Key Highlights:
- Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 expands Insomniac’s version of New York beyond Manhattan with playable areas in Brooklyn and Queens.
- Creative director Bryan Intihar has described the overall map as roughly twice the size of the original Marvel’s Spider-Man.
- Insomniac researched real neighbourhoods through Google Maps, local organisations, businesses and online communities while designing the expanded city.
Insomniac Games has revealed more about how Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 expands its version of New York, with Brooklyn and Queens joining Manhattan as fully explorable parts of the open world.
The additional boroughs substantially increase the playable area. Creative director Bryan Intihar previously described the new map as roughly twice the size of the original Marvel’s Spider-Man, with Brooklyn and Queens providing environments that differ from Manhattan’s dense concentration of skyscrapers.
New screenshots published alongside a New York Times report show several parts of Insomniac’s expanded city, including Times Square, Coney Island and Grand Army Plaza.
The expansion also confirms what earlier material had suggested about Queens becoming a playable location. Players will be able to cross the East River rather than remaining largely confined to Manhattan as they were in the previous games.
Coney Island is one of the most recognisable additions. Insomniac had already shown the area in July’s story trailer, while Brooklyn and Queens introduce lower-rise residential districts alongside the returning towers and streets of Manhattan.
Building those neighbourhoods presented a different problem for the development team. Design director Josue Benavidez told the New York Times that much of the research began while developers were working remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Benavidez said the team spent considerable time using Google Maps while recreating areas of the city. Developers also contacted organisations including the Center for Brooklyn History, posted questions in neighbourhood-focused Reddit communities and spoke with businesses close to locations they were studying.
Insomniac was not attempting to reproduce New York building-for-building. The studio also had to adapt neighbourhoods around the movement abilities of Peter Parker and Miles Morales.
Rowhouses, brownstones and lower buildings present different traversal conditions from Manhattan’s skyscrapers. Insomniac therefore varied street layouts, incorporated recognisable locations such as Brooklyn Visions Academy and added environmental features including additional trees where they supported web-swinging.
Benavidez explained that elements of the environment were intentionally positioned with traversal in mind. That becomes more important in Spider-Man 2 because the larger map also needs to accommodate faster web-swinging and the new Web Wings without making the expanded boroughs cumbersome to cross.
The Chrysler Building remains one notable omission from Insomniac’s recreation of New York. The landmark appeared in the original Marvel’s Spider-Man but was absent from Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales after the building changed ownership.
Insomniac previously explained that negotiations to include the Chrysler Building in Miles Morales did not work out. The studio has confirmed that the landmark will also remain absent from Spider-Man 2 after it was unable to reach an agreement with the building’s current owners.
That absence does not change the broader increase in scale. Brooklyn, Queens and locations such as Coney Island give Insomniac more varied environments to build missions around while also changing the conditions players encounter when moving through the city.
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 launches exclusively for PlayStation 5 on October 20, 2023.
