Any developer would feel plenty of pressure while creating a massive AAA game, and that pressure surely gets doubled when that game is based on a property as well known and widely loved as Spider-Man. Insomniac are feeling that pressure too- in several areas, certainly, but more specifically, in terms of which characters to include and which to leave out in their upcoming game.
Several fan favourites such as Miles Morales, Rhino, Electro, Scorpion, and Vulture are going to be in the game, but by that same token, characters as huge as Venom have been left out. Game director Bryan Intihar says it’s all about maintaining a balance between having fan-favourites in the game’s cast, and making sure that they function properly in context of the game’s story and the way it will play.
“100 per cent, yes,” Intihar told Push Square when asked if Insomniac ever felt the pressure to include or exclude certain characters in the upcoming Spider-Man. “I think that everybody has their favourite character and supporting characters and villains, but at the end of the day, some people will be super happy and some people will be wishing there was someone else in there. We had to do what was best for the experience, [both in terms of] the story we wanted to tell and in terms of a gameplay challenge. So, we just tried to find those best matches. It’s a pretty big cast so hopefully we got a lot of peoples’ favourites.”
To be fair, I think most people will be pretty happy with the characters we’ll be seeing in the game. Other than the ones already mentioned above, big names such as Norman Osborn and Silver Sable were recently confirmed to be in the game, while others such as MJ Watson, J Jonah Jameson, Shocker, Mister Negative and more have already been confirmed in the past. And there’s plenty of characters that might be featured that we haven’t heard about yet.
Spider-Man, which has now gone gold, launches exclusively for the PS4 on September 7.
