‘Marvel’s Spider-Man’ Writer Reveals How to Prepare for DLