An Insomniac staffer shared an interesting feature that his studio added into Marvel’s Spider-Man 2.
As reported by PSU, the game has an assist feature for the web swinging in the game. This can be used in such a way to make the web swinging easier or harder, as the player likes it.
Insomniac Games’ Community Director James Stevenson explained the feature this way on Twitter:
“It’s not an accessibility setting. Its the opposite of that.
For instance – there are 10 levels of Swing Assistance on that slider. The game starts at the default (from the previous games!) is Level 10. So it’s a feature we let players turn down to get /less/ assistance if they want.”
So, based on James’ explanation, the game is default set so that the player gets the most assistance for their web swinging. If they cared to, they could then lower that setting from 10, so that they would get less assistance and would have to put real effort on the web swinging.
As to why players would want to do that, well, obviously, this assist takes away a skill that the players have to learn. If you’re a player who likes challenge, or in a different angle, you would want to learn this skill so that you can show off with it, you may want to learn to manually do the web swinging yourself.
We don’t quite know what manual web swinging would be like for Insomniac’s latest game. We assume players who decide to pick up the challenge will have to study how they can pick up and steady momentum, perhaps like a tennis player.
Web-swinging is something of a classic video game design challenge, that were handled in many different ways by different developers along the years. The first historically significant implementation of this was found in Neversoft’s Spider-Man for the PlayStation in 2000. This mechanic has really mostly been associated with the webhead, which is remarkable for how it makes the Spider-Man games important in the history of game design itself.
I suspect it will be the gamers who actually played through those earlier 3D Spider-Man games that will have an interest in tinkering with this web swing assist. They may want to see if they can recreate the conditions in those earlier Spider-Man games, and if they’re up for the challenge.
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 will be releasing exclusively on the PlayStation 5 on October 20, 2023.
