168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Spider-Man 2 got an extended look at the last night and it looks like what we, in the biz, call a ‘true sequel’. There’s been a lot of talk recently about what exactly a game needs to do to earn the 2 in the title, culminating in some players claiming that 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Tears of the Kingdom didn’t look like a real sequel in the run-up to its release because it reused assets from 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Breath of the Wild.
But, beyond recent discourse, there has been a muddying of the waters around what constitutes a full follow-up. Ubisoft has put out plenty of game-sized DLC that you can't access without the base game. If you played all of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Assassin’s Creed Odyssey’s DLC it would take you 20-30 hours. The publisher has also released DLC that stars different characters in different worlds, like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Immortals: Fenyx Rising’s Myths of the Eastern Realm and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Far Cry 5’s Hours of Darkness.
Add-ons like that could have been sequels or spin-offs in an earlier era, and other developers have treated them that way, responding to ballooning expectations for how big a game should be by turning content originally planned as DLC into standalone experiences. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Spider-Man: Miles Morales weren’t ‘sequels’ despite being as long and fully featured as plenty of full-length games. For my money, those games represent one of the healthiest trends in gaming: a willingness to make a smaller game in less time, instead of a gigantic game that takes half a decade to develop. With the Spider-Man games, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Insomniac has done both.
Pushback against unrealistic expectations is good. Now that we’re solidly into the new generation and games still mostly look like they did last gen, but slightly better, players need to let go of certain notions of what constitutes a sequel. We’re never going to get a graphical leap as big as the one from 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Super Mario World to Super Mario 64, or even the jump from 64 to Sunshiಞne. We’ve hit a wall for fidelity, and now the impro𒉰vements are and will continue to be more marginal.
So, what constitutes a sequel if not graphical improvements? Everything else! The Spider-Man 2 trailer shows off major changes from the first game that go a long way toward resetting the table for a very different experience. With Peter’s symbiote powers and Miles’ more traditional toolset, Spider-Man 2 is giving players two very different play styles that look to maintain and evolve the old, while introducing something entirely new. The ability to switch between two protagonists brings back one of my favorite systems from GTA 5, a feature depressingly few other games have used in the decade since Rockstar’s open-world opus. The PS5's SSD should make this feature much faster, too. I wouldn't be surprised if you can swap from Peter to Miles in the space of a few seconds.
The story also feels like it's moving beyond the status quo of Spider-Man PS4 and Miles Morales, with interesting angles on classic villains. Kraven is set up as the primary antagonist, and his hunt across New York City will likely provide an overarching story for the game, while the Lizard continues to become (literally) a bigger and bigger threat in the background. Throughout it all we'll have Peter's struggle with the symbiote and Miles' struggle to understand and deal with the changes happening to his mentor. It could go in a different direction, but those seem to be the plot elements in play from the trailer. And, that's a very different story than we got last time around. So different, in fact, it feels like a sequel.
Queens is arriving alongside Manhattan, but it remains to be seen how much new area Spider-Man 2 adds to the map. However, if Tears of the Kingdom has taught us anything, it's that developers can pull off impressive things when they don't have to build the game from the ground up. Insomniac is one of the best developers working at iterating on past work in interesting ways, and I can't wait to see just how different Spider-Man 2 ends up being from what came before. If the symbiote teaches us anything, we know that something can maintain the same shape while changing completely under the surface.