Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered is the latest ex-PlayStation exclusive to come to PC, following a collaborative effort between original developers Insomniac Games and porting specialists Nixxes. It’s also a good time to go skyscape and screw it up, says Alice Bee’s review, and it includes lots of special features just for the Windows version. I’ll be posting a more performance- and hardware-focused guide later this week, but in the meantime I called Jurjen Katsman, founder and senior development director at Nixxes, and Mike Fitzgerald, director of core technology at Insomniac, for a talk about how Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered makes the jump to PC.
I had a few questions about the additions to the game’s technical toolset, such as improved ray tracing and a surprise AMD FSR 2.0 implementation, but first things first: swinging. The arc between Manhattan’s skyscrapers isn’t just a transmission mechanism, it’s central to the “becoming Spidey” fantasy of the entire game, and was originally designed to be played with the controller only. How difficult was it to recreate the feeling of swinging on a PC mouse and keyboard?
“It was an avenue, I guess, to explore,” Katsman admits. I think when we started, we definitely didn’t feel like we had a lot of obvious examples from other games, like, “Oh, we should mirror exactly what that game was doing.” I think that’s a lot more unique.”
“We started with some initial attempts, and then we kept iterating with some feedback from various people in the studio. Then we went outside, we started bringing in people from Insomniac as well, all playing like, ‘Hey, how’s it going? is this for you?” Just to convey that feeling and keep iterating on it, adding other methods for people to reconfigure it, other ways to tune in slightly differently. And then we do a bunch of external user testing where we have people come in and make sure they feel like they’re getting that feeling.”
“If it’s suitable for everyone, why do we even allow you to set it up?”
Nixxes had some flexibility to deal with the swingfeel issue, thanks to the good old basic computer of customizable controls. “What’s really important to me isn’t that the default mapping is right for everyone; that’s kind of a misnomer to say that. If it’s right for everyone, why do we even let you set it?” continues Katsman. “It can’t be right for everyone. So we’re doing something that hopefully will be right for most, but I always think it’s a lot more important than when someone says to me, ‘I don’t like the mapping you did there.’ I’m like, “Okay, well, can you map it the way you like?”
“For me, it’s really critical that everybody can map it in a way that feels like, ‘Yeah, I feel empowered, I think this is a great way to play.’ And then there’s always people who feel like a gamepad is a better way to control third-person games, and for those of us who support DualSense, including many DualSense features and almost every other game controller you can imagine using for a game like this on PC, with all its unique icons on the screen. So I’m pretty sure everyone should be able to find a good way to get around the city.”
The swing feel wasn’t the only thing that needed to be adapted. Although the original Marvel’s Spider-Man was released on the PS4 in 2018, Nixxes should bring, as the name “Remastered” suggests, a more visually and technically complex version for the much more powerful PS5. For the PC edition, Katsman was faced with the prospect of making sure Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered ran on budget PC hardware as well as the latest and greatest graphics cards.
“It was definitely more difficult than we initially expected,” he tells me. “I think one way to look at it is like ‘Oh, this is a PS4 game, right?’ Well, it wasn’t really, as someone had already made a PS5 game and done something with that hardware, and they were already making use of all the PS4 hardware to the best of their ability and really exploiting it. So it definitely gave us new challenges to optimize for low-end systems. Still, I think our overall performance is still in a good place. We always look back at our previous games and often have to increase a a bit as time progresses, but they still seem pretty reasonable.”
“And if you look at devices like the Steam Deck, for example, I think we’re really proud of how well we’re doing there. On that mobile device, you can just sit there and play that game — that’s not something we necessarily expected. There are definitely challenges.”
“There are a lot of other things possible with ray tracing, and we might explore more in the future at some point.”
While Valve themselves didn’t foresee developers making games with the Steam Deck in mind, Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered suggests that the laptop won’t be ignored either. Vid Bud Liam and I have tested it, and after a pre-release patch, it plays pretty smoothly. For Fitzgerald, making a game compatible with Deck doesn’t require custom development, but testing the system while simultaneously working on a PC game made it hard to ignore.
“I wouldn’t say we made any compromises to make it work on Steam Deck as well… When it was announced, and when our own employees and friends started using it to do things, it was like, ‘Man, it would be great if we could get going with that. So adding that as a goal during development and pushing for it, I think, was just an added bonus for us.
Katsman adds that some portable customizations have indeed made it into the final game. “There are some additional scalability options that we added while we were testing on Steam Deck, like, ‘Oh, this would be useful for this.'” But we make sure that we default to what we think is the right set of settings to play Steam Deck I think there are some UI tweaks, to be viewable on this screen size, we wouldn’t necessarily change the UI for someone’s 4K screen, but we have some special cases , specifically for Steam Deck, that work well.”
At the opposite end of the hardware spectrum, Marvel’s Spider Man Remastered has more than a few concessions to high-end PC owners, including ray-tracing reflections that improve upon those of the PS5 version. The Nixxes, despite having experience with other ray tracing effects (like the RT shadows in, appropriately enough, Shadow of the Tomb Raider), are only sticking to reflections for now, but as Katsman explains, this could adapt in a New York environment of about 50 years. % glass walls and 50% rain-soaked roads.
“In this kind of environment, the city with all the reflective windows, I think that’s really where the reflections are a good example of what we can do with ray tracing,” he says. “It’s something that Insomniac already explored for the PS5, so building on it was the natural choice. And I think every time I went through the city, it really was the right choice. Every time I hang out ‘a building and I look at the city behind me or the streets below in this reflection, I really feel that this is the right feature for this game. But there are many other things possible with ray tracing, and we could explore more in the future at some point. But it certainly felt right for this game.”
This thought of even more ray tracing features is appealing; from what I’ve played, the ray-tracing reflections in Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered look like the absolute business, adding more pop to an already vibrant New York. But like all ray-tracing effects, there is a significant performance cost, and keeping operating speeds from dropping even further proved another challenge for portable teams.
This aggravated the nature of the scene. The massive, modern open world gave reflections plenty of opportunity to shine (Fitzgerald jokes that Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered “could have more mirrors than any other game I can think of”), but when you’re tracing so many rays, surely the scale would also present performance challenges?
“We certainly ran into a few,” Katsman admits. “First of all, what we’re seeing is that on the PS5, where we have lower-level access to the hardware, some things become easier, we’re not so dependent on different controllers as handling things slightly differently. It took quite a bit effort to make it efficient enough [on PC]. And if you look at the wide scope of the open world, if you think about it, you can be hanging from a building on one side of the city and you can look back at the reflections on the other side of the city. So the world we’re throwing these beams at is gigantic and it has to keep updating as you’re playing it.”
“We certainly ran into different bottlenecks than we would necessarily encounter on console. Even right now we’re still adding some additional tweaks and configurability for users to control what causes reflections to appear. How do we balance that with the density of people, for example, and then the density of traffic, so that people who go into a low-end system can still have an experience that they’ll actually enjoy? But yeah, the size of this city doesn’t match to everything we’ve encountered before.”
“It’s a unique challenge of an open world because the character moves very quickly through it,” adds Fitzgerald. “Sometimes he walks on the ground. Sometimes it’s up on the roof looking over the whole city and you really have all these different profile problems to solve. Move fast, move slow, see everything, see nothing, and there aren’t many limitations you can rely on. And then adding the ray tracing reflections is… oh yeah, you can also look in any direction, functionally, and at the…