Video: 18 Minutes Of The Spider-Man 4 Xbox Game We Sadly Never Got

It's really weird, Sony has a few Marvel games coming out and the narrative now is Xbox needs hero games, but like, if hero games are the only hype of a console then surely that's only going to lead to fatigue. Xbox doesn't need Spiderman, or Wolverine, they've got Star field, Fable, Master Chief. Don't get me wrong, Insomaic Marvel games look immense and one day I'll get a PS5 once those games are out, but this strange new narrative driven by the Sony lot is super weird and reeks of desperation

@Hellosmoothskin I think your underestimating how big marvel is, if xbox got hulk, Deadpool or xmen then that would be massive and would definitely drive gamepass subs more

@Hellosmoothskin I don't think this is the narrative driven by 'the Sony lot' but typical media garbage. Wrote something the other day where Xbox article and comments suggesting Sony need to get FPS and Western RPG now that MS bought Bethesda et al.
I just don't see why each of them should change? There are plenty of 3rd party FPS/ RPG to cover Sony fans without needing a Halo/Doom/Wolf games and similarly there are plenty of 'superhero' style games Xbox has/will have that don't need to be Spiderman.
If they all start offering the same games between them then it will half the creative output in general.

@Hellosmoothskin I agree with the others but also you. These gets by Sony are huge. They will sell consoles and millions of units.

But Xbox doesn't need to watch Sony and copy. They have their own plan and diverse lineup. Similarly, Sony does not need to copy Xbox and have a Halo, Gamepass, and Gears. Let the companies push each other but also be their own unique ecosystem.

Man do I wish Activision managed to cut a deal with Disney to let them sell again their old game catalog, and make them Backwards Compat on Xbox. I think for the most part Activision has embraced Xbox OG/360 BC so this is likely just a licensing roadblock.

@Hellosmoothskin Xbox needs super hero games as much as they need sports games, racing games and arcade games.

There are some people that are simply attracted to specific genres and any platform holder should want to have a decent offering on any such front. The games don’t need to be exclusive, though. Xbox is getting the Guardians of the Galaxy game and already got The Avengers (for as bad as it was, and as incomplete as it will be without Spider-Man.) I’m sure now that Disney|Marvel are opening up their licensing we will see more super hero games on Xbox, at least from third parties.

I'll buy a PS5 like I have with the PS4 Pro and PS2....on Black Friday weekend at Bestbuy with a ton of 1st party games for $10.

Every few years, it never fails. Not a hater, but the controller isn't my favorite and Sony acting like Nintendo over a few things is my reasoning. Just not as seamless as it has been being an Xbox owner the past few years.

However, Spiderman on PS4 was one of the few games that had me hooked, along with God of War and the UnCharted series...which may be my favorite series of all time now that I reflect back on them and how the stories really engulfed me.

I prefer [Prototype] over the spiderman games. Grabbing, anyone really, running to the top of a building and throwing them as far as Mercer could throw, is cathartic. Getting the full body armor and running through the streets, swatting away cars like so much New York debris, is awesome!
Spiderman games, from the first ps iterations, to insomniac's masterpiece, haven't differed much. Ya swing, ya fight, ya web, ya move on. Spiderman: shattered dimensions was a nice break from the openworld format.
Short story, long, I'm tired of the webhead. Tired of batman. We need some new comic/superhero blood.

This is honestly just depressing me more about the state of Sony's 1st party and the fate of Insomniac. This is a 2011 Activision game and it basically looks like the same game as the game before it, which is basically the same game as Insomniac's Spiderman which is almost certainly basically the same game as Insomniac's next Spiderman game. It's prettier with better animations, smoother handling, and more elaborate cinematic scenes, the the overall action in the overall world is all just different versions of the same game with the same camera angles and the same worldscale. If nothing else this tells me Marvel really dictates what the game will be and the studio is a factory tasked to manufacture it. Either that or Insomniac has no creative vision on their series (Insomniac started there's before Sony bought them) at all to take it in new directions, but that doesn't sound like Insomniac.

