It’s time to do Web-Swing. With Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 Now available worldwide, you may have already taken your first tour of Manhattan, Brooklyn or Queens via web or Web Wings. Taking advantage of Peter and Miles’ masked aerial acrobatics to quell crime and confront new emerging threats, he examined new costumes and styles with delight and played with a variety of accessibility options.
If you are one of those players, you may have already spent the first few hours of the game, enjoyed its spectacular opening, and applied your Spidey skills to complete some previous missions. If so, then you have some of the same questions we posed to the game’s Senior Creative Director, Bryan Intihar, when we sat down to talk about the game’s opening act.
Below are selected excerpts from that conversation that touch on specific moments early in the game, edited for length and clarity. You can hear much more in an extended version of the interview, streaming today on the PlayStation Podcast. But for now, enjoy it.
Spoiler alert: This interview covers some stories and missions in the first act of the game.
That opening tutorial was proposed early in development.
In Marvel’s Spider-Man, players became familiar with Peter Parker’s moveset in a showdown with the Kingpin. In Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, the newly named Spider-Man faced off against a rampaging Rhino. For Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, Insomniac got bigger. Much larger.
“Sandman was one of the first things we decided on, from the beginning,” explains Intihar. “This was a meeting where I thought, ‘I want to open with Sandman.’ We knew it from the beginning [Marvel’s Spider-Man 2] It was going to be on the PS5 console. We knew enough about the console, its capabilities, and how we wanted to push it. And obviously we knew it would be two Spider-Men. So you say: new console. Great sequel. Two heroes. What deserves an opening for that? I think Sandman was our thing.
We worked on that mission for a long time. A long, long, long time. Here’s the thing: It’s not just that he’s obviously an important character in the opening. But technically it’s a challenge, whether it’s getting in and out of buildings and switching heroes seamlessly, just the amount of technology and art it takes to make Sandman look good. We wanted to do it big. We wanted people to understand right away, and I always joke that his name is Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 for one reason, because there are two, but for us it was like, how in those first 20 or 30 minutes can we show people that everything is leveling up?
“Having this big show opening that would blow people away, but also trying to teach people ‘this is how to play.’ So there’s the challenge of creating this amazing spectacle, but at the same time, teaching players how to do this with the net, as well as hit, as well as dodge, as well as use their first slotted ability. That’s how you dodge in the air, that’s how you use Web Wings… we throw you a lot. And that is achieved simply through iterations, tests and more iterations.”
The studio wanted the events to have a lasting impact on Marvel’s New York.
“What we probably didn’t talk much about, what we couldn’t talk about until now, is the second mission. Internally, we call it The Aftermath, because we want to show, unlike the first two games, that there is a cause and an effect to these big things that happen. So, you’ll see the devastation in the destruction of the city, in this big Sandman event. The example I give is, when we did that construction mission, in Marvel’s Spider-Man [in 2018], there’s the end, Pete catches the helicopter, right? And he’s trapped between two buildings, right? He is great. Well, movie magic: if you finish that mission, as soon as you finish it, you turn to where that helicopter is, and it’s gone. As if nothing had ever happened. Well, we wanted all of our big events to have that cause and effect, look at the consequences of that. So whether it’s that mission or others in the game, you’ll see a sense of cause and effect throughout the game. And that’s one of the things we want to show in our world compared to the last two.”
Hailey and ASL representation in the game.
Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales introduced players to Hailey, a talented artist who communicates with Miles and his friends using American Sign Language (ASL). She returns in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 and is (light spoiler) the focus of a particular mission.
“That mission in particular, which I’ll try not to go into too much detail, I will tell you is definitely one of my favorite parts of the game. Not just because of what it is, but because of how it came about. Because the team… I can tell you right now, we didn’t go into this game with the idea of doing that mission. He definitely didn’t. But it was something the team talked about and proposed. And I can tell you it didn’t fit into the schedule. It was not so. And this was something that the team was really passionate about, and they tried… Our whole team was like, ‘Hey, let’s figure out how to make this happen,’ even down to [it being] one of the last things I checked. One of the last things I went into the office and reviewed was that mission, that quest. I know I’m being very broad, because I don’t want to ruin it for people; once you play it, you’ll know what I’m talking about, I promise. And for me, it’s really special. That quest is a great example of how, yes, I’m the creative director, yes, part of my responsibility is to define the vision of the game. But it’s also my job to empower the team when they have really great ideas that will not only get people excited about working on the game, but also make it better. And I think that mission in particular is a great example that when you empower the team to create the game, they do it better than you could have ever imagined in your head.”
On the game’s accessibility features and the importance of accessibility for the studio and the industry
“Someone asked me the other day what the biggest advancement in gaming has been in the last, you know, 5 or 10 years, and I quickly said, ‘accessibility.’ I think that’s what’s happened – not just at Insomniac, but across the PlayStation family and across the industry – the amount of accessibility features we continue to add to our games. For us, it really started a lot with Marvel’s Spider-Manand then continued to be added through Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales and then, obviously, Ratchet & Clank. and now in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2.
“I think our goal is always to find more ways for more players to play. Of many ways, [Spider-Man] He’s such a character, the characters, Pete, Miles, they’re such a big part of pop culture. In many ways, they are two of the most popular superheroes out there. So whether you’re, you know, old, like me, or young, everyone wants to be Spider-Man… I think what’s really amazing is that not only are we committed to continuing to add accessibility features, to every game, but we will continue to add More features even after launch, so we will continue to add more things. And again, I think it’s all about different settings to make the timing and combat different or the timing and balancing different, like all these different sliders, whether it’s visual settings that you can set, you know, audio stuff. .. what can we do? so that as many people as possible can play… I think for a lot of us, especially me, these are things that I haven’t been exposed to before or that I’m learning about myself. But I think it’s extremely important. We always watch other games, right? You’re always watching what they’re doing. I think we’ll see more and more members of the industry coming together and sharing more knowledge about this, because I think this is something that can make the entire industry much, much stronger and bring our entire medium into a whole. Another level if we make our games playable by anyone.”
On Bryan Intihar’s favorite moment in the game and why it speaks to Spider-Man’s heart
“It’s not really a big spoiler, because you play it early in the game, but my favorite is the quest in Queens with Harry and Pete… because essentially, it’s the least Spider-Man content in the game, in many ways. But we all felt like it was really important, because that relationship and that friendship is vital to the game and the story to understand where the story of the game is going to go and how their relationship will go through its ups and downs throughout the game. . We wanted to make sure people really understood the story behind those two best friends.
“It’s like the least bit of Spider-Man, but… what I always said from the beginning was, ‘Hey, we want to deliver the fantasy of being these heroes, whether it’s the web-swinging, the suits, the combat.’ We wanted to live out the superhero fantasy, but I think what can really help our game stand out is how we show their lives outside the mask. If we show their journeys, their needs, their desires, their problems? How do we show them outside the mask?’ And I feel that the mission of Queens is that as if magnified a hundred times. And there are many personalized things. It takes a lot of faith because those types of missions tend to be ones where you have to squint a lot during development to see if they’re actually going to work. But the team crushed him and did much better than he could have ever imagined.
“The really cool thing was that every time we did a usability test, that was the first mission I always looked at, whether people liked it or not. Because I thought, if they like that, it means they’ll accept the rest of the story and its characters. I mean, obviously the Sandman thing is great, because he’s like, ‘Oh my God, superhero bonanza.’ But those moments with Harry and Pete in Queens… yeah, that’s what I always wanted from our Spider-Man games.”
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 It is now available, only for PlayStation 5. See what’s new at Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 on PlayStation.com.
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