We talked to James Stevenson, Community Director at Insomniac Games for Marvel’s Spider-Man, about the challenges of managing people’s expectations with nostalgia around Spider-Man 2.
“Yeah, sometimes 14 years of distance creates a kind of a rose-coloured glasses situation,” Stevenson said.
“I think even for me I had a little bit of that because we played a lot of the old games when we were doing the research. Not just Spider-Man games; we played a ton of games. We were looking at open world games and action games from all across the spectrum. Even going back to Spider-Man 2, which I had reviewed back in the day and loved, it was like, ‘Man, this is a little wonkier than I remember it being.’
“To me though it was the fantasy fulfillment at the time, where you were able to swing around and feel like a superhero – you were able to feel like Spider-Man. It got that really right, and sometimes people maybe get hung up on the specifics of that, but the goal is to make people feel like they are that character. So when we were designing that system we certainly wanted to respect the idea that webs needed to attach to the something. You can’t be above the building line and swinging through the sky, it doesn’t feel right – it feels wrong. There needs to be some element of physics to have a pendulum and a swing, and making that feel right is important. This allowing you to build up momentum and use all of your abilities to get around the city as quickly as possible.”
Insomniac Games wanted people to find the web-swinging easy to get into but also make it feel like you were always learning something new in the way the superhero manoeuvrers, even hours into the game.
“We really wanted people to pick it up and feel like they were a masterful Spider-Man really quickly,” Stevenson said.
“So that was one of the goals that we had, and the second goal was how deep could we make that. Later in the game you’ll get challenges where you will have to follow a path through the city; zipping through points as precisely as possible. And you’re doing that while swinging, wall running, using parkour and launching yourself; you’re using like five or six different button combinations in a different order to get through it. It’s also challenging, which has kind of been the goal for us, to create that easy to pick up but really deep and masterful system – both from a combat perspective but also a traversal perspective.”
Marvel’s Spider-Man is due for release 7 September, exclusive to PS4.
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