Discussing the Padding in Marvel's Spider-Man (PS4)

[Winter]

So I recently replayed Spider-Man and I have to say that the game is still a lot of fun to play... A bit creepy at times given that it was released in 2018 and had a Terrifyingly Accurate Depiction of the COVID Pandemic before it even happened but still a great game. However, I have to admit that I've felt that the game has is a lot less fun to replay and a major factor in that is how much padding there is in the game.

To show that I mean let's look at the following missions, Taskmaster's task, Black Cat's look out and reactivating the Ubisoft Towers. The first time we do one of these missions they are part of the main story and cannot be skipped even though we can ignore the rest of these missions as much as we want. And NONE of these are related to the main story.

Finding you're lost backpacks doesn't add anything yet you NEED to pickup the first backpack or the game will not progress. They're a fun collectable but finding the first one doesn't have anything to do with Mr. Negative or Doctor Octopus.

And that's not the only problem, the two missions with Shocker do tie into the main story but in a REALLY superficial way. Shocker mentions working with the demons but honestly this has so little to do with the threat they pose and is so meaningless that if you cut it out you would lose nothing.

And finally there's the game's two main villains. Mr. Negative's character and arc is virtually identical to Doc Oc's. Both have a grudge against Norman Osborn, both unleash a plague he created to get back at him, both have a connection to Peter before their fall to the Dark Side and Peter tries to save both of them from themselves only to fail in the end.

It doesn't help that the game doesn't do anything to flesh out Mr. Negative's character and we spend almost no time with him before he goes Supervillain and spend more time with Otto before he's fall. It feels like the first 20 hours of the game is just spinning it's wheels until it gets to the good stuff instead of using the time it has to tell it's story.

Compare this to Spider-Man: Miles Morales. Every side quest is set up during the main mission, things like Spider-Training, the Spider-App and Roxxon Reactors are all introduced in the main mission BUT they all tie-into the main story. The Spider-App, for example, is where we're introduced to Miles' uncle Aaron who will obviously play a major role in the main story as him trying to get the trains running on time which seems to be a mundane problem only for it to turn out that the Underground, the villains for the game, are behind it.

This helps to teach us how a Spider-App mission and general side quests will play out but everything that happens in Aaron ties into the main story so it doesn't feel like a waste of time.

In Spider-Man it feels like it takes forever for the plot to get going and most of the Starter Side Quests are, at best, minor detours from the main story and at worse, set up for DLCs.

I know a lot of fans dislike how short SMMM is but the honest truth of the matter is if we got rid of most of SMPS4's filler quests it would be the same length as SMMM. I checked the extra stuff in SMPS4 takes about 8 hours of a 25 hour long game. That's 8 hours of doing basically nothing. While I do agree that SMMM has it's pacing issues (look at you Finn) I do feel it makes better use of it's time and side missions.

[CharlesPhipps]

Actually, I'd argue that SPIDER-MAN: MILES MORALES suffers for the fact that everything is all interconnected too much. The world feels very small for the fact that everything is related to Roxxon and their NuForm energy source: Phineas, Not-Antifa, the Rhino, the Prowler, and so on. It makes the world feel very small and I feel like adding a few more extra stories would have helped it appear that there's more going on in Harlem than just the nefarious corporate baddies and the people opposing them.

Which is to say that, "If you removed all the filler, the game would be as long as SPMM" but that's just an argument the game needed MORE filler.

Filler isn't always bad.

Pies have filling.

I do think that Mister Negative's handling lacks nuance really but I also think he's got a lot of connections to the story that help things along too. He's connected to Aunt May, FEAST, and also is the guy who murders Miles Morales' father. I feel like that they probably should have given us a bit of time as Morales Spider-Man and have him go after Mister Negative in the finale as opposed to Peter Parker. After all, the idea that Miles has spider-powers too should NOT be a surprise.