Right down to striking a pose for pedestrians, it's all right here. 2011, 2018....all the same game. And that's the biggest hype going on for PS5 now is the newest iteration of what amounts to a 2011 Activsion tie-in game. And then they're doubling down on it.

@UltimateOtaku91 Personally, the only thing other than more Marvel games that could make me LESS hyped for a platform is a focus on more zombie games. Spiderman is throw-away get it on a deep sale kind of garbage to me at this point. And my interest in Wolverine is less than zero. I know it's big money, big sales, but man, that might as well be a Mahjong collection and a remaster of Haze as far as my interest level goes. Not the kind of games I play games for, that's for sure. I don't dislike it, but I'm not interested enough to actually pay more than a trinket amount of money for it.

@SplooshDmg I fit that group. I bought spiderman because it was Insomniac even though I don't care even slightly about Marvel anything and never did. But...it was disappointing. The open world was the same empty trash with the same repetitious activities as these old Activision games. It really lacked that Insomniac addictiveness. It felt like a nicely defined open world with great action, that was as empty and insipid as the old Activision games that served as nothing more than a map screen for the only-rails 20 hour adventure campaign. The only thing that could convince me to buy Spiderman 2 is if it indeed has coop because that would be genuinely different and cool.

@SplooshDmg Yeah. I mean I knew Spiderman is boring, but I figured, well, it's Insomniac, it has to be great! I mean what they did, they did well in terms of controls and movement, but there's really nothing to it that hasn't been done before, and it's all depressingly repetitive. Even the RPG-lite upgrades are almost entirely useless, added "just because." I've never been disappointed by Insomniac, but I don't blame them. It's clear that you get the same game no matter the studio that makes it, so I'm sure the problem is on Marvel/Disney. Insomniac took what they had to make and made it the best it could be made, but it's still a mediocre base materal to work with and they made it very nicely within that cage.

I think what's bad about it is, the on-rails movie-game part is done great, and maybe the game would be better with only that. The open world is essentially pointless. It's fun to swing around NY and explore the corners once, but there's little other than collectibles and repeating auotmatic "crimes" to deal with. The open world doesn't seem to exist for any reason other than to say it's open world. But it's a cool world to explore once. But after you've done it in one game......why do you need to do it again? Whether it's Acti 2011 or Insomniac 2018 or Insomniac 2022, it's the same NY. NY hasn't changed. NY hasn't changed since Brooklyn went from Little Italy to hipster activists with rich mommies and daddies that pretend to be poor. At least inFamous takes you from Empire City to New Marais, entirely different, to Seattle (because Seattle is an intriguing fictional city like Empire and Marais. I want to believe Des Moines is a real place!)

Spiderman is the same freaking city in every single game. I know, it's Spiderman. It has to be. But how many games can you just swing from the same buildings in the same city doing the same overall nothing? At least let us visit Newark and Albany or something...give us something new!

@SplooshDmg What's most depressing is film is dominated by Sony+Disney (Plus Comcast in distant 3rd). Now games can be dominated by Sony+Disney. All selling Beijing approved inoffensive trite garbage.

And agreed on KotR, that's what made it great, it was sci-fi and happened to pull in elements of SW that made a much much (much) more compelling SW than any of the real SW stuff. Now we get a "remake" that rewrites it and no doubt makes it not an RPG. And will probably double down on combining modern SW to make it as merchandisable as possible and kill all the Bioware-RPG out of it. With a writer that thinks Episode 1 is the high point of the franchise. Ugh.

It defiles precious memories like searching Deviantart for Nintendo characters.

@SplooshDmg It really feels like theres a disconnect between me and the world. The world shows with their wallets that Disney, superheroes, zombies, and GTA are the single best things ever. I, on the other hand, would pay to lock out the above entirely. It's a mix of apathy and true disgust at the mix of the above. Which used to be fine. That's why I played games. The content in games was strange and diverse and generally the opposite of all the things that are popular elsewhere, and therefore somehow appealed to things I liked. Now that it's reversing and just merging with those other things, it's harder to find anything to like in anything. I end up spending more time and money on things that aren't media at all.

