Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions Q&A
With Beenox Creative Director Thomas Wilson
Before last year's Batman: Arkham Asylum took a batarang to previous perceptions about superhero games, the genre was generally considered sub-par. But among the best of the merely average were Activision's Spider-man titles. Delivering satisfying web-slinging, acrobatic combat, and a wide-open New York City to swing through, the games managed a decent job of putting players under the spandex. That said, the quality of Spidey games has been in slow but steady decline since last-gen's Spider-man 2. In an effort to bring back Peter Parker's great power (and the responsibility that comes with it), developer Beenox is taking the reigns of the series, and giving gamers not one, but four unique Spidey characters and worlds in Spider-man: Shattered Dimensions. Each of the four areas will boast unique gameplay, challenges, and aesthetics for fans of the web-head. We recently chatted with Creative Director Thomas Wilson to find out how he and his team plan on getting gamers' Spidey senses tingling again.
AtomicGamer: Can you talk a bit about the title including the four versions of Spider-man?
Thomas Wilson: We definitely feel that our game’s most defining feature is the four different universes and the variety it offers to the player. You basically have four very different looking worlds, four unique Spider-Men to play as, and four different styles of combat in the same package. And as a bonus, you get to play as Noir Spider-Man in a videogame! How cool is that?
AG: What can you tell us about Spider-man: Shattered Dimensions' storyline? Is it entirely original, or inspired by any previous canon?
TW: Spider-man: Shattered Dimensions is a brand new storyline being written by Marvel writer Dan Slott. While we felt it was important to create a story unique to our game, we also took inspiration for the universes and art styles we chose, the bosses you encounter, and objects you interact with in our game from the vast library of Marvel and Spider-Man comics. The focus of the story revolves around an artifact called the “The Tablet of Order and Chaos”, which was based on an artifact in Marvel’s canon. This Tablet ends up shattered in pieces at the beginning of our game. It’s Spider-Man’s duty to collect the pieces because, as you’ve probably already guessed, it gives anyone that possesses a piece of the Tablet incredible powers, with the potential for creating mayhem and chaos in the world.
AG: What sort of threats and villains will Spidey be up against in the game? Can you talk about the appearance of any specific villains?
TW: Throughout the game, you’ll get to see a bunch of characters from Spider-Man’s pool of villains. For example, in the Amazing Universe, one enemy you’ll confront is Kraven the Hunter on his own ground: the jungle. For Noir, we took a well-established Al Capone-type villain, Hammerhead, and adapted his look to fit our Noir universe. For all the bosses in the game we wanted to give them a distinct style that fit the universe we placed them in, while also keeping their essence intact. However, you can expect a few surprises once they get a hold of a tablet fragment.
AG: Will there be any appearances by any other Marvel superheroes?
TW: There will be a few cameos from other Marvel characters, but we really wanted to keep the focus on all four Spider-Men. Of course, we aren’t ready to talk about any other characters just yet but expect to hear about them in the future!
AG: Is Spider-man: Shattered Dimensions being built on the same engine as Web of Shadows? Will it be doing anything new under the hood that we have not previously seen in a Spidey game?
TW: Beenox is using its own proprietary engine for this Spider-Man game. Just looking at screenshots and gameplay footage of the game, you can easily see that our engine is able to render some amazing (pun intended) looking levels. Our engine is fully-featured in that we have access to all the available shaders out there (bump, specular, parallax, etc.) and our physics engine is also really neat (rag doll, cloth simulation, etc.). Also, we have internal tools that allow us to do really precise facial animations which are really helpful for the sequences where you get up close and personal with the bad guys.
AG: Will the title use the same core swinging and combat mechanics as the previous games?
TW: Yes and no. I mean, why fix what isn’t broken? So you’ll get the same fantastic free-roaming web slinging experience as in the previous games, including the ability to web zip and move really quickly from one point to another. Regarding combat, we looked at Web of Shadows as a major influence since we thought it was a major highlight from that game. However, we made sure that each Spider-Man in our game had his own “signature” moves. For example, Amazing Spidey uses his webs a lot to create web shapes during fights, while Noir’s style is more of a brawler or a boxer.
AG: Any new gameplay featured that we haven't seen in a Spidey game before?
TW: The stealth part of the Noir universe is definitely one of the many new things we’ve added for a Spider-Man game. It’s surprisingly satisfying to crawl on a wall in order to get close to an opponent and then take him down quietly with your web. There’s a lot more cool stuff we wish we could talk about, but unfortunately you’ll just have to wait for future announcements.
AG: Are you looking at Spider-man: Shattered Dimensions as a complete reboot of the franchise?
TW: The previous Spider-Man games have always been great as sort of stand-alone games each with their own self-contained stories. While Spider-man: Shattered Dimensions isn’t a direct sequel, it isn’t really a reboot either, simply a brand new approach to the franchise. Bringing something unique to the table was very important to us, and I think you’ll find the various location and enemies of our game quite interesting. For example, the jungle in which you fight Kraven is a big departure from the urban settings that we could see in a city like New York. We wanted to explore locations that were different for a Spider-Man game and places that would allow him to use his abilities in interesting ways.
AG: Is there anything specific from Web of Shadows that you really felt needed to be significantly improved upon? Conversely, was there anything from that game that you really wanted to retain for Shattered Dimensions?
TW: As I mentioned earlier, we really like the Web Swinging and the Combat mechanics that were in Web of Shadows. So we studied those features that were done well in Web of Shadows and built upon that to accommodate the different nuances of each of the four Spider-Men in our game. As far as improvement, one of the main design principles we tried to stick to was to really have the player feel like the character of Spider-Man. That’s not to say that previous Spider-Man games didn’t do this, but we felt that having four different Spider-Men was challenging in that we had to display the different sides of Spider-Man in each universe, as well as bring out that consistent essence of who Spider-Man really is.
Thanks to Thomas Wilson and the guys at Activision and Beenox for letting us get inside Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions. It's set for release this Fall on DS, PS3, Wii, and Xbox 360.
