Now before the title of this Opinion Post makes you scream "Hold Up! What about FFXVI!?"; yes, FFXVI is looking to be an absolute banger and likely the strongest recieved Final Fantasy since FFX.
But we are not here to gloat over the gorgeous visuals and gargantuan scale of that upcoming genre defining JRPG.
This is about Spiderman 2, of which we have seen little to nothing of that actually represents the product we will get.
However, do not let that early development trailer from September 2021 fool you. This will not be "more of the same". Insomniac are ambitious, and as a studio they are pioneers in the technological space.
They implemented machine learning AI in runtime before any other platfrom holder, making Spideys muscles pop with hyper realistic muscle deformation.
Insomniac also blew everyone away with their Raytracing solution, all combined with a buttery smooth 60fps performance. The technical bar was set day 1 the PS5 launched, and Insomniac utilised the PS5's hardware in a way that surprised many who were previously sold on the narrative that PS5 is not an RDNA2 machine and incapable of coming close to what Xbox will deliver where Machine Learning and RT are concerned (not going too well that narrative, is it?)
With all that said, Insomniac, though they have been largely secretive as to what they are doing with Spiderman 2, have revealed a few nuggets, and with these we can draw some pretty solid conclusions regarding just how platform defining Spiderman 2 will likely be and how elevated it will be over all previous insomniac titles.
1) Spiderman 2 is going to utilise PS5 tech in an unprecedented way.
During Insomniacs 2019 GDC technical break down of how they made Spiderman, insomniac revealed an ingenious bespoke way to compress the city of New York into incredibly low memory segments they called "tiles".
They revealed that their hero would traverse at a max speed of 32m per second. They would require 3x3 tiles loaded at any given time, given any direction the player chooses to traverse.
3 tiles would cover 138m of traversal in total, requiring each tile to be loaded in every 1.33 seconds.
With all this in mind, in addition to factoring non proprietary HDDs they also diligently catered to, Insomniac calculated that each tile would have a budget of an astonishingly small 20MB - the max throughput being 25MB/s.
So everything you see at any given time - geometry, terrain, base textures - all would be within a 20mb budget.
Now let that sink in. In 2015, they decided their memory budget was 25MB/s and they were STILL able to create 3 years later one of the most detailed and impressive open world cities to date.
Today their budget is in Gigabytes per second territory. 100s of times more bandwidth available for them to toy with. And we know Insomniac like to play!
Can we even begin to fathom what they considered as possibilities when in the conceptual stage of Spiderman 2's development? It begs for speculation. But we will soon see with our own eyes, regardless, the impact that this astronomical increase in budget has had on world scale, traversal, detail, environmental interactions, "living world" background processes and animations, character detail and animations etc. We are not ready!!!
2) Rachet and Clank Rift Apart was barely even a tech demo and sets a likely precedent.
As impressive as Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart was and still is, it impressed whilst being designed around unknown specifications. Insomniac didn't know the bandwidth of the ps5 or its specifications when in pre/early development of R&C, and so they designed the entire game around a safe "low tier" spec. A low-tier SSD was their baseline. The entire premise of Rift Apart however reveals clearly that Insomniac's heart is set on pushing boundaries - seeing what games can now be. They had us jumping through 5 portals to 5 different planets within 30 seconds, those 5 planets easily totalling more memory that 16gb RAM - meaning they designed the game to load at least some of the worlds between world 2 and 5 not from RAM, but to it and then the GPU during the sequence. Digital Foundry revealed the budget requirements of this segment was doable on an SSD far slower than the PS5's proprietary one.
So now, with full knowlege of what their budget actually is, it is reasonable to conclude Insomniac will be more ambitious - to a significant degree, where PS5 tech utilisation is concerned.
Spiderman 2 truly is the first game Insomniac have made around the PS5's specifications. And with all the incredibly impressive games they've already given us since their acquisition, i doubt even the sky will be their limit.
Oh and one more thing: Insomniac are keenly aware Spiderman + PSVR2 is a match made in spiderverse heaven. They KNOW. But that's for another time.