MS is still by far appealing to things I like. For now. But I can't stand watching the gaming industry get saturated into the same thing as the film industry. True story, the last movie I actually went to was Return of the King. I consider that "recent." Was that like 18 years ago? I consider that a new movie. I couldn't even name much of what came after. Nothing else in film appeals to me even slightly anymore. It's clearly for an audience that isn't me. Gaming has been, but it looks like it's slipping if the reason to buy a PS5 is a bunch of series I'd have to think hard about in a $5 clearance bin at the supermarket, and would probably ignore if it were on Game Pass in favor of anything else less trite.

Going back to the book vs film thing from the other day, I keep seeing that. Over on PS there's a converation on GoW and cinematography and art. To me cinematography isn't a word that belongs associated with a video game. Right there we've taken control away from the player and the immersive character and turned it over to a "director." Instead of you engaging the world on your own terms and exploring it as yourself placed in another's shoes, you're being presented a world as an art maestro had decided he wants you to view it. That belongs in film. Not in games. But, that goes back to, I see a game like a book. I'm dropped in, given the definitions, and my imagination makes up the rest of it. In film, people want to be wowed by seeing someone elses view of something. In books and my view of games, I want to see it for myself in my own mind with the outline for doing so presented to me. I hate film. The last thing I want to see is games as films. It's the anti-game.

I thought Padme said "One does not simply walk into Mordor, Harry. We have the technology."

@Widey85 Love your insight mate but I don't see why Xbox doesn't need to have a couple of good superhero games on its platform. Would love to see Microsoft's first party studio develop one or two without acquiring an external studio to accomplish it.

@SplooshDmg That's just it, classic gamers are "freaks" - we were always the nerds playing video games. We by nature weren't into the cool things the masses did, that's why games appealed to us, it was something radically different than that stuff we weren't part of/interested in. And it was a nice deep rabbit hole to explore.

It's depressing beyond compare what's happening to the industry. I don't really have words for it. I agree, Matrick was right from the start and head of the curve. We know gaming was "going mainstream" but didn't get what that meant. I thought it meant our nerdy things were going to become more popular. What it really meant was that the nerdy things would be replaced entirely by the things that were already popular elsewhere. The masses didn't learn to like video games. The masses learned to replace video games with movies that have some amount of interactivity, distilling only the thin essence of video games into the format. Who needs RPGs with tons of agency and configuration and ability trees and inventories when you can just have a cinematic story that's paced for the player with key points of interactive moments along the rails. Which, really, is just higher budget versions of what the licensed EA and Activision games of the early '00s were doing.

Heck, dated or not, just compare what inFamous was doing in the superhero genre a decade ago, versus what Spiderman is doing today...

@Widey85 Damn, don't tease me man. 😆

@SplooshDmg Nerdy hobby: Lots of reading. Video games in the 90's. Books in the 70s.

Mainstream hobby: Watch the flashing lights and sounds.

It really seems to have come to the point where a video game dependent on actually reading is seen as archaic, and a video game with flashy motion and sound and acting is the future. The illiterate masses have again decided reading is unnecessary. That really is 90% of what's changed and how it went from nerdy to trendy. Reading remains nerdy. To solve that, video games no longer require reading.....

@SplooshDmg Yep. Somehow I never put 2 and to together on that before. I just happened to notice that basically any game I pick is text-heavy. I didn't do it on purpose, I just realized that most of what I pick is text heavy. I kind of realized it when trying to share my library with someone that DOESN'T like reading and trying to find a selection from my massive 300 game library and it's like: Oh you should play...oh...wait, not that one. Oh, how about....oh, not that either. This one is good! (30 minutes of frustration later) Oh...I didn't realize there was a lot of reading in that...uhm....

I mean to me Yakuza HAS NO TEXT. It's all spoken dialogue. I recommended that thinking it's all voice acted. Then realized quickly the voice acting is all in Japanese....and I read the whole thing as they speak....in their voice.....so to me they're all speaking english with an accent, and I'm not reading at all...and never even realized it

The idea of KotOR without READING the dialogue is the most miserable video game experience I could imagine. I pictured a Bluepoint type remake that keeps every detail exact to the original game, just with new graphics and controls.