The upcoming PlayStation-exclusive Spider-Man DLC for Marvel’s Avengers will not feature any direct, playable narrative component.
Instead, the “With Great Power” add-on will reveal its story through audio logs and illustrated cutscenes. Players will unlock these entries by completing challenges in the Avengers Initiative section, home to Marvel’s Avengers’ multiplayer missions.
It appears Spider-Man’s exclusivity to Sony platforms may be part of the reduced story focus. Previous heroes added to the roster – such as Black Panther and both the Kate Bishop and Clint Barton versions of Hawkeye – came with new cutscenes and core storylines. Those characters were available to players on all formats.
For the friendly neighbourhood web-slinger, the developer needed to make a fully playable character across the game’s various modes but only available to one group of players. As a result, Spider-Man’s arrival is being branded a “Hero Event” rather than an “Operation”, as for the Hawkeyes, or an “Expansion”, as Black Panther’s introduction in War for Wakanda was called.
Philippe Therien, gameplay director at developer Crystal Dynamics, told IGN that the creative team wanted “to spend our efforts on content that everyone can enjoy, so we chose to spend a lot of our energy on the Klaw raid that’s coming up at the same time.”
Therien added it was “a simple decision for us. Spider-Man can play all the content, but then we release a piece of content that’s good on all platforms. Really that was a decision that’s been that way since the beginning.”
The Klaw raid will arrive for all Avengers players on November 30, while the same day will also see Spider-Man swing onto PlayStation consoles only.