For a little more info, please see link below: its a two part thread, with vital info on both posts
But we are not here to gloat over the gorgeous visuals and gargantuan scale of that upcoming genre defining JRPG.
This is about Spiderman 2, of which we have seen little to nothing of that actually represents the product we will get.
However, do not let that early development trailer from September 2021 fool you. This will not be "more of the same". Insomniac are ambitious, and as a studio they are pioneers in the technological space.
They implemented machine learning AI in runtime before any other platfrom holder, making Spideys muscles pop with hyper realistic muscle deformation.
Insomniac also blew everyone away with their Raytracing solution, all combined with a buttery smooth 60fps performance. The technical bar was set day 1 the PS5 launched, and Insomniac utilised the PS5's hardware in a way that surprised many who were previously sold on the narrative that PS5 is not an RDNA2 machine and incapable of coming close to what Xbox will deliver where Machine Learning and RT are concerned (not going too well that narrative, is it?)
With all that said, Insomniac, though they have been largely secretive as to what they are doing with Spiderman 2, have revealed a few nuggets, and with these we can draw some pretty solid conclusions regarding just how platform defining Spiderman 2 will likely be and how elevated it will be over all previous insomniac titles.
1) Spiderman 2 is going to utilise PS5 tech in an unprecedented way.
During Insomniacs 2019 GDC technical break down of how they made Spiderman, insomniac revealed an ingenious bespoke way to compress the city of New York into incredibly low memory segments they called "tiles".
They revealed that their hero would traverse at a max speed of 32m per second. They would require 3x3 tiles loaded at any given time, given any direction the player chooses to traverse.
3 tiles would cover 138m of traversal in total, requiring each tile to be loaded in every 1.33 seconds.
With all this in mind, in addition to factoring non proprietary HDDs they also diligently catered to, Insomniac calculated that each tile would have a budget of an astonishingly small 20MB - the max throughput being 25MB/s.
So everything you see at any given time - geometry, terrain, base textures - all would be within a 20mb budget.
Now let that sink in. In 2015, they decided their memory budget was 25MB/s and they were STILL able to create 3 years later one of the most detailed and impressive open world cities to date.
Today their budget is in Gigabytes per second territory. 100s of times more bandwidth available for them to toy with. And we know Insomniac like to play!
Can we even begin to fathom what they considered as possibilities when in the conceptual stage of Spiderman 2's development? It begs for speculation. But we will soon see with our own eyes, regardless, the impact that this astronomical increase in budget has had on world scale, traversal, detail, environmental interactions, "living world" background processes and animations, character detail and animations etc. We are not ready!!!
2) Rachet and Clank Rift Apart was barely even a tech demo and sets a likely precedent.
As impressive as Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart was and still is, it impressed whilst being designed around unknown specifications. Insomniac didn't know the bandwidth of the ps5 or its specifications when in pre/early development of R&C, and so they designed the entire game around a safe "low tier" spec. A low-tier SSD was their baseline. The entire premise of Rift Apart however reveals clearly that Insomniac's heart is set on pushing boundaries - seeing what games can now be. They had us jumping through 5 portals to 5 different planets within 30 seconds, those 5 planets easily totalling more memory that 16gb RAM - meaning they designed the game to load at least some of the worlds between world 2 and 5 not from RAM, but to it and then the GPU during the sequence. Digital Foundry revealed the budget requirements of this segment was doable on an SSD far slower than the PS5's proprietary one.
So now, with full knowlege of what their budget actually is, it is reasonable to conclude Insomniac will be more ambitious - to a significant degree, where PS5 tech utilisation is concerned.
Spiderman 2 truly is the first game Insomniac have made around the PS5's specifications. And with all the incredibly impressive games they've already given us since their acquisition, i doubt even the sky will be their limit.
Oh and one more thing: Insomniac are keenly aware Spiderman + PSVR2 is a match made in spiderverse heaven. They KNOW. But that's for another time.
For a little more info, please see link below: its a two part thread, with vital info on both posts
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