Spider-man is PlayStation’s solo salvo in 2023, and it’s sensational

The season for big video games has arrived, and with it Sony’s singular major first-party release for the year: Marvel’s Spider-Man 2. After launching on Friday, it sold 2.5 million copies in 24 hours to become PlayStation Studios’ fastest-selling game ever.

Following Insomniac’s incredible 2018 game and sequel Miles Morales, which together sold more than 30 million units, this is the first entry in the series designed solely for the PlayStation 5. It’s the state-of-the-art for open world narrative action blockbusters. But, how different is it from games you might have played on a PlayStation 4? And how different are Sony’s blockbusters from what’s going on over at Xbox?

Spider-Man 2 moves fast, especially while using the new web wings.

Everything that made the last two games great is still here. Swinging around town feels incredible, combat is satisfying and intuitive, there are lots of side quests and an emotional, twisting narrative. This time the stars of the previous games – Peter Parker and Miles Morales – work together, with players switching between the two heroes as they like or as the story demands.

The personal themes from each Spidey’s respective game continue here even in the more incidental content, where Peter puts his scientific skills to use for a philanthropic new start-up and navigates his shifting home life with Mary Jane, while Miles tries to secure his academic future and helps his uncle Aaron get back on the straight and narrow. But standing in their way are a raft of new and returning villains, including Kraven the Hunter and Venom, whose goals and actions not only mingle uncomfortably with the heroes’ lives but threaten to drive a wedge between them.

The most immediate difference you notice in this game versus the last two is how fast it is. It takes in an even larger and better-looking chunk of New York City, and yet you can swing through it at blistering speed or pop out your web wings to glide at an even higher velocity. You can ride a draft into the air and feel like you can see for kilometres, or dive to the ground to find a bustling street with pedestrians and cars.

Fantastic facial capture and great performances bring Spider-Man 2 to life.

The speed with which the game can load in new parts of the city, and therefore the speed the developers can allow you to move, has been bolstered by the solid-state drive in the PS5, which is significantly faster than the mechanical unit in the PS4. That’s also the reason you can now instantly warp to anywhere in the city, or switch between Peter and Miles even though they’re far apart. And often, when a story moment in the game shifts locations, it does so with a fast camera flythrough.

Mike Fitzgerald, Insomniac’s director of core technology management, said that the power and fast storage of the PS5, combined with the developer’s tools and cinematic art, made for an experience that wasn’t possible before now.

“In a lot of games you just exist in a cylinder of the world, at some period of time,” he said.

“Sure you can fast travel, and things get unloaded and you load in somewhere else, and to some extent that’s still true. But hopefully in this game, you can feel like this is one giant city that’s just sort of always existing and active, and you are Spider-man, a piece of that.”

Though this is the first Spider-man game developed solely for the PS5, Insomniac did adapt its previous games for the system and also created the PS5 exclusive Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. Fitzgerald said the studio is developing new technology and refining tools all the time, and often targeting a theoretical spot three or four years in the future where its new game will come out.

On the one hand, that means tech developed for one game can also be designed for use in another, for example the tools powering the titular rifts in Ratchet & Clank are used for a specific super-power-fuelled portal chase in Spider-Man 2. On the other hand, the long lead time means it’s not as simple as games just magically looking and feeling better when a new console arrives. That said, designing purely for one console has some big benefits.

“This game is a culmination of what we’ve learned [since first designing for PS5]. Developing for a singular piece of hardware, every trade-off decision you have to make as an engineer, or as a development team, can be made with the exact knowledge of how players are going to be experiencing it,” Fitzgerald said.

“Which is really valuable, especially when you think about how that can compare to PC development, where you have no idea what hardware people are going to be using. And especially with the fun extra stuff, like haptics on the controller and the adaptive triggers. We get to really lean into all our experiences on those previous games and find some really cool ways to use those.”

