- Hi everyone, I'm Brian Intihar,
senior creative director at Insomniac's Games
and at Marvel "Spider-Man 2"
and I'm here to answer your questions on the internet.
This is video game support.
[upbeat music]
First question, Ben Edapal asks,
"How did you guys come up with the web shooting sound?"
First off, we hire a really awesome audio team.
They actually told me that what they do
is they have silly string, plastic wrap, shrink wrap
and they even make those thlip sounds with their voices
and it's all integrated into making our awesome web sounds.
As a creative director,
I overall see everything on the project,
but I do not offer my own sound effects
because nobody wants that.
@thegamerPA asks, "Honest question, do game directors focus
"on the overall creative vision of a game
"or do they have some type of programming/coding skills."
So you actually don't need to have programmer/coding skills.
There's a lot of different ways
to become a creative director or a game director.
I actually started out as a journalist
writing about video games and eventually I said,
"Hey, I'd love to go work at a studio,"
And I actually started working at Insomniac
roughly 15 years ago and I started out
on the community team, answering emails,
talking to our fans.
A couple years later, became a producer
and then one day back in 2014
walked into the office of Ted Price, our president, CEO.
He asked me what do I think
about working on the Marvel game?
Yes, please.
And I said, "I don't wanna be the producer.
"I wanna be the creative director."
If you have a passion, willing to work hard
and you work well with others, you can do anything you want.
@Ben_N64 asks, "The game, 'Spider-Man 2' Venom
"is the best Venom design.
"Change my mind."
Ben, I'm not gonna change your mind.
I completely agree with you.
So we want to take all of the elements
that players and fans love about Venom,
whether it's his size, the symbol, his teeth,
his mouth, his eyes, the transformation, the power.
So we want to kind of be respectful of the the DNA
of the character, but also not be afraid to mix things up
and take that into all into account.
Get 19 inches of Venom, all 19.
This is actually the part of the collector's edition
and that features both of our Spider-Men
fighting their toughest challenge yet
in the form of Venom, pretty badass.
Matthew Guz asks, "What's your game design philosophy
"in tweet form?"
You wanna deliver the fantasy
while making a world and characters that you absolutely love
and wanna spend time.
SilentWrath87 asks,
"How do you decide which suits go in the game,
"is it personal preference or do you think about abilities
"and which suits would match up well with them
"and are you free to pick or do Marvel have a say?"
Wow, where do I begin?
We know there are suits that everybody wants.
We talk to Marvel, we talk to our Sony producers,
we get artists to create brand new suits
that had never been made before.
Suits are unlocked via basically
hitting a certain hero level
and then having the right resources to craft it.
So that's how you do and then because we have two heroes,
we have over 65 suits and now we wanted to go
even bigger with that so now the majority suits have
what we call suit style.
So there's usually four different suit styles you can unlock
for that suit, which means we have over 200 different suits
in the game, which is crazy.
But at the same time we hope we got everything
everybody wanted.
It's like Christmas and it's the all the presents
are under the the tree and you're like,
"I hope I got them everything they wanted."
Clay864 asks,
"But is there going to be a Spider-Man 5 console
"like we got with the PS4 from the first game?"
Damn straight there's gonna be.
Got this sweet controller.
Symbiote takeover.
But the real cool stuff
is this sweet, sweet, sweet console.
I don't even have one yet as we sit here.
This idea of the Symbiote and takeover,
not only thematically works for the console,
but it ties very heavily to what we're doing in the game.
So it's awesome design, super happy
that PlayStation wanted to do it.
@DEspumpkinz, with a z, asks,
"Is New York City in 'Spider-Man 2' to build the scale?"
It is not.
Our idea is we want to create a New York City
that kind of you have in your head,
whether you've been there or seen in the movies.
There's tons of recognizable elements,
whether it's certain neighborhoods, certain buildings
and then, of course, this is Marvel's New York.
So we want to have things like a Avengers Tower
or the Wakandan Embassy and what's been really awesome
on "Spider-Man 2" is that we've nearly doubled the size
of the city with the addition of Brooklyn and Queens
so now you see things like Coney Island,
you can see where Miles goes
to school at Brooklyn Visions Academy
and even Pete now living at Aunt May's old house.
And now with things like the web wings,
you can cross things like the East River
and our bridges much easier than you couldn't pass
because in the last games you couldn't even do that.
