Spider-Man: Web of Shadows AU Interview

Spider-Man has had a pretty rocky history as far as videogames are concerned, and the last couple of years have not been encouraging. Spider-Man 3 missed the mark by a considerable margin, while the less said about Friend or Foe the better. With Web of Shadows, Spider-Man is in the hands of a new developer – Shaba Games – who is trying to reinvigorate the license by making combat more involved and spectacular, by improving the camera system, and by having an epic storyline that sees the city itself evolve over the course of the game, and with it the enemies Spidey faces. It all sounds – and looks - pretty promising, and we were fortunate enough to grab Chris Scholz, the studio head at Shaba, and Graham Fuchs, the senior executive producer on the game, for a chat to find out more.

IGN AU: How did Shaba come to be involved with this latest Spider-Man title? You haven't made one before, so what was it about the studio that convinced Activision that you were the right people for the job?

Chris Scholz: Well, the first contact we had with the superhero genre was that we did the Marvel Ultimate Alliance downloadable content; the hero pack that came out… honestly though, it's kind of our interest. We've literally been thinking about this type of game for ten years, ever since we started doing extreme sports games.

IGN AU: In terms of being comic book fans and being given the Spider-Man license – without a film attached – did that mean that you were trawling through existing story arcs, or did you want it to be an original story from the get-go?

Chris Scholz: Honestly, what we did when we were crafting the story was, we were thinking more about 'what is the game we want to make?' and then made the story fit that, as opposed to trying to cram a game into the story. And really, for us, we had this idea of an awesome combat system that required you to fight dozens of guys at a time, and we kind of thought 'oh, well, what could that be?' …the symbiote invasion [came out of that].

IGN AU: Was it easy to sell Marvel on that as a concept?

Chris Scholz: Yeah, they pretty much dug it right away.

Graham Fuchs: They were really great to work with because they're very used to having their characters reinterpreted by different artists and whatnot, so they liked the approach we were taking in terms of what we wanted to do, and as long as we could find inroads into the Marvel universe to support that, they were all for it, and totally supportive through the whole thing.

IGN AU: In terms of the enemies that you're going to face in this game, are they all going to be symbiote-derived?

Graham Fuchs: No, you're going to see a bunch of classic Spider-Man villains, some you've never seen in a game before… [such as] Vulture and Kingpin… the game kind of progresses. It starts off with everything sort of hunky dory in New York, and you're fighting gangs up in Harlem, and then as the invasion – it sort of starts as an infection, so it starts to spread and people start acting strangely, before it becomes this full-blown zombie and monster invasion, so there's a progression of enemies throughout the whole game that keeps the experience fresh, hopefully.

IGN AU: You've spoken about shifting alliances in the game, and how you the way play influences how people will react to you. Can you tell us a little about how the mission structure will work with that system?

Chris Scholz: You're going to have a morality metre. We kind of treat the black suit as a corrupting force, so the longer you fight in the black suit the more the metre moves to the black, and then people in the city start noticing that and reacting to you, and the dialogue starts changing, and then who is there to ally with you is changing.

IGN AU: So does that mean that some missions will be open to you and some won't based on where on the metre you are?

Chris Scholz: It's more about who's fighting with you in the missions, or how the city's reacting to you. And then ultimately it does end up [influencing] who's there in the final battle, by your side.

IGN AU: One of the biggest weaknesses of previous Spider-Man games has been filler gameplay – fighting faceless mobs that are only there to boost the length of the game. How are you looking to give it a decent length, without resorting to samey gameplay?

Chris Scholz: We've really focused on the combat, and the combat is deep enough that – especially with the whole upgrade system – that you keep finding new ways of doing it. It's hard to describe, the joy of it, but it just feels right. When you're doing it, each time you do it just a little bit better… There's going to be Youtube videos of just, ridiculous combos that people can do. And you'll look at it and go 'how did he do that? That's what I want to do!' It keeps the feeling fresh.

Graham Fuchs: One thing that we've said before is that, unlike previous Spider-Man games, where you're fighting the same guys at the end as you were at the beginning, as the threat to the city gets bigger you're going to be fighting – you start off fighting more regular thugs, then you start fighting super-powered villains, then you'll start fighting these creatures with powers to rival Spider-Man's, so the experience is going to change throughout the game to keep up with what you're doing.