These may be the longest 24 hours for any Spider-Man fan out there, as Insomniac Games'
Marvel's Spider-Man will finally be releasing
tomorrow.
From a technical standpoint,
Marvel's Spider-Man looks like a technical marvel anywhere you look at it. The team at Onsomniac Games has done a wonderful job polishing the game to meet the standards of gamers, and Spider-Man fans alike.
Today, the official PlayStation Blog has posted a new interview with Insomniac Games' Mike Fitzgerald, who is the Director of Core, AI Hastings, and Chief Architect of
Marvel's Spider-Man.
In this interview, Fitzgerald tells us about the tech behind the highly anticipated
Marvel's Spider-Man—talking about the game's impressive open world, the web swinging mechanic, and being able to deliver a game worthy of one of Marvel's most beloved characters.
Fitzgerald first talks about the game's open world, which is a very faithful representation of New York City, although with a few tweaks in order to make it run properly on the PlayStation 4's hardware.
"
Like many open-world games, we have to carefully parcel up our world up into small sections, since the whole island of Manhattan would be impossible to fit into the PS4’s memory at one time. There are approximately 800 square tiles making up our version of Marvel’s New York, each 128 meters square, making the city several times larger than what we built for Sunset Overdrive", explained Fitzgerald.
Sunset Overdrive is Insomniac Games' first open world game, and they have even mentioned that the map in
Marvel's Spider-Man would be four to six times the size of the one found in
Sunset Overdrive, which is no small feat.
"
As you swing through it, we’re constantly unloading tiles behind you as well as loading tiles ahead of you—seamlessly transitioning so you’re always exposed to the highest detail level. And when Spider-Man is really pushing his top speed, we’re loading about one new tile every second".
Fitzgerald then touches on one of the game's most important features; the web-swinging. Any Spider-Man fan will know that the web-swinging mechanic can make or break a Spider-Man game, and Insomniac Games knew this when they took on the task to making
Marvel's Spider-Man.
"
Part of the fun of game development is to give the player the feel of something like swinging between buildings in Manhattan without actually making them do it. This extends to the physics behind it as well – if we perfectly simulated the dynamics of a person hanging from a rope on 34th Street, the player wouldn’t feel much like a Super Hero. But with neat effects like camera movement, field of view, and careful character animation, we can give the feel of being Spider-Man in an even more convincing way".
This is the kind of attention to detail that make the game unique, as it allows players to get even more immersed in the game's world instead of being just a spectator.
The team at Insomniac Games did add some realism to the game in order to make it feel like it was something that could actually happen without breaking suspension of disbelief, as Fitzgerald tells us that "
there are some nods to realism to make it more convincing, however. For example, every web you shoot to swing from needs to be anchored to an attachment point on the edge of a building or tree. Every piece of architecture in the city is tagged with places webs can attach, and as you swing around, we find the perfect swing points to preserve your momentum and keep you flying towards your destination".
Another thing that the team got right was the cinematics in
Marvel's Spider-Man, which oftentimes feel like watching a movie. Fitzgerald also explains how they managed to pull that off.
"
Marvel’s Spider-Man has a notably more realistic art style than our last PS4 title, Ratchet & Clank, which had a cartoon-like look and feel. Beyond changing our lighting model to more accurately reflect physical materials, we also developed specific improvements to hair, eye, and skin rendering systems".
"In the animation realm, we added support for large-scale destruction, which our artists put to good use to create some epic Super Hero-scale interactions. Our facial animation system can now accurately model the response of characters’ skin as they speak and emote, and it can represent the individual movement of each of the approximately 60,000 vertices in their faces", explained Fitzgerald.
Insomniac Games managed to make every single in-game model look like its very own character, especially during cutscenes, giving a level of authenticity to the game's world like no other Spider-Man title has been able to pull off in the past—quite literally bringing life to
Marvel's Spider-Man.
"
Every character has an extreme-quality model that’s used for close-ups, cutscenes, and scripted action sequences, and we built up the motion- and facial-capture processes we use for those moments to bring out the details of our actors’ performances. The final foe you face in the game is rendered with more than one million polygons—more detail than we’ve ever had for a single character in a game before!"
Marvel's Spider-Man really is a technical marvel, and the team at Insomniac Games knew exactly what they wanted to do with the character and how to do it. Fitzgerald goes more into details in the full interview that
you can read by clicking right here.
Sony Interactive Entertainment, Insomniac Games, and Marvel team up to create a brand-new, authentic Spider-Man adventure exclusively for PlayStation 4. Take control of an experienced Peter Parker who is more masterful at fighting crime.
Marvel's Spider-Man will be available exclusively for the PlayStation 4 on the 7th of September.