During E3 Marvel unveiled a teaser trailer for a new Spider-Man game that seems to have fans really excited. The game looks awesome and Spider-Man even got a fresh new look. It sounds like this is only the first in a series of games that Marvel is developing!
During an interview with Polygon, Vice President of games at Marvel Jay Ong discussed the new Spider-Man PS4 game and teased some big plans and upcoming announcements.
"When I joined Marvel two years ago, I came in with a mandate to usher in a new era for Marvel Games, We have a treasure trove of the best superhero characters on earth. What can we do with this to create truly epic games? Is [Spider-Man] a signal of things to come? Oh, yes. Absolutely. And we can’t wait to tell the world about it."
Ong goes on to talk about their long-term strategy, which is great because Marvel has never really had a decent strategy for their video games. The quality and style of the games have never really been consistent. They range from completely and utter crap to a few decent ones. I've never really been completely blown away by any of the games Marvel has released. Maybe that's all about to change.
"One of the things we really focus on in terms of our new strategy is that we all believe that great games drive the brand and great games are what our fans really deserve. The question is, 'How we can get there?' The thing we landed on is to be really selective with who we partner with. Extremely selective. Right now I would say that out of every 10 opportunities we look at, we maybe do one."
He goes on to talk about the kind of talent they are looking for to develop their games:
"What we look at first and foremost is the talent level of partner. Are they world class in building the games we're talking about? They have to have world-class talent. They have to be able to invest the resources to make that talent sing. Equally important is, do they have passion for the IP they're working on? Do they share the same ambition? Do they love the character? We look for passion, that comes through in the first 30 seconds.
"One of our mantras is authenticity; it's easy to make a game with Spider-Man on the label, but it's much harder to make it truly authentic in a way that reflects Peter Parker, the character. We are absolutely obsessed about [quality]. That is our North Star. We always say 'Great is not good enough. We're going for truly epic.'"
I like this attitude! It sounds like they actually know what they want this time around and they are going after talented developers who will give them the best quality games possible. It's about time! It's then explained that Marvel will no longer have timed releases to coincide with the release of their movies, which is the smartest thing they could do. I'm surprised they weren't doing that sooner. This will allow the developers to create the kind of quality games they want.
"Things like [games] you cannot under-resource, You can't not give the development time ... to do justice to the game. We think, 'How do we make the game better? How do we help our partners make the game better?'"
"Building these franchises, and building these characters [at Marvel Games], this is that first big milestone from this team. This is a huge ambitious project."
Hopefully, they follow through with this vision and give fans the "truly epic" games that these characters deserve.
