Was Marvel’s Spider-Man Downgraded Prior to Release?
Marvel’s Spider-Man is officially out for PlayStation 4. You’re either a fanboy like me and got it this weekend, maybe you’re saving up to buy it, maybe you’re gonna wait for it to go on sale, or maybe you don’t care about a Spider-Man video game at all. Regardless, the hype surrounding this game is undeniable.
The Puddlegate Controversy
At first, it was because of how great it’s E3 2018 demo was received, however, things kind of took a negative turn when the “puddlegate” hashtag went viral a couple of weeks ago.
This started when screenshots started popping up on Reddit and Twitter comparing the game demo to the game’s final release version. People were speculating that Insomniac had downgraded Spider-Man due to a noticeable change in puddle size throughout the game. I know what you’re thinking, “come on, puddles, really?” Did people expect this to be a weather simulator game? No, but I would love a game like that.
Anyways, it wasn’t actually just about puddles. Spidey’s suit and even some shadows and light reflections seemed different from what we had seen before as well. What happened next was a couple of gaming sites like Polygon and Kotaku taking a stance against those who questioned Insomniac’s changes, reducing the issue down to being just about puddles and making fun of people online. In other words, business as usual.
Of course, Insomniac tried to get people to calm down by replying to tweets, which never goes well. They tweeted out, “It’s just a change in the puddle size, there’s no downgrade at all,” to one user and then Community Director for Insomniac, James Stevenson tweeted, “I am telling you I talked to the technical and engineering and art staff, and looked at the live code of this from the final build. There was NO DOWNGRADE.”
Now, I’ll admit that I didn’t think the game looked bad at all, but I did see where skeptics were coming from. The suit did look different, the shadows and reflections weren’t the same, and those puddles were gone.
TAKEN.
REDACTED.
KIDNAPPED.
…PUDDLE-NAPPED?
Now I’m just making up words. Still, there was no way to be sure if Insomniac was telling the truth since the game hadn’t been officially released yet.
The Aftermath
Well thanks to Digital Foundry, who did a great comparison video, we can see whether or not the game was downgraded. They ran a bunch of analysis on cool gamer stuff like FPS and resolution in the final version compared to the demo. It turned out that Insomniac had been honest with gamers and Spider-Man had, in fact, been upgraded since E3, now running at higher resolutions on the base PS4 and the Pro.
What’s more, textures were much better and some changes were made to add a bit more flavor to the game world such as increased car traffic, larger groups of pedestrians, and this cool feature where you can see the rooms inside windows of buildings you crawl on. Spider-Man can be kind of creepy when you stop and think about it.
Now to answer the big question we’ve all been waiting for: were the puddles changed? Yeah, they were; but not because of game performance or anything like that. Really it was just an artistic change made late in development.
Final Thoughts
As far my thoughts on Marvel’s Spider-Man? It’s awesome; I love how it feels to swing around New York City. I love how Insomniac was able to recreate the experience of watching an MCU movie in an open-world game. And of course, I love the visuals and environments.
At the end of the day, was Spider-Man downgraded? No. Were people overreacting over puddles? Eh, kind of. Were they completely wrong? I don’t think so.
What I think the gaming community needs to do is find better ways of communicating. It’s one thing to have a debate online but it’s another thing to argue with someone over digital puddles. I understand that people get passionate about games, however, you can’t just shut down someone else’s view just because you disagree with them.
That’s not what Spider-Man would want us to do. How do I know him so well? Let’s just say me and Spiderman have never been seen at the bodega at the same time.
