Spider-Man 2 Adds Brooklyn and Queens, Insomniac Aims to Further Boost Fidelity for Launch

Last week, we finally got a proper look at Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 in action, and while the footage was impressive, it did leave fans with a handful of unresolved questions. Thankfully, Insomniac’s Bryan Intihar and Ryan Smith have been making the rounds, providing a few more answers to players burning questions.

One of the big questions fans had was about character switching. Players can control both the Peter Parker and Miles Morales variants of Spider-Man in the new game, and during the footage we saw, it looked like the game determined when you could switch. Well, according to a Eurogamer interview with Intihar, that’s only the case during story missions. While exploring the open world, you can switch with the push of a button, and there will be certain challenges tailored to either Peter or Miles.

Speaking of Spider-Man 2’s open world, it will now be approximately twice the size of Insomniac’s previous Spidey game, as they’re fully adding Brooklyn and Queens to the returning Manhattan. Exploring that new territory shouldn’t feel like a chore, as Insomniac has boosted your basic webslinging speed and added the new “web wings” for getting around. This is actually one of the major ways Insomniac is tapping into the capabilities of the PS5 – the speed at which you move through New York in the new game simply wouldn’t be possible without an SSD to stream in content quickly.

Finally, while the debut Spider-Man 2 gameplay looked plenty pretty to my eyes, there were, of course, nitpickers. Some said the game didn’t necessarily look that much better than Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered (which is hardly a knock), while others felt the resolution wasn’t as high as it could be. Well, according to Intihar, what we saw last week was still an early version of Spider-Man 2, and further refinements and improvements to the game’s overall fidelity will be made before launch…

“We're always looking to improve the game... everything will continue to get better and better, whether it's performance, whether it's fidelity, whether it's our gameplay. Our goal is to obviously make a very polished, stable experience when we ship the game, that also - at the end of the day - takes advantage of what the [PlayStation 5] hardware can do.”

Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 launches on PS5 sometime in fall of this year. A PC version is presumably coming at some point, but Sony hasn’t even begun talking about that. What are your thoughts on what Insomniac is cooking up?

Written by Nathan Birch