~ Estimated Reading Time: 10 min ~
We've been knee-deep in difficulty as gatekeeping discussion for over a decade now, and we haven't figured out anything. "In AAA, you can only design games anyone can beat right now" a designer friend recalled to me as I played this. I'm going to avoid speaking in platitudes here; there are plenty of meaningful compromises we can work towards. I'm sure we've all have an easy game or a hundred that's totally worked for us! The problem here is where and how we place those compromises - because we are in danger of losing out on interactivity.
One case that comes up a lot is the Mini-Map: it helps with processing so much, it skirts into being an accessibility option. It's also dangerous if it presents too much information - that'll make an adverse affect of guiding your actions more than your own curiosity. While Sony's Spider-Man is ostensibly huge, compared to other open-world games it's especially far and in-between. Points of interest are sparse enough that you can't learn much from just glancing around. This is to say that, the mini-map basically owned my eyes during this playthrough. The giant decreasing number in the center of the screen, if you're lucky. I was looking away from the world around me. This'll make your game feel high-budget more than it'll feel actually pretty, which is only an intended player response if you're a little evil. I thought that once I got to a waypoint, I'd at least have to spot the exact location, but they even prepared for that: pressing the Spider©-Vision button illuminates any collectible's placement for you regardless.
I gotta talk about the movement for a second. Spider-Man as a playable character has been meticulously crafted as to not have any possible roadblocks in their way. If there's a wall, you run up it, and fast too. Web-Slinging has no true fail-states. There's never a moment where a webbable surface isn't on screen, it auto-aims, and holding down the button automates it entirely. Never will you have a moment like Peter breaking his back from falling on a car; I've seen this alone be a deal-breaker for some hardcore nerds. I have an even bigger problem with it, though.
....Do you see why this doesn't work with the aforementioned exploration structure? Once you've pinpointed the direction of a flashing icon on your map, you don't need to look at your monitor at all. The difference from say, an easy platformer, is that in those games you at least have to recognize a platform is there, and then jump onto it. The most going on here is noticing you've gotten to your destination, and chilling out on rhythmically tapping R2; they made a whole video game where all you do is park your car. we gotta rethink some things
While I do wonder what type of person would praise an a hundred-million dollar game for feeling polished, it does feel good to swing around and punch people in this. Combat isn't any less compromised, though :p They stole the thing from Arkham where a giant icon appears over your head when you're about to get hit, except without the part where that feature turns off on higher difficulties. It even shows up when guns are pointed at you, despite lines of fire already separately being pathed out by streaks of light. This is in combination with a moveset that is wholly non-committal - there isn't a single move you can't instantly cancel into your invincible dodge. What this means in practice is that if you see that icon above your head, and you press the circle button, you're safe. You don't have to keep track of anything surrounding you. It's a liiittle dire that combat in a game where you're always fighting a bunch of guys at once doesn't even attempt to use the skill of spacial awareness. In the spirit of 2000s-licensed games, it feels unfocused, like its filler had distracted its devs from actually designing a core. It's hard to ignore that the whole game feels under-considered.
They have so many stealth mini-games in this... On paper, I get it - stealth is a playstyle always available to Spider-Man, so it makes sense to force the player to learn the thought process. The problem here is that this "filler" has been so watered down of any mechanics that could get in your way, that there is no longer anything it could teach - weightless and without logic. There were so many times in which the enemy sight was so thin, I could walk by them as they faced me at a 90-degree angle. Nothing about it looks right in motion. You can run behind their backs at full speed while Mary Jane's shoes clack against the floor, as if sound recognition hasn't factored into stealth for 30 years of perfectly fine games. These scripted scenarios of passing by bad actors, as they look around with their eyes wide-shut, represents an admission by the developers that otherwise, I would be wasting my time. That in order to separate themselves from the blatant filler-stench of 'annoying' stealth in 2000s mid-budget games, these sections must play swiftly and smoothly as to not give any players web-slinging withdrawal. But by taking away any meaning to its play, ironically - this feels like way more of a waste of time than if it had any merit to its gameplay.
(Miles' stealth game over screen where he gets a bunch of guns pointed at him by cops was definitely not in good taste in 2018, by the way!!)
