Post Script
Do expansions like Miles Morales represent the shape of things to come?
The credits for Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales are an eye-opening reminder of what it takes to make a blockbuster videogame in 2020. Sure, by then you can’t fail to have noticed all the money on the screen – it’s evident in the pore-perfect detail and realistic animations of its performancecaptured characters, and in the dazzling effects that mean some fights produce more pyrotechnics than your average firework display. But it’s only here that you really begin to appreciate the scale of the production, and the sheer manpower involved. The names scroll by for a long, long time – we’re not holding a stopwatch, but suffice to say that we’re forced to pick up the controller more than once to prevent the power-saving settings from kicking in and turning off our PS5.
Yet while you’d hardly describe a game with these production values as ‘thrifty’, this is a world we’ve visited before. Granted, Insomniac has done its best to tart the place up: as Morales’s home, it’s no surprise Harlem feels less of an afterthought than it did in the main game, for starters. Seasonal shifts and new-gen bells and whistles combine to give New York an appreciably different ambience, too. And – joy of joys – the entire map is open to explore pretty much from the off. There’s a nagging feeling of familiarity elsewhere, from the procedural crimes that sporadically pop up on your radar to the recycled combat mechanics to a few copypasted side missions. But it retains enough of the original’s strengths, while telling a very different superhero story, that none of those are deal-breakers; in some cases, you could even argue that consistency is to its benefit. Either way, this kind of expansion certainly seems a more efficient, cost-effective way to develop games, and we suspect we could well see many more like it – particularly on PS5.
Because in light of Sony’s recent firstparty focus on narrative-driven singleplayer games, it’s a move that would make sense for players and studios alike. Given those spiralling costs, it would be sensible for developers to start telling different stories within existing worlds. One obvious advantage is that it would accelerate the production process: even with more powerful middleware solutions, the fidelity demanded by a new console generation means games are naturally going to take longer to produce. And if expansions can be made quicker, then surely they can be sold more cheaply, too? With Sony setting a new standard RRP of £70, people are unlikely to be able to afford as many brand-new games as before. Perhaps Miles Morales is Sony’s way of testing the waters; the commercial response could yet determine the viability of these standalone expansions. (If you’re wondering, that awful marketing term ‘expandalone’ has now been added to Edge’s banned-words list.)
There are risks to such an approach, of course. Asset reuse is nothing new, even in triple-A development, but audiences are growing more savvy to it. Yet the angry reaction to Ubisoft recycling Far Cry 4’s map for Far Cry Primal was perhaps understandable, given the publisher’s asking price for the prehistoric action-adventure. Tellingly, when it pulled a similar trick for Far Cry 3 spin-off Blood Dragon, the response was much warmer: marketed as an expansion and priced accordingly, the ’80s-themed shooter left few purchasers feeling short-changed.
On its own, Miles Morales isn’t cheap, but nor is it 70 quid, and it’s much more than a reskin. Rather than pretending it’s a brandnew game, Sony has been clear that this is an expansion; as such, what could easily have been a costly disappointment suddenly looks, well, responsible. With luck, this will catch on and ease the burden for developers, too, particularly if studios start to share their assets more widely. Wouldn’t it be nice to swing freely over New York without worrying about the labour involved in recreating it for the umpteenth time?