Insomniac Games scaled back the final boss in Marvel’s Spider-Man in order to avoid heading into crunch territory, the company’s CEO has revealed.
Speaking during a chat at Develop: Brighton, Ted Price revealed that the battle between the Wall Crawler and Doctor Octavious was originally going to take players all across New York City. However, it was ultimately decided to scale things back for a bigger emotional punch, as well as avoiding any potential crunch at the studio.
Originally, we were going to have a boss battle that took you all over New York City, and it was way out of scope. The temptation is to just brute force it, put our heads down and run through the brick wall.
But the team took a step back and thought about what was important to the players, and that was the breakdown of the relationship between Peter and his former mentor, Doctor Octavious.
They rethought the fight and realised they didn’t need to destroy half of New York to pay off the relationship. In fact, it would have worked against what we were going for. As a result, the final battle is much more up close and personal, has a far bigger emotional impact than planned, and it fit within the time we had.
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This permission to be creative within restraints needs to come from the leaders, who set the tone for the project. I see this in action, and it’s incredible when it works, but it takes constant repetition because I think we default to old habits.
This process is the ideal. Does it happen all the time? Absolutely not. In the stress of hectic production, we often feel we can’t take our foot off the gas pedal, but that’s often what it takes. The team needs to have permission to pause and come up with a better way, instead of bulldozing through the problems and causing potential health problems.
Spider-Man was released for the PS4 in September 2018 and was remastered for the PS5 in November last year as part of the Spider-Man: Miles Morales Ultimate Edition.
[Source – GI.biz]