For mass appeal, yeah probably. Guess the next closest might be Halo 5.
This is actually what made me stop playing Shadow of War (Mordor 2?) - every time I gained points all I could seemingly spend them on were new abilities and eventually I had 8 or 9 things I could do and it was completely overwhelming.
Uncharted 4 and Horizon come to mind, but I wouldn’t consider them as having mainstream appeal. A competent Spider-Man video game smack in the middle of entertainment’s superhero renaissance is a huge get.
Yeah I thought of Halo 5 and Uncharted 4, but I feel like at this point in both of those franchises Spider-Man has them beat on wide-spread appeal. Wikipedia says Halo 5 moved about 5 million copies total, Uncharted 4 sold 8.7 million copies. The Eurogamer article doesn’t say how many copies Spider-Man sold, just that it’s the fastest selling for Sony this year. Wikipedia says God of War (2018) moved 3 million units in three days after release, so I guess we can assume Spider-Man is doing at least that well. Gotta figure it’s going to do well through the holidays.
This is why I liked the first Batman game the best. I liked a limited start so I can get used to the tools. It’s like they thought I played nothing but Asylum before City came out so I remembered how to do all the moves / use all the tools.
Man, that’s so sad.
I can also relate, since I put a bunch of stuff for my wife into Divinity Original Sin and Pillars of Eternity through my kickstarter perks and our 20 year relationship went boom before those games came out (and as a result I still haven’t played the former, and am very belatedly finally playing the latter).
Played a few hours of Spider-man and like it so far - definitely reminds me a lot of Spider-man 2 on Gamecube, as well as the Batman games, and am a bit overwhelmed by the moveset while playing on the highest difficulty. City seems a little less interesting than I expected. But one thing it really nailed - it really does make you feel like the character, and puts you in the role of thinking like him and assessing situations/actions. I’m a bit disappointed with the other characters, which are a little too goofy for my tastes.
Oh damn. I remember you being excited for those Kickstarters. That sucks.
Thanks for the tips. Getting a bit better with the buttons, but I reckon I’ll disable QTEs for now. Just that I haven’t had a PS for very long and the little console experience I did get over the years was with the 360.
The square throwing people up thing, is working out quite well. The rest is generally still button mashing, but I’ll see how it goes.
Yeah, Halo 5 sales are not particularly good compared to God of War, Horizon, Uncharted 4 and now Spider-Man. All those are roughly double, or more. I can see Spider-Man doing as much as 15M.
Are you sure about that? Has he made it to the end of Act 1 yet? There’s some pretty impactful stuff there. In any case he should be able to mainline the story and finish in pretty short order. You don’t actually need to grind levels to progress.
Sure, I understand all this! I’m just not sure how much can be done in terms of new story when they already exist and are probably a property of Marvel? I’m not getting into copywriting or anything here, just thinking out loud. Can they write a new story for Spidey? Or are they just playing safe by using the characters we already know?
But still, I’d love to sit down and play a beautiufl and new Harry Potter video game, even though I already know how it all turns out =)
That’s a fair question, but my guess is Marvel wasn’t going to stifle the story they wanted to tell - I think they just played it safe by assuming most of their audience wasn’t really reading the comics and generally knew the material from the films (in which case, a lot of this will be all new to many players). The story they DID tell, from what I am told, is a new story - they aren’t just translating one of the comic story lines into the game - but it’s still a very safe story they are telling, designed for a combination of new and young players, I suspect. I’ll have a stronger and more knowledgeable position to talk about it in more detail when I get my turn at it.
He did beat the game last night, and he said that he thought the last few minutes were absolutely incredible (story wise) so that’s interesting. He really, really liked the end of the game. He just reinforced that he thought it was a bad idea to assume folks don’t know Otto or Norman’s actual path in the classic stories. And, while i haven’t played, I have to agree.
Heh, they are absolutely, 100%, assuming you know who Otto and Norman turn out to be. (Pretty much every time Otto calls Peter to his lab it’s designed to keep the player in suspense about when/how the inevitable happens.) Like I said, it’s about those characters’ getting there, not their destinations.
And I don’t know how safe the story is, given they made somebody most people haven’t heard of the central baddie and rejiggered the characters of MJ and Aunt Mae so they’re unlike any of their famous incarnations.
What the story does’t have (so far, I’m 60% through) are any massive Everything You Know Is Wrong plot twists, like “Aunt Mae killed Peter’s parents” or “Peter is secretly a clone of himself.” Which I for one am fine with; those are why I quit reading comics back in the day.
I’m not sure if it’s the new tranquilizer drugs my doc put me on, my (gag) new middle aged progressive lenses, or if I’ve finally fallen into the old man reflexes category, but boy howdy do I suck at this.
Random fight on the street? Dead Spidey. Try it again? Dead Spidey.
Buyer’s remorse is setting in :(
Hopefully I can still raid tombs.
Old man reflexes. My 12 year old routinely takes me out…I used to be a Rainbow Six Raven Shield expert killer and now…I can’t win anything against that little punk.
Finally pumped some time into this during the week and hot damn it’s great. Swinging around by itself is a treat, especially with some upgrades and some of the dialog is genuinely funny. The Spider cop schtick is more amusing than it has any right to be.
I was secretly prepared for disappointment, and am now extremely pleased that Insomniac managed to pull this off.
Is there a way to go over the edge of a building and crawl down the wall (as opposed to jumping off)?
Good news, my old man reflexes are getting decent at Spider-Man…I’m sorry, that’s Spidey-Cop. My mistake.
Awesome game.
I pushed through to the end of act 2 today. Man, this game goes places! I have been loving the variety.
Stealth challenges are my favorite. The combat is just sublime after an adjustment period. Took a while to retrain away from using triangle to counter. But once I did I realized I think circle is a way better choice for that. I’m way better at Spider-Man combat than I ever got at Batman or Mordor. Working in webs and environmental throws and air juggles just feels brilliant. The game throws enough enemy variety to keep encounters tense while allowing you to flit around like a badass improvisers.
I’m doing my best to milk this game for as long as I can. No danger of getting bored in sight.
That’s what I did last night.
Went into the drug store to buy that fancy spiderman console bundle. Turns out they didn’t have any, or the game… but I still walked out with a PS4 Pro.
Yeah well, don’t every try Shadow of War. It’s the same combat system(s) but any time you die you get f’ed over by new arch enemies. Some people seem to dig that. I will take infinite retries on Spider-Man. So far at least.