Spider-Man Originally Had More Missions Dedicated To Its Main Villains

SPOILER WARNING

You know what they say about superhero stories- they’re only as good as their villains. And Spider-Man on the PS4 has a lot of villains, some of them even excellent. According to some, though, there were a few baddies in the game that perhaps got less attention than they deserved- according to Insomniac’s Bryan Intihar, creative director of the game, there’s a very good reason for that. Once again, there are spoilers ahead.

The Sinister Six turn out to be a major part of the game’s third act, as Spidey travels around Manhattan to shut them down one by one in order to get things back to normal. In terms of gameplay, this results in several boss fights, two of which each club two of the Sinister Six together, with one focusing on Electro and Vulture, and the other focusing on Rhino and Scorpion.

And while there has been some criticism for the lack of focus on those four characters, especially when compared to the two remaining Sinister Six members, originally Insomniac planned to have more main missions dedicated to them. These, however, were eventually cut out due to time constraints, and because the developers felt they were lacking in quality.

“Originally we had more missions with Rhino, Vulture, Electro that were outside what you saw in the final game,” Intihar told Game Informer in an interview (which you can view below). “But what happened was that, a) we were kinda running out of time, and b) it felt like a lot of fluff at the end. It just felt like a lot of fluff. It didn’t hit the quality bar. At the end of the day we wanted to say, quality is most important. You know, whether it’s 20 hours, 22 hours, that doesn’t matter. It’s how do we make the highest quality experience.”

“What we ended up doing was we started trimming down these extra missions and activities, and started condensing things,” he continued. “And the beauty of that was things like the Electro-Vulture boss fight actually ended up being way better than having the two separate fights that we were going to do. It tied better into the story and the flow of act three, so it was almost like the constraint actually ended up making for a better product.”

Well, I can see where he’s coming from, and I do agree that the Electro-Vulture boss fight was absolutely amazing- perhaps even among the game’s highlights. Hopefully, when the inevitable sequel rolls around, Insomniac will find a way to be able to do justice to all of its main villains, the same way they did with Mister Negative and Doc Ock.

Spider-Man is currently available on PS4, and it’s been doing rather well since it launched. In addition to selling 3.3 million copies within three days of its release, it was also the highest selling game in Japan for September.