Yesterday was a head spinner for Spider-Man fans. After being starved of information on the game for months and anticipation ratcheting up ahead of what is likely to be a bulky deep dive into its features in this week’s PlayStation Showcase, the game finally sprung a leak - Miles Morales actor Nadji Jeter ‘confirmed’ the game had co-op. It was an exciting time. A few hours later, Insomniac slapped some tape over it like a salesman on the shopping channels, and the leak was unsprung. Despite the initial excitement at hearing something - anything - from the game, in the cold light of day the truth is clear. It’s great news that Spider-Man 2 has no co-op.
Single-player games are still going strong. Around a decade ago, there was a sense that they were dying out. Traditionally, games used to be very simple - you could play them on your own, or your friend could sit next to you, plug their controller in, and you’d play against them. With the injection of the internet, this went from ‘your friend sitting next to you’ to ‘anyone in the world’, and from there it spiralled. Multiplayer only games, like Overwatch, were one thing, but many other, ostensibly single-player, games had multiplayer wedged in and often peppered with microtransactions. EA President Frank Gibeau famously said single-player games were dying, but that felt like wishful thinking.
Multiplayer games are designed to be played forever, with tweaks and expansions extending their lifespan, all while players pay again and again and again for battle passes and cosmetics. They’re expensive to make, but have a long tail to make their money back. Single-player games are designed to be played once, whether they’re 12 or 40 or 100 hours long, you beat them and it’s over. Like a good book, you can revisit the ones that stay with you, but for the most part, it’s a one and done experience.
This is how a lot of us have grown up playing, and prefer immersing ourselves in a narrative to improving our skills month by month, inch by inch at the same game. Single-player games have less chance for profit, and make all of their money on sales and potential DLC later down the road rather than the steady income of online games, so suits don’t always like them. Thankfully the artists who actually make the games do like them, and these prestige stories remain killer apps for consoles (even if FIFA makes more profit), so they’re here to stay, Frank Gibeau be damned.
Here’s where Spider-Man comes in. It’s clearly a single-player game. Both Spider-Man and its Miles Morales spin-off were not just single-player games in the literal sense that you played them alone, but they were solid archetypes of the medium. They have strong, driven stories, lots of optional side quests, and due to the nature of web-swinging to nowhere, even manage great replayability in the vein of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.
I understand the desire for co-op. There are two main characters in the game through Miles and Peter, and being able to help your friends in missions could be cool. But have we not learned from Anthem? From Gotham Knights? From that dark feeling in the pit of our stomaches we got from Suicide Squad? There isn’t a lot of evidence that superhero games and online play can mix, at least not in this modern version of online play with percentage boosters and Destiny RPG loadouts.
Having us play as Peter and Miles online is a slippery slope to microtransactions and grinding, and would either force the game to throw in a lot of grinding to justify the costs of online development (a la Avengers and Anthem), or lead to drawn out and confusing development practices that cause delays or a broken launch (a la Suicide Squad and Redfall). We’ll get to play as Peter and Miles, and that’s enough. Maybe we’ll get to swap at a hub, or on the fly, or at specific story points. However it goes, I have faith in Insomniac. I would have had far less if it were co-op.
Spider-Man co-op seems exciting because it’s new, and because it’s easy to only imagine a version where everything works and nothing bad happens. Online play transforms and often derails games, and it’s hard to see a world where this doesn’t happen to Spider-Man too. Peter and Miles might work together, but we should only play alone.