@TheAnimeG_ asks,
"The web swinging with certain aspects added
"are so refreshing, I'm kind of interested to see how
"they can make 'Spider-Man 2' as cool
"as Miles Morales' web swinging."
How we make exploring the world
and getting around the world better, the web wings,
we knew really early on,
we actually prototyped it really early "Spider-Man 1,"
but we were like, "Ah, we don't know."
It's a cool idea, but we just don't really have
the time for it right now.
So we knew by the time "Spider-Man 2" was rolling around
it was something we really wanted to do.
So that's a big element.
So many times playing "Spider-Man 1,"
you'll be above the the buildings,
you're like, " Well I wanna keep going."
And now you can just press triangle and boom,
pop those web wings and keep gliding.
Just keeping that momentum
when you don't have a web line available.
But I think we've added other things,
like being able to turn a corner really, really fast.
What people have asked for a long time
is yes you can do the loop de loop now,
in our game you can unlock that skill.
So adding all new animations, adding more swing animations,
we know, we've heard you, you guys like swing animations.
We get it.
We've added more.
@Furk729 asks,
"Do you think that 'Spider-Man 2' is story wise,
"combat wise, better than the 2018 'Spider-Man' game?"
God, I hope so 'cause we've been working really hard
to deliver that.
It's not just a story of Peter,
it's not just a story of Miles,
it's a story of both Peter and Miles
and they're not only their journey together,
but individually.
So one mission may just be as Pete,
one mission may just be as Miles,
some missions actually be playing as both of them
or switching back and forth so we kind of control it.
While in the open world, we give you a lot more choice
and then basically what we've done is
we've created content that specific for Peter,
specific for Miles and in the combat front,
we've just been adding a ton of stuff
whether it's new powers for Miles and the evolved Venom,
to obviously our Symbiote abilities with Pete.
Hell yeah, this game is better than 'Spider-Man 1.'
09missyG asks,
"How do you write a compelling story
"that works for an open world game
"where the player could experience it out of order
"or even circumvent parts entirely."
Part of an open world thing that people love
is having that freedom, right?
When you're making something like "Spider-Man,"
we understand, when it comes to Marvel,
everything starts with our story.
What are they going through,
not only in the mask but out of the masks?
It's a balancing act.
We have an amazing team of writers
that work on this for years.
We start really, really broad.
Gimme the paragraph of what the story's about
and then we go into a story treatment.
The story treatment can go half a page,
to one page, to five pages, to 20 pages.
Here's what act one, act two, act three is about
and then we go into, okay, within act one
there's probably five, six, seven missions
and we start to build out a macro
which shows kind of how it's gonna flow together
and then from there, when we have kind of buy-in
from the team and everybody on what the story treatment is,
we start to write scripts.
@lazyjusten asks, "How does Insomnia manage to put out
"such high quality games?
"Like every two years?
"Like what is their secret?"
There is no perfect answer
because no development is perfect.
It's not gonna go perfect.
But what we always try to do is
kind of self-evaluate ourselves.
What can we learn from our previous production
that we can apply to the next game?
Back in the day you would release a game
and you'd kind of be done with it.
Now, even for a single player game,
you're looking at player feedback.
Maybe there's something that is tripping people up
that we can update the game really quickly.
Obviously, with a multiplayer game,
they're continually updating, they're rebalancing,
they're putting out new content.
The industry has evolved,
development is still going even when it's out.
@ZachRuden asks,
"How exactly does one go about designing a game
"to optimize a serious horsepower of a PS5?"
So first off, we're very fortunate to have Mark Cerny,
the architect of the PlayStation 5, be one of our producers.
I think it's this combination of learning about
what the console can do,
what can the console do that maybe we couldn't do before?
What could we do in previous games,
now we can do better?
I think when you look at Marvel "Spider-Man 2"
in comparison to our previous games,
there are a multitude of things that we couldn't do before.
We could not swing as swing as fast as we do now.
The world wouldn't have loaded the way it needs to load
as you're swinging if we didn't have that.
Our hero switching that we do in the open world
would never be as fast as it is.
I think our set pieces,
we'd have to do a lot more smoke and mirrors
than we actually are doing.
Taking our favorite comic panels,
our favorite movie moments and going,
"Hey, we're gonna do that in a video game
"and put you in control."
night_persian asks,
"How does Insomniac get such detailed textures?