The lack of flow to its mission structure is just one sign of many here that game developers aren't ready to make a movie yet. There was a part in this game I found jarring to look at - a genuinely well-rendered scene of Spiderman standing sideways while texting on his phone. I realized it was because eight hours in, I hadn't scene a Shot in this movie game yet. The universities haven't yet taught their game artists how to make anything more form-over-function than a Skyrim NPC first person conversation-angle. The script isn't there either, it's weak weak. The game being advertised around Spidey being an adult, to avoid retelling the same backstory as usual, feels like a decision made out of spite towards existing licensed game failures more than its ever an interesting choice on its own. You could probably write something cool out of him being far-removed from his coming-of-age, but the last thing this quip-poisoned MC needed was to be detached enough from his life to crack jokes about it.
I had been warned that this game had a little political ignorance to it, but it was to my horror that it might be something worse than that: Median Voter Spider-Man. One of the first crowd fights in the game has Spider-Man say aloud that, maybe if you criminals just got REAL JOBS, you wouldn't have to do so much crime! This one sentence haunted me as the game went on. Later, you frequently visit a homeless shelter - you can walk by NPCs speaking of the hardships of unemployment, how embarrassing it'd be for their kids to see them like this. It wants you to sympathize with these poor people - because they're the GOOD poor people. They might not have homes, but at least they haven't resorted to crime yet!! Fuck you. I shouldn't have to say what's wrong with this. There's a handful more quips along this line - when the game's not busy punching down on those less fortunate, it's licking that big boot above. You're constantly partnering with cops in this one, all an excuse to drench the game in constant tacticool aesthetics. Everyone has military attire. When it's not actively insensitive, it's ugly as shit. At least to me, it is a genuinely sad thing - to play this American-produced, America-centered fiction that shows all of America's worst flaws with adherence, rather than awareness.
Especially when being critical, it's always valuable to remember that it's difficult to actually fix anything in a AAA production. Rebuilding something already made is such a massive tank in scheduling, it's more worth spending that time heightening its core instead. This is not a game worth saying "what were they thinking" - the developers must know its problems better than me. Technology-pushing teams have it even tougher; it's horrifying to imagine scaling each asset in every obstacle to perfectly match the narrow optimization of an open cityscape. Which is why it's such a waste they chose to so expensively render New York, when we weren't even going to be there
We aren’t designing with space anymore. Spiderman (2018) isn't even allowed to be a game that takes place within a place anymore. I hovered above it, tourist window-shopped through it, but I wasn't actually there. Let alone does it even know anything about what it's actually like to be in a New York, a real one or fictionalized. And I think that makes video games, as a medium, look lame as hell. I think it's lame that while traveling to your next waypoint, it can't imagine you'd be entertained without dialogue - or vice versa - that its dialogue alone wouldn't entertain you if you weren't playing an adult stim toy-style sandbox game. That they had no faith that simply existing in the world they created would be enough for you, that they had to get you to the interesting parts as fast as they could. Have you ever stopped to actually slow down in this game? The magic dies. The thousands of people in the streets below you have nothing to say. The little details are non-existent. 'Makes you wonder why the devs felt the need to railroad you so quickly in the first place....is it just so you won't see the cracks?
And I understand exactly who wouldn't finish this game without the aggressive assistance. I never finished games as a kid...and I still loved them. I'd play the parts I could beat over and over, always hovering over that 'restart save'. Playing this on my Playstation 5, where they've added a convenient percent meter showing how far I am through the game makes me wonder if beating games is becoming a dopamine-driven list-checking compulsion - driven by bragging rights, listing sites (are you impressed?), and trophies. Is this even for players, or burnt out reviewers? Is it a necessity to make sure everyone is caught up on the latest in the Sony's Spider-Man Trilogy, so we'll all feel confident to show up day 1 to the sequels? There's more to unpack than I can alone.
With sympathy still in consideration, I do need to acknowledge that this is just how professionals do it sometimes. When you design something, and there's no time to fix it, the testers are hating it - culling the frustration becomes a necessity. But it's hard to say the final product "turned out fine" when they've ripped the video game right out of it, like it's terrified of being unliked by anyone. Because the investors want it to be designed for everyone. We aren't gonna invent a new future if all we're doing is bandaging the flaws of the past - often milquetoast, and at worst not even flaws at all. Especially when we haven't spent any time figuring out what even made the past good. The industry is falling, nobody's gonna catch it like this.