Marvel’s Spider-Man 3 is Ready for New York City-Wide Catastrophe

Highlights

• The environmental impact of disasters in the Marvel’s Spider-Man series adds a layer of realism and immersion.
• Fast travel may return in the upcoming sequel but hopefully with a focus on sustaining damage and showcasing narrative consequences.

Upping emotional and environmental stakes in each subsequent entry is a staple of the superhero genre like it is with essentially any genre. Somehow, though, Marvel’s Spider-Man has been able to keep its events relatively subdued and grounded in three entries, at least relatively speaking. The symbiote invasion is certainly the franchise’s most horrific and epic event yet, and at the same time it didn’t seem any more threatening or overwhelming than anything Peter Parker may have already had to deal with in the eight years he was Spider-Man before Marvel’s Spider-Man takes place.

Even Devil’s Breath seemed to cause more casualties than the symbiotes. Regardless, what Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 achieved was a sense of calamity ensuing in New York City that was nowhere as prevalent in Marvel’s Spider-Man or Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales. This was a huge upgrade as it changed how New York City’s open world looked and felt on a massive scale between Sandman and Venom’s individual impacts, and whose city-wide effects occur as an inciting incident and a late-game climax respectively. If this was Insomniac’s way of flexing environmental destruction muscles, it could mean Marvel’s Spider-Man 3 might feature a wholly immersive and adaptive open world.

Marvel’s Spider-Man 2’s Sandman and Venom are Exercises in Environmental Adaptability

The Marvel’s Spider-Man franchise has had quite a few extraordinary moments in its three installments thus far. Still, few come close to how breathtakingly spectacular Marvel’s Spider-Man 2’s opening with Sandman is.

This sequence is multifaceted, a tutorial masked as a lavish set piece, and features the first boss fight in the series where the antagonist has a genuine health bar. But what follows this sequence is most intriguing as it illustrates how Sandman blanketing the open world in sand has affected it.

Traversing through the city and seeing the FDNY work to rescue civilians and recover from the battle’s aftermath is a logical element that is rarely ever shown in superhero media and Insomniac was great not to pass it by idly. Then, the symbiote invasion is similarly effective as it envelops the open world in gargantuan tendrils and symbiote nest pockets for Marvel’s Spider-Man 2’s Spider-Men to purge.

Marvel’s Spider-Man 3 Needs New York City’s Tragedies to Have a Lasting Impact

It’s been a bit of a running gag that Marvel’s Spider-Man has always featured great fast travel and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 arguably went overboard by having next to no loading screens and still hurling players into the map at any arbitrary point they’ve selected. In open-world games where traversal is exhilarating, especially with the web wings Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 debuted, this fast travel system inevitably falls into obscurity despite its technical excellence unless players somehow can’t be bothered to web-swing or glide to their destination.

Fast travel will presumably return in Marvel’s Spider-Man 3, but nevertheless it should seek to sustain any damage that’s inflicted on the city. Soaring over a neighborhood where a boss fight previously took place and mayhem ensued would be incredible if players could see how that’s affected the civilians living there narratively and how that’s affected nearby architecture with regard to gameplay.

Insomniac loves designing scaffolding, construction sites, fire escape balconies, and other city architecture in ways where Spider-Man can interact with it fluidly while traversing and doing so within building ruins and other wreckage would be immersive thereafter. The immersion would then come from how long it would realistically take for the city to repair such unthinkable damage unless maybe a time jump skips past all that construction work or something prevents players from being in that area for a while.