"Damn their engine is amazing."
It is amazing.
Our teams work really closely with our engine team.
One of the benefits of having our own engine
is that there's so much collaboration going on
between our artists, our lighters, our effects team,
everything to come together.
Because you can have an awesome texture,
but if it doesn't have great lighting,
it's not gonna look as good as you want.
@Moonlit_Games asks, "What do you think has been
"the most significant advancement in gaming recently?"
I would say the amount accessibility
that all developers across the world
that are adding to their games.
Whether making swinging more accessible,
combat, anything we can do to get more players
playing our games is a huge win
and it's something we're always continue to do
from here on out.
@PostMesmeric asks,
"I often wonder how we begin developers
"determine what should be considered the default settings
"in their games."
I think it starts off with,
who are you making your game for?
Our goal, first off, is we wanna make it accessible
and playable by as many people as possible.
So that's whether it's our,
how difficult the enemies are defeat,
to our traversal controls, our combat controls.
But at the same time we understand that
there are also hardcore fans
who want a really tough challenge
so we offer difficulty modes.
But what we usually do is we're testing our game with people
who come into our usability labs and check it out
and sometimes they say this is way too easy,
sometimes they say it's way too hard
and then we kind of go back and forth
and just try to find that sweet spot.
@IndieWolverine asks,
"Was there a single game that impacted you so much
"that you can confidently say it led to you
"having a career in the big industry?"
Maybe not one game, but it was one console.
It was the original Nintendo, the eight bit Nintendo.
I remember that Christmas I got my first Nintendo
and playing "Zelda" and "Metroid."
I remember when I lost the code to "Metroid"
where I was and I cried my eyes out
even realizing the game wasn't as long
as I thought it was when I was a kid.
From when I was a little kid all the way to now,
I still use it to kind of escape for a little bit
and I know it's probably cliche to say,
but I can't play believe I get paid to do this.
@vaughn_romero asks,
"How often do you alter game mechanics to fit the story?
"Or perhaps how do you use game mechanics
"to benefit a story?"
"Spider-Man 2," a big element of the story
is the Symbiote, they talked about it forever.
When are we having the Symbiote story?
Well, guess what?
It's coming, but it's not just part of our story.
He has that black suit, but it's not just a new suit.
He has all these plethora of Symbiote abilities,
that we wanted to show off how different
it makes Pete's fighting style.
So when we think of our Spider-Men
as these acrobatic improvisers,
with the Symbiote it was really important for us
to show off, not only the power of this substance,
but also his transformational nature.
So people love the Symbiote.
126Gaming, "Just curious if there's any new variations
"to random crimes.
"I remember an 'Ultimate Spider-Man."
Which is a great game.
"Sometimes smaller villains like Shocker and Boomerang
"would spawn as an event.
"Do you guys have anything like that in this game?"
We definitely have done more to spice up our random crimes
with more surprises.
We also have a bunch of things in the open world
that you can do where you can discover some new storylines
that aren't part of the main story that are optional.
But I can promise you, if you like villains,
you will be rewarded.
JMaine518 asks, "Will 'Spider-Man 2' have multiple graphic
"and performance mode options like the remaster
"and Miles Morales games?"
It sure will.
So we'll offer fidelity mode,
which runs at 30 frames a second and runs in 4K,
we'll have performance mode which goes around to 60,
but we reduce the resolution a little bit,
and then for people who have 120 hertz TVs,
we actually have an option where you can run at 40 hertz
and kinda get the best of both worlds.
But, no matter what mode you're running in,
we will have rate trace reflections.
So when you wanna see how awesome, you go up to a window
and you want to see your Spider-Man suit,
not just on the character
but in the reflections of the windows,
it's gonna look white shit hot awesome.
TwoFOOL asks, "Why are video games important?"
Sometimes real life is not the greatest thing in the world
and sometimes we just need to find a way
to take a break from it, reset,
whether we wanna be Link, be Mario, be Spider-Man.
Sometimes we need that time to ourselves
to kind of escape for a little bit.
It's okay to take a break from real life
'cause sometimes, as great as real life can be,
it can be stressful, it can be hard, it can be tough.
But having those moments to kind of take a break
and reset has been really great
and I hope that we can do that with the games that we make.
Thank you for all the questions today.
They were, in the words of Marvel, amazing.