Insomniac has revealed that Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 will have a new game plus mode.
As reported by Comic Book, Insomniac community manager James Stevenson revealed that Insomniac is working on New Game Plus, as well as a mission replay feature, but they won’t make it in time for launch.
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 will have a day one patch, but as Insomniac has explained, it isn’t mandatory to play the game. Insomniac took pains to explain that the game is complete on disc, and gamers can expect a great experience even without installing the patch. And of course, it will already be part of the game for players who chose to purchase it digitally.
Insomniac did plan well to not force these modes to come with the game. While obviously New Games Plus and replays would be great to have for the game at launch, Insomniac chose to prioritize other aspects of the game so that they could ship it complete.
Now, we do understand that this will affect the replayability of the game on an experiential level. Without mission replay, players won’t have an easy way to replay an earlier stage for a higher score. They will have to replay the whole game over from that point until that mode has been added in.
New Game Plus is also a bigger deal for Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 than it would first appear. Players usually can’t complete Peter’s or Mike’s abilities and updates in Insomniac’s earlier Marvel’s Spider-Man games, in their first playthrough of the game. They will need to have New Game Plus to fill out the rest of those character’s updates.
So these were not trivial additions to the base game that players won’t care about. But Insomniac’s ambitions were placed on the core game, so they were presumably right to focus on completing the main story campaign before adding these features, which would be ‘great to have’. They inarguably will enhance the experience of playing Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, but at least Insomniac knew to literally complete the game first.
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 received a Metacritic of 91 based on 128 critic reviews. This is the highest metascore any game in Insomniac’s licensed franchise has received, and guarantees it a spot for GOTY contention in The Game Awards, and other awards shows. Surprisingly, it now looks at Baldur’s Gate 3, alongside The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, as stiff competition for these awards. There is no doubt, however, that it emerges as one of the best games, of a really great year for video games.
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 will be released exclusively on PlayStation 5 on October 20, 2023.
