Talking Marvel's Spider-Man with Insomniac Games
James Stevenson is the Community director for Insomniac Games.
Ahead of the launch of Marvel's Spider-Man on September 7, exclusively on PlayStation, James was in Auckland to talk to the press and sell the sizzle.
Here's our interview on the upcoming release.
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| James Stevenson of Insomniac Games |
So this has been 3 and a half years of work - take us back to how it first started, where it started and all began?
Some of that's not entirely our story, but basically I know Marvel and Sony were talking about having Sony release the first party game, give the Playstation treatment to a Marvel character, a new big story based game to one of their characters. And Marvel was all about story, so, that made a lot of sense, and Marvel wanted to work with one of the big studios and specifically mentioned us; Sony came and said "Hey are you guys interested in working with marvel?" and we said "of course", but what character do they want us to do? And they were like, 'Oh no, they want you to pick. You guys can have all the choice of which one you want'".
It was like Oh wow. So huh, ok, that's overwhelming decision (laughs) but it was pretty quickly decided it was going to be Spider-Man the first choice, the one that made sense and matched up very well with Insomniac and made most sense with the DNA of the games we've made, the types of games we make, the kinds of stories we tell, the character we thought felt closest to, so yeah we started working on that and it turns out later, here we are, ready to launch this thing in a about a month.
Do you know which title from Insomniac caught wind of first and put you on their radar?
I don't know which one it was, I'm not sure what games, people like Mike Jones had played in the past, but I'm sure it had to do with Ratchet and Clank in a lot of ways. Probably to some extent, Sunset Overdrive may have had something to do with it, in terms of world traversal, but honestly, it's like the sense of humour, and the storytelling we had in those Ratchet and Clank games and the fun gameplay we've had in all those games is hopefully what I guess drew them to us, but you'd have to ask them to be sure - that's just me guessing!
How daunting is it when a studio like Marvel comes to you and says what do you want to do, you pick ; you say it was a fairly quick decision to come to Spider-Man, did you bat around a pitch and go back to them or did you say we want to do Spider-Man and they said go do what you want?
No, it was more we kind of talked internally; there wasn't a close second place, it was pretty clearly Spider-man; we spent some time talking about it and went back to them to say Spider-man and they were like Yay, that's awesome, they were very excited; Bill Roseman, who's the executive creative director at Marvel games, he loves Spider-man so much, his son is named Peter so they were pretty excited that we were going to make a Spider-man game and they were going to work with us on it because they knew they'd be working on it too, so it all worked out well.
Then as soon as that started, our people began doing research, playing games, not just Spider-man games, but a bunch of video games that were related, and then started having those conversations with Marvel who were just minutes away from our office, so having those in person conversations to figure out what that story would be over the next several months.
How did the evolution of the story go? Did you keep going back to them or did you just follow an overall arc? Normally with those big cinematic universes, there are plans , bigger parts on the board that you're not aware of for characters for other films?
Well, we're not tied to any other universe so it didn't really matter, we're creating our own Spider-Man universe; there was no restrictions on we couldn't touch anything, because our game is not tied to the MCU, to a comic series, so anything they do isn't really affecting any other players and so we kind of had free rein.
That's a good creative freedom to have I guess?
Yeah it was very good; the story itself definitely coalesced over that first three month period, there was core days of like Spider-man and Peter Parker's worlds colliding, and lot of the major pieces were in place early on, and I'd say over the last couple of years, it's been relatively figured out - the major beats have been figured out, and obviously somethings like gameplay changes and the story accommodates that stuff, but we kind of knew where we were going, and we knew how we were going to shape up for some time, so it's just been executing it for quite a while.
Was it difficult or different working on a title that was not your own property?
I wouldn't say difficult, I'd say different. With great power, there's also great responsibility;ok, you now have 50 plus years of comics, movies and cartoons and all these fans who love it and him, this beloved character that everyone knows around the world and you have all this inspiration, all this stuff to draw on, which is awesome and overwhelming, how do you tell a new story within that, how do you mix it up and surprise people, and there's all these expectations from fans so you have a lot to live upto. And in some ways, this is our first Spider-man game and it kind of has a new IP feel about it when we're making it.
