Where many other Spider-Man projects are focused on the multiverse of it all, Spider-Man 2’s risk is in its restraint – drilling into what we love about these characters from the comic book pages and reimagining them in ways that fit into the modern video game storytelling formula. It’s these very human issues of grief, strained relationships, and self-worth that drive Insomniac’s sequel to new storytelling heights. New York is under threat from a new breed of supervillain, but it's Peter and Miles’ personal journeys that take centre stage. In Ghost of Tsushima, an invading force threatens a nation but it's our hero’s personal demons that loom largest.Īnd now, in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, that pattern continues. The end of the world has already taken place in The Last of Us, but it's Joel and Ellie’s relationship that lives on. The end of the world beckons in God of War Ragnarok, but that backdrop is secondary to the bond between a father and son. Storytelling risks are still taken with unexpected twists taken and new wild worlds created, but these days it seems emotional ties to characters and relationships within their worlds are the core pillar of Sony’s storytelling playbook. It also allowed for the micro to be as important as the macro, finding those personal moments that really bring the bigger picture to life. It allowed for this modern era of first-party studios to create deeper characters, exemplified perfectly by the nuanced re-imagining of Kratos in the latest God of War games. This change in mindset also went hand-in-hand with another technological breakthrough – the vastly improved motion capture and facial animation tech, that enabled what was written down on the page to be conveyed better than ever before. These characters would go on to define what PlayStation studio games would look like throughout the PS3 and PS4 generations, so much so their faces make up the logo shown every time you loaded up a PlayStation exclusive over the past few years. Out went Crash, Jak, and other wordless protagonists, and in came fully scripted humans with a newfound complexity. No longer would these heroes be known as PlayStation mascots, but characters instead. We care about Nathan, Sully, and Elena in a way that very few video game characters had made us up until this point. The key was not only delivering high-octane action and explosive moments that stick in the memory, but developing characters that made these life-or-death moments mean so much more. The storytelling formula concocted in Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune can still be seen as the building blocks for every hit PlayStation story-driven game since. It’s in this tale of two Spideys that the sequel really shines, too, and highlights just how reliable Sony has become when it comes to delivering single-player games that thrill as much as they move us. Yes, it may take place in a sprawling New York City, but for all intents and purposes Insomniac’s latest is a focused narrative campaign that happens to take place in an open world. Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is the latest in a long line of top-tier story-driven games from Sony’s PlayStation Studios.
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