Marvel’s Spider-Man for PlayStation 5 lands pretty much exactly where we hoped it would. Insomniac Games has delivered another new game for the console that pushes back technological boundaries, which a denser, richer representation of New York City, expanded to include Brooklyn and Queens, while the core rendering itself features dramatic improvements in ray traced reflections, along with the introduction of RT reflections on bodies of water. Meanwhile, the studio firmly embraces the potential of the game’s SSD with streaming that allows for more dramatic and faster traversal through the city, along with some spectacular streaming-based set-pieces.
In our tech review of the game, we had plenty of theories about how some of Insomniac’s tech had been enhanced over Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered and Miles Morales, but we were hungry for much more information. Sony and Insomniac agreed to allow us to speak in an extended interview with Director of Core Technology, Mike Fitzgerald, and we got everything we wanted – and much more.
In this interview, John Linneman talks extensively to Mike about their commitment to ray tracing, how they removed raster-only modes from the game, and how the studio achieved many of its showpiece achievements. We also talk about streaming, compression, along with some of the less noticeable – but still crucial – technological components in the game.
Digital Foundry: I wanted to get your first impressions and first thoughts on the approach that you wanted to take in building this new game. Where did you want to take the technology for this next title?
Mike Fitzgerald: Well, you know, the fun thing to do is to take a photo of New York City and put it next to the game and try to find the exact perspective, right? And then say, well, where are we? Where are we falling short of this? Now, you know, ‘photo-real’ is not exactly the goal. I think it’s more ‘Marvel-real’ or ‘game-real’ or something, some sort of somewhat exaggerated, dramatic interpretation of it. But you know, off the top of my head, some of the things we pointed out were that our buildings got a bit flat in the distance, the lighting would drop out, they didn’t have a lot of macro breakup and variation, so that was one thing we were excited about. Ray-traced reflections on our PS5 launch titles were awesome, but there were still a lot of tricks and fakes around there around building interiors, which was a fun area we were excited to tackle.