You may have a lot of the character and story stuff figured out but what's swinging going to feel like, what's our mechanic for that,what's our combat like, what's our camera like, what's our gameplay - all this stuff is new and you have to figure out how it works, so it does help to have some of that figured out, but it's still a challenge in its own way in creating something from the ground up.
How difficult is it to make Spider-man your own? Did you take some games as starting points, look at mechanics and develop them?
I wouldn't say we took games as starting points, we played a bunch of them; not just superhero games, not just Spider-Man games, anything; DMC or fighting games . It's a good point, you think about Spider-man as a character, he's probably been posed in every way he could ever possibly be posed, right? There's only so many ways you can contort the human body and especially then if you are talking about one that's a 3D model and not one that's ink on paper where you can cheat; you can't cheat a model in a lot of ways. It's interesting because some of that is, some of those areas are well established so it's about drawing on what your favourites are, drawing on the inspiration to make some of those our own, and pay homage but also to make it feel fresh.
In terms of developing the combat, it was trying to feel like Spider-man should feel; it wasn't necessarily trying to figure out anything else from any other game; you wanted to be him this masterful acrobatic improviser so he's web-zipping, leaping around, swinging around, leaping over enemies, sliding through their legs, dodging all the time, using the environment against them, using his gadgets and so trying to figure out how to make all those things work in kind of the classic style of Insomniac combat where you just have all these choices and how you want to play it in this situation was really the big challenge.
Was there a lot of input from other people? Did you look at all the different paradigms of this gameplay?
It was like you knew webs were going to be a big thing; you knew web shooters are obviously an important thing. Obviously you can web people and stun them and we have like the perfect dodge mechanic and if you dodge them at a certain time, you can web them in the face and stuff, but if there's someone coming at him, or he can use his webs to pull things away from people - you can use webs to pull people to him or himself to someone. It was like "Ok what are all these moves you want Spider-man to be able to do?" ;webbing people to the wall is just for fun, or when you knock someone down you should be able to web them down and keep them down. Trying to make all of that work, you have all those pieces, and and trying to make a cohesive combat system and using all of that and gadgets, his aerial combat, it actually just takes a ton of iteration not just to piece it together, but the flow as well and sense of style when you're in combat. I wouldn't say we under-estimated it, but it took a lot of iteration from the combat team, kept working on it, kept working on it, kept working on it, making it better, and better, and better. You have a lot of respect when you know there's great action games out there that have done great things over the years and a new found respect when you deal with a character that is as agile and mobile as this one, and has all these options - and what it takes to create a game like that.
It seems like a massive free open world game as well, at what point did you start to look at reigning it back in and we need to just stop scale it back; or did conversely you think you had to push it further?
I think we knew we were never going to make a 1-to-1 New York in terms of the scale of it as it's so huge; we wanted it to feel dense and populated, we wanted the city to feel like it was people on the streets and we wanted to do activities in areas. The other thing we knew was we wanted to have activities to have story ties; it shouldn't ever be a straight up challenge, there's always a story for whatever you're doing. This ties into collectables.
Collectables - ie the backpacks you'll find in the game - each backpack has a little memento of his past eight years of being Spider-Man, the past eight years of his life; he has a line, so he'll say something about that; you can learn a little more about his character, who he's been by finding his backpacks and if you wanna do combat, and want to do combat situations, there's enemy bases - you've taken Wilson Fisk down but his men are still out there and as you go take care of that base, you'll find out what they were doing there - what illegal operations were happening there and the same thing is true when the Inner Demons show up, they also have their own quests and storylines too, but erm, we tried to make sure anything you did, even if you're just taking a photo of landmarks in the city, Peter has something to say about it and tie it back in so you're never just collecting something, but you're collecting something and getting a little tidbit of story with it as well.
There are Reddit threads dedicated to other bits, discussions over whether traffic jams will exist, that kind of thing - you're a community manager, how much of the game has been shaped by the fan feedback?
We were working on this in the dark for a long time, when no one knew we were doing it so that sort of instantly is helpful, because we established a strong vision internally of what we were doing. And I still think that's true our vision is clear; just because someone says they may disagree with our vision and they want us to go a different way, it's fine, but that's our vision and that's what we're sticking to.
