Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is a little over a week out from release on PS5, and the hype continues to build. There’s absolute faith in Insomniac Games to deliver a title that will be worthy of the Spider-Men, and there’s little doubt the game will be good or even great. But many hope that the title will exceed even their wildest expectations and deliver a potential “Game of the Year” experience much like the first one did. The team at Insomniac Games, alongside certain members of Marvel Games, did an interview with Marvel.com to highlight the personal struggles that the game’s characters will endure.
For example, Senior Creative Director Bryan Intihar noted that what separates the Spider-Men from many other Marvel Comics heroes is that they’re incredibly relatable simply because they’re “kids” from New York. They have these very normal lives outside of their superhero gigs, and they have to work hard to find time to do it all. In the new game, Miles is going to struggle with college work, and Peter has a lot on his mind:
“Peter, he’s trying to figure out, ‘Okay, I’m going to start this new teaching gig, and I’m trying to figure out living out and I’m taking over Aunt May’s house. How am I going to do it?’ And then taking that next step with—you know, now him and Mary Jane are back together, and what’s their next step in their relationship? Where’s that going?”
He also highlighted how the return of Harry Osborne will affect everything, including the relationships between the other characters, due to the “history” he has with Peter and MJ. Speaking of Mary Jane, she’s trying to build herself up further at the Daily Bugle but is struggling because J. Jonah Jameson is back and trying to change things in a way she doesn’t like.
Intihar stated that for him, these personal struggles are the true part of the game, with the superhero stuff being the “extra” bits that people will enjoy in between:
“I think that’s the thing, to me, actually, is the thing I… talk about first. If we can get that down, the other stuff is like—I would say that’s like we’re baking the cake: that’s the cake part, and then the icing is all the Super Hero stuff we got away with on top of it.”
They did promise an “escalation” to the conflicts we’ve already seen and that the game will feature great villain battles, but they didn’t want to take away from the characters’ personal drama.
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 arrives on October 20th.
