Ryan Taylor
Insomniac’s Spider-Man and its follow-up Miles Morales are regarded as among the best superhero games of all time. Visceral combat, action-packed set pieces, a fantastic story, and a well-rounded cast of characters. Most important of all is the web swinging and it will be equally important in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2.
It often looks ripped right out of the movies. How could you possibly improve something that looks this good? That’s the main issue. It’s designed to look great, not necessarily feel great. Much of the discourse among fans centers on how it holds your hand too much, with limited room for expression and freedom.
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Often, Insomniac’s web-swinging is compared to the previous games, most notably the original Spider-Man 2 movie tie-in from 2004, a pioneer of web-swinging and open-world games in general. Webs attach to buildings, you could cast two webs at once, and run along the ground while holding onto your web. It didn’t hold your hand. If you fell from a great height Spider-Man slammed into the ground taking damage, not immune to velocity and physics.
This danger created a thrill. You truly felt in complete control of both successes and mistakes. Subsequent titles expanded further. Ultimate Spider-Man allowed web climbing, Spider-Man 3 introduced a slingshot launch (returning in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 this October), and Web of Shadows allowed sliding along surfaces at break-neck speed.
Traversal was seemingly only going to get better until The Amazing Spider-Man games took two steps backward. Once again Spider-Man was swinging from clouds. However, it’s not entirely fair to write them off. Beenox had some good ideas that even Insomniac can learn from such as contextual animations when point launching.
So how can Insomniac find that perfect balance between freedom and stunning visual quality? It’s easy to say “Just do what the older games did”, but I have to respect that Insomniac has its own design philosophy.
I believe the answer lies in increasing the amount of mechanics available to the player.
You can chain the current ones together with relative ease to create awe-inspiring moments. But the problems appear when you look closely after you’ve put a few hours in. Because the mechanics are pre-set canned animations, not only do they become repetitive, there’s no risk, reward, or skill involved.
Traversal in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 could require more skill from the player.
There is an argument that it shouldn’t require skill. After all, Insomniac’s games are single-player and Spider-Man is already an expert at this. Why should the player feel challenged? When a mechanic requires no skill, it also requires little engagement. You can simply hold R2 and tap the X to get from A to B. There’s no sense of progression throughout the game in terms of how you move around the world.
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That’s a problem when you spend a lot of time doing exactly that. If a large portion of a game is based around traversal it has to have some level of challenge, engagement, and expression.
Offering players a challenge also offers the opportunity for mastery, and through mastery comes fulfilment.
We know Insomniac isn’t completely reworking web-swinging in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 from what we’ve seen so far. The canned mechanics are still present but they have created some spectacular new ones. As mentioned, the slingshot launch is returning, and, as though lifted straight from the Just Cause franchise, we’re getting web wings that allow us to gloriously glide through the air.
Insomniac is listening, these were highly requested features. How can it go further in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2? The web tunnel mechanic? Create new ones such as being able to zip through open windows to pass through buildings. Sprint-boosting up a wall? Allow players to hold X to slingshot up the side of the building just like Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Man in his first movie.
Many players voiced frustration that you can’t loop de-loop. This is because Insomniac’s system stops you from keeping hold of your web. To counter this, when swinging on an eligible structure the game could prompt you to hold R2 and X at which point Spider-Man will keep hold of the web and begin spinning. The longer you hold X, the more powerful the boost.
Sprint speed could be increased to improve the flow from Parkour to swinging, and have less momentum lost when going from the air to the ground, such as in the Prototype games.
Rather than an invisible barrier stopping you from touching the ground, Insomniac could create an animation similar to the one from the cutscene when Peter received his new suit, where he swings low and trails his hand across the floor. And during that same cutscene, we see him slide across a surface. Clicking in L3 which has no purpose on the ground could allow Spider-Man to slide to pass under objects or even straight down a wall.
The more mechanics available and fewer restrictions to the player, the more opportunity there is for freedom of expression in how you traverse the world. It would be the ideal marriage between how damn good Insomniac’s swinging looks and how exhilarating the past games felt.
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