New York City has always been at the very heart of Spider-Man's character. Growing up in a small suburban area of Queens, heading into the big city for college, swinging around skyscrapers, and taking out thugs in darkened alleyways, Spider-Man has become synonymous with New York City at this point. Even though some comic book runs, movies, TV shows, and games have tried to take the Wall-Crawler out of his home city, it always feels better when he's being a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. Indeed, it seems as though Marvel's Spider-Man 2 knows this.
Rather than up the ante by putting Spider-Man in a brand-new location for the sequel, Marvel's Spider-Man 2 instead decides to reuse New York City once again, but instead expand on it in some big ways. In recent interviews, following Marvel's Spider-Man 2's first gameplay trailer, Insomniac's Creative Director Bryan Intihar confirmed that the sequel's map will be roughly twice the size of its predecessors', adding both Queens and Brooklyn. While this concept already sounds great on paper, it will hopefully end up having a positive impact on Marvel's Spider-Man 2's gameplay.
What A Bigger New York City Could Mean for Marvel's Spider-Man 2's Gameplay
The first major impact Marvel's Spider-Man 2's bigger map is going to have on the game is its variation, both in terms of gameplay and visuals. Generally speaking, Queens and Brooklyn look quite different from Manhattan, each with their own style of architecture and visual aesthetic. This variation is likely to translate directly to Marvel's Spider-Man 2's gameplay, as each borough will likely provide a nice change of pace visually.
The different architecture of each borough could also potentially affect the player's method of traversal. For instance, Manhattan's tall skyscrapers encourage web-swinging, while Queens' lower buildings might require a different form of navigation, such as web launches and web zips. Keeping on the subject of Marvel's Spider-Man 2's traversal mechanics, a larger map also requires faster movement. Where most open-world games give players vehicles to traverse the large open world, Marvel's Spider-Man grants the player a pair of web-shooters and spider-like reflexes.
While Insomniacs' last two Marvel's Spider-Man games had some incredibly satisfying traversal mechanics, some fans did feel that web-swinging felt just a tad too slow. With Marvel's Spider-Man 2's map apparently being twice the size of those games, it's more important than ever that Insomniac allows players to move faster while swinging and launching themselves off buildings. Thankfully, based on what fans have seen from the gameplay trailer, it looks as though that's already being taken into consideration.
Marvel's Spider-Man 2's new boroughs shouldn't just feel like an afterthought, like Insomniac has just added them for the sake of it. Queens, Brooklyn, and Manhattan all need to feel unique, and worth exploring, and one of the best ways to achieve this is by including borough-specific missions and enemies. It would make sense that each borough of New York City has its own gangs, with smaller neighborhoods like Queens potentially having lower-level criminals, while Manhattan is home to high-level supervillain gangs.
This would also pave the way for a nice variety of bosses that come from across Spider-Man's history. Smaller boroughs like Queens could deliver boss fights using some of Spidey's lesser-known villains like Vermin or Shriek, while Manhattan could offer cinematic fights from the likes of Taskmaster and Sandman.
A bigger map in Marvel's Spider-Man 2 also means that there's simply more room for everything. While Marvel's Spider-Man and Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales had plentiful content, the missions and collectibles' proximity to one another could leave Manhattan feeling a little cramped. But with two new boroughs to play with, Marvel's Spider-Man 2 has plenty of room for all the side missions, collectibles, challenges, random crimes, and just about anything else Insomniac wants to throw at the player.
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 launches on October 20, exclusively for PlayStation 5.
