With Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered finally hitting the PC platform, it represents another step in Sony’s strategy of using its console big hitters to take another bite of the gaming pie. However, for Insomniac Games and their partners, Nixxes Studios (who joined PlayStation Studios last year), the move to PC is all about “taking advantage of what the platform has to offer, and make fans feel like they got the respect it deserves.”
That was the sentiment shared by Mike Fitzgerald, Core Technology Director at Insomniac Games, and alongside him was Jurjen Katsman, founder & Senior Director of Development at Nixxes Software, who echoed the need for enhancements for the PC debut of the AAA title.
This means support for the relatively new and shiny Steam Deck, allowing players to both enjoy Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered on PC using a controller like the DualSense or if you prefer, a mouse and keyboard.
“What you’ll find in the PC version is a pretty direct translation of all the haptics and trigger features in the PlayStation 5 version. So if you’ll feel the same haptics response. The one caveat on PC is that you do need to use a USB connection from the controller to the PC to get the haptics and trigger features But really, it will be exciting for some PC players who have the controller to get to feel all those features,” explained Fitzgerald.
Those with ultra-widescreen monitors can benefit, and so will those with multiple screens, and at the end of the day, it is the ability to “tweak and play the game exactly the way players like to play” that will be widely lauded.
As Fitzgerald shared, “it was a lot of work” for a big game, and “to show two times as much on the sides” meant going back to adjust everything that may have been ignored before. But with Nixxes’ help and “a ton of effort to chase down everything and catch all the little edge cases and revisit a lot of those old animations,” players are going to benefit.
With even more people getting to play Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered, Insomniac’s aim was exactly that, but for Nixxes and Katsman, it is the flexibility and potential that a PC port provides and the reception the game will have that is satisfying.
“I’m looking forward to people’s reactions. And I hope that those reactions are what we want them to be and then I think as a PC developer, because that expectation level and the hardware level is so broad, we wanna see how people have set up that we didn’t quite anticipate.”
For a game as beautiful as this, that flexibility also comes into play when it comes to graphical options. Whether it be the anti-aliasing or the resolution, the idea is to deliver the best performance that machines are capable of, while utilising some neat tricks to up the ante.
“One thing that I’m personally quite enthusiastic about is our dynamic modes, where the game automatically adjusts itself in terms of upscaling and maintains a very consistent level of performance.”
And while the PS5’s SSD continues to set the bar for game loading, users on PC can expect to see great performance even if they are not using the latest and fastest hardware, even if it ends up taking a couple more seconds.
Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered would not be possible without the collaboration between Insomniac Games and Nixxes Software, and it is a partnership that will only grow stronger with time.
“We were very excited about it. I think we’ve thought about doing it ourselves in the past, but it’s a daunting task to do that. And as a team that works on one specific piece of hardware, the idea of working, needing to make something that runs on all these various combinations of hardware was a little scary,” Fitzgerald said.
“So knowing that we could work with a partner that had that experience and was obviously very capable and competent was exciting. And then like Jurjen said, as soon as we got together and started talking about it and looking over code, it was a very natural relationship between us.”
“It really has been a very powerful collaboration; I feel the teams interact very directly with each other. We have experts from Insomniac chime in when when when we run into something, to me that has been, in a way, and together, we tend to land on solutions where we all like it and put in the game,” added Katsman.
Considering that Nixxes was finally added to the PlayStation fold in 2021, there is certainly potential for even more PC-related projects in the future, and that is something that is not lost on the team.
Katsman explained that “it was interesting how many Sony titles including Spider-Man came up” during discussions, and that the Nixxes team was “really happy” about making the shift and working with Insomniac on Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered on PC.
For Fitzgerald and Insomianc, it has been “a significant amount of time” they had done any PC development, save for smaller VR titles, and this partnership allows everyone to “learn a ton” and paves the way for “that relationship to continue” for more exciting things down the line.
Having enjoyed both the base game and the remastered release, the release of Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered on PC is yet another monumental step for the gaming giant in getting into the platform mix. And with such studios delivering what they do best, it will only make players’ lives even more interesting and fun as Sony’s world of gaming grows ever larger.
Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered arrives on PC on 13 August.
Jake is a full-time trophy hunter and achievement gatherer on consoles, and part-time Steam Sale victim. He has a thing for Batman and awesome statues, and running out of space for both. Send help.
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