The popular Spider-Man 2 game that everyone has come to love on their PS5 actually was about to not have the fast-travel feature. In the game, when a player looks at the map, they were able to easily click the place they want to go and would the fast-traveled there without having to do any extra work. This is a feature that many modern games today have to save time and players attention spans.
Josues Benavidez, who is the design director at Insomniac for the Spider-Man 2 game recently revealed in an interview some of the challenges that came up while working on the game. With the size of the map in Spider-Man 2, it obviously makes sense why it would need fast-travel, but the developers almost cut that part of the game out all together.
“We were working on this new fast travel. It was one of my favorite new features. And it totally broke our game. Because the map was fully revealed, you could go anywhere,” Benavidez said.
It is understandable why this feature was off-putting to the developers as they wanted their players to actually explore the map, see different easter eggs, and enjoy the world to unlock the whole map. Versus it already being done and players feeling they can just go anywhere whenever through fast-travel at the very beginning of the game.
Luckily for us, Insomniac was able to fix the problem so that we could have fast-travel in Spider-Man 2 and not have to manually travel everywhere.