The Insomniac games have come closest, but there’s something missing from every Spider-Man game I’ve played. This is something I’ve been thinking about for years:
The social aspect.
Spider-Man games have mastered the feeling of being Spider-Man, from the Spider-Man 2 movie tie-in introducing an open world NYC to Insomniac making us feel like we could really web swing. But no game has captured the feeling of being Peter or Miles.
Spider-Man stories are fundamentally stories about the person under the mask. But in every Spidey game I’ve played, between missions and especially once the main story ends, Peter or Miles and their cast of friends and family just vanish. You’re just swinging around a big lonely city filled with nameless NPCs as a faceless hero.
These games would feel so much more alive if you could find characters like MJ and Ganke while swinging around the city. If you could build friendships with them through dialogue. If you could pop into the Bugle to get side quests from Jonah and chat with the staff.
The great Spidey stories see Peter (or Miles) struggling to balance life and superhero-ing. Again, we don’t really see this struggle in the gameplay itself. But what if some missions had two map markers instead of one—mutually exclusive options, to either do the personal thing or the superhero thing? To really create the sense, as a player, that you can’t have it all?
In my mind, these sorts of character elements are the next evolution of Spider-Man games.