But there's always good feedback, and whether it's a silly bug we didn't see or there's a line missing on two parts of his suit, the fans caught and flag ; we don't spend time staring closely at his suit, cos we're working on all manner of things in the game. Even just stuff from people in the office, it all helps. We're always trying to listen, and we're always trying to improve, so if there's legitimate good feedback for improvement, we'll always take that into consideration. We're always listening to what fans have to say ; not just fans but what people said in previews - there will always be criticism, and especially constructive criticism, we'll take that all day every day.
That's not to say we can do it all, and not to say we always agree, but if it's a good idea or point, we're always happy to make the game better. Whether that comes from fans or whether that comes from partners in games, or partners at PlayStation, there's a lot of people who want to see this game be the best that it can and we're happy to be driven by that.
The key to any Spider-Man game is making you feel like Spider-Man, what was the moment when you thought "This is it, we've got something here"?
Pretty early on, Web-slinging was definitely that day one thing we started working on from the beginning and that we knew we had to get absolutely right. Pretty early on, we started getting there - it just has to feel really good. We took all those lessons from Sunset Overdrive of fluidity and flow and tried to apply what we'd learned on that. It's no fun if you swing and face plant into a building and fall down - but with the R2 button if you're holding that, now if you face plant into a building, you'll start running up it or one side of it, so you can keep moving, if you wanna keep moving, you can. And giving people the power - Spider-Man will overcome anything even if he does hit something, he's going to clamber up it or over it, move forward, or keep chasing it - and that really feels good in the game. I think when that all started to come together, it was clear we were onto something. So we just spent more and more time tightening and polishing it - upto the point, I've been playing this game for three plus years, I've played the whole thing again this year and I'm still excited for it - it's just kind of a bizarre feeling. I'm really excited for the trophies that will be enabled so I can go play through again - I wanna unlock all the trophies. I've played it a few times this year at home - not just in the office but at home on my couch, and played through a few versions, and I want to play it again.
That leads me to spoilers talk and obviously you will have concerns about what creeps out with this story. We live in a spoiler age, how do you maintain that these days? You've held a lot back from previews and builds because you want the fan experience - do you still think that's possible in this day and age?
I think there's a lot of responsibility on fans, to guard themselves if they decide to, as much as there's a responsibility on us to not show too much in some ways. I don't know, people debate spoiler culture and if it's needed, it's a relatively new thing.
I will say in this, we've been trying to to surprise people and to shake things up in a way that's rewarding. You kind of know these characters, but you hopefully haven't seen them all in situations like this. You can read about these surprises in advance, or you can experience them yourself - which we always think is the best.
There's stuff we haven't shown at all, in marketing et al; there's obviously going to be people who leak things or accidentally talk about something or a copy falls off a truck somewhere and people will start posting about it. Even reviews, how do you, if you're having core things you're holding back, how do you possibly ask someone not to talk about this thing if you want them to honestly talk about and critique your game? And so I guess we're really hoping people just warn folks if there's stuff in there, or you can have stuff sectioned off if we're not going to show and if you want to talk about them, but others don't want to know, great, I hope you just warn readers.
They can press the back button and miss it that way, Thanos Demands Your Silence was the great Avengers Infinity War credo - like that movie, if you'd told me all the stuff that would have happened, it wouldn't have the same impact at the theatre.
When it comes to letting stuff slip, how close have you personally got?
Me personally? I don't have a good example off the top of my head but I've had one or two where I've said something off the cuff and I was like 'I almost said that'
Not anything big but we've shown a breadth across this game; we've definitely shown a good chunk of this game, you've seen bits and pieces; we haven't shown in depth a lot of things so...There's some stuff we haven't shown at all that we've put in a black hole and left for people to experience - I know the folks who are following it maybe know some things and know where the black holes are and are what's based in there cos of what's around it. But what I am hoping is that people playing this game won't know all of that and will be just totally surprised by what we've done and we'll have them experience big moments which are surprising and emotional - I'll be very curious to see people's reactions.
Talking of reactions, it was well received at E3 and reviews of the first few hours, you must be fairly confident it's going to do well out there in the market place?