In the PS5 versions of previous Spidey games, the adaptive triggers – which can dynamically adjust how much force you need to actuate the buttons – made every web swing too fatiguing for me and I turned them off. But it’s much more forgiving and feels great in the new game, while the triggers are also used for certain mini-games to let players feel where they need to be held. Elsewhere, the presence of ray-tracing and incredible lighting, even while playing on the 60-frames-per-second performance mode, marks this as a significant leap over the previous generation Spidey games.

Meanwhile, on team green

Having a roster of in-house studios make games purely for the PS5 (if they end up coming to PC later they’ve been ported by a specialist developer) represents a key philosophical difference between PlayStation and Xbox.

Microsoft’s Xbox Series X is comparable to the PS5 in grunt, but all the company’s games also come to the less powerful Series S well as PC, including this year’s blockbuster role-playing game Starfield and this month’s racing sim, Forza Motorsport. They’re all also included on day one in its Game Pass subscription, and available to stream from the cloud to phones, consoles or smart TVs. PlayStation has its own subscription service, but new Sony-made games aren’t included.

Rich Lambert is creative director at Zenimax Online Studios, a Microsoft-owned company that makes The Elder Scrolls Online for current and older-gen consoles including Xbox and PlayStation, as well as PC. He said it’s a challenge to support so many different devices at once, but the benefits are clear for an online game that thrives with lots of players.

“We’ve always built towards the lowest common denominator. Where you get to play is in visual fidelity and quality. We have a bunch of different quality modes you can adjust between, so on current gen consoles players can choose, do they want faster frame rates, or do they want those really high-quality visuals,” he said.

“In terms of storytelling and world building, it doesn’t really change much.”

Starfield, released earlier this year, was played by more than 10 million players.

In a potential cloud-streaming future, Lambert said he would love to build for one kind of hardware and have everybody access that whether they were on PCs, phones or consoles, but he isn’t sure that will ever happen. Currently, many ESO players play via the cloud, which runs the Xbox Series X version of the game, but a much greater number run the game on their own machines.

Another aspect of Xbox and Game Pass that differs from traditional retail games is that, since subscribers all get the new games automatically without having to pay $80 to $130, the usual hype and marketing cycle doesn’t always apply. Earlier this year, Microsoft studio Tango Gameworks released its latest game, Hi-Fi Rush, directly onto the service the day it was announced as a surprise for players. The game’s director, John Johanas, said it was the most stressful moment of his career.

“You’re spending five years working on a project, it’s like your baby. You’re kind of thinking about all the ways it could go wrong,” he said.

“What if another game announces something on that day? Or what if like, there’s a national tragedy on that day and no one wants to hear about this. I’m sure the marketing team will gladly say they got some very stressed out emails from me. But it went as well as it possibly could have.”

Hi-Fi Rush ended up being picked up by more than 3 million players in its first six months. It’s a fast-paced action game where everything is timed to the beat of the music, meaning it was important for the dev team to have it running at a consistently high frame rate. This would seem to preclude it from the Cloud, where there’s inherent latency, but Johanas said it’s had some play there too. He prefers to think of the cloud as a way for people to try games instantly before they install them.

The bulk of big games are sold both on Microsoft and Sony’s consoles, including this month’s Assassin’s Creed Mirage and Alan Wake 2. But blockbusters the calibre of Spider-Man 2 are rare on Xbox, just like getting new high-quality games in a subscription is rare on PlayStation. At least for now.

Sony has recently been investing heavily in developers to make live service and free-to-play games for its platforms, and is starting to roll out limited cloud play of PS5 games in other territories. Meanwhile, Microsoft has just officially acquired Activision Blizzard King after two years of regulatory battles, which will give it access to more blockbuster-making studios as well as the creators of mobile hits like Candy Crush.

This won’t necessarily mean more games become exclusive to Microsoft’s consoles or cloud (it has committed to bringing Call of Duty to PlayStation for 10 years, and will sell streaming rights to French publisher Ubisoft to license out), but it does suggest the future will lie in content, not consoles.

Get news and reviews on technology, gadgets and gaming in our Technology newsletter every Friday. Sign up here.