It's crazy; the reception's been really great. I don't even know how to gauge it, this is the biggest thing we've ever worked on; it could well be the biggest game Insomniac's worked on, so it's kind of hard to focus. It just seems gigantic. It's like, Wow, that's just crazy, I don't know how to process it I guess. We're still not there yet; people still have to play this thing, and like the whole story, the mechanics, and the world - yeah, the reception's good, hopefully the whole game lives upto expectation so we'll see. Even more so than reviews, hopefully it lives up to what the fans want, we got a ways still to go. It feels good so far, but it feels like a lot of people are excited based on pre-orders. It's very flattering people would put their money and faith in us already.
You've made MJ a playable character, how do you feel about women in games, we've got Ellie in Last Of Us Part 2 - do you think we're starting to see a bit of flow through in terms of representation?
This being us wanting not to tell not just a Spider-Man story, but a Peter Parker one too, not just a superhero story, but a human one too, we really wanted to dive into Peter Parker and his relationships and you can't just show that in a cut scene and really explore her.
Especially in the role we've put her in, she's not just a nightclub owner or an actress, she's an emerging investigative reporter at the Daily Bugle and her world and Peter's world collide. They've been broken up for six months, they haven't talked for a while and their worlds only come back together because MJ is poking around somewhere that turns into quite the scene and that Spider-Man needs to show up to. It's a new dynamic of reporter and superhero following the same thread, but also ex-boyfriend and ex-girlfriend, all that emotional baggage and how does that all come together. It's worlds colliding, which is where the best Spider-Man stories come from. It gives us that interesting place to go to.
But also, we just wanted to make sure her characterisation was awesome, that she felt like a really strong and capable character. Peter's working on his career and MJ's working on hers too- she's trying to be the best she can be.
Just showing her in cutscenes would have been a disservice; we need to let people be her, and see the kind of things she's going to see. And I also think it gives you an interesting perspective on playing a non-powered character in a superhero world and lets you see the superhero from a different side eventually. She's really great, Laura Bailey's really awesome, the writing for her is terrific, her performance is terrific and I'm really happy with people playing the first few hours and coming out just raving about her and how much they loved her. She's a great force to the story.
I think there's always room for improvement. I think the video game industry as a whole is getting better over time, and I think there's always opportunities to tell different stories from a variety of perspectives. It's a big opportunity because of all the stories we haven't told, if you're focussed on one type of character, you're only going to get one type of story and so many of the great stories are because of interesting character choices. I do improv comedy, and if you make a bold character choice, it takes you places you never knew where you would go. So having more bold character choices for games will only take us into more interesting places we've never been.
Is that what Insomniac would like to do next?
We've finished the game, last week whew, we're still working on a day 1 update and we'll have some DLC coming that have new stories and new characters, Black Cat's a starter for this. Sooner rather than later we'll have timings for those and show some of that stuff off in the near future and there'll be new suits to craft as well. In terms of other stuff, we've always been really good at planning at Insomniac, cos we have whole teams of 250 people - you don't want to lay people off, you want to have stuff to work on. We definitely have stuff we're working on, we'll announce details in the future.
What's the one moment you're proudest of?
It's a spoiler so I won't say! There's some really good emotional unexpected moments that are in the game and I'm excited for people to experience them. When we had that sequence at E3 last year where he was chasing that helicopter, seeing that kind of blockbuster Spider-Man moment on an E3 screen was really special. It was a level of spectacle and story-telling that was elevating our craft at Insomniac and taking us to a new level. That was exciting for us to see play out. As a whole I'm really excited for people to meet our versions of these characters and get to know them a little bit - not just the Spider-Man side of the story.
What's your 5 second pitch to those who've never heard of Spider-Man?
Everyone else is going to, so you better should to (laughs)
You don't want to be the only one not playing!
Hopefully you love Ratchet and Clank, Spyro the Dragon, it's the same group of knuckleheads you know making a Spider-Man game and it's the biggest we've ever made. There's been a ton of people putting a ton of time into it and I think it's got not just great gameplay, great open world, and a great way of getting around it, really fun combat and a terrific story that's not just about Spider-Man but about the man behind the mask. So I think there's a lot to relate to and whether you are someone who's had that time of your life being out of school and having their first job, or doing it now, or looking at really looking forward to getting out on your own, it's something everyone can relate to.
It's always good to be in ahead of that sequel, right?
(Grins) You know we're just focussing on that DLC right now.
Marvel's Spider-Man hits PlayStation exclusively on September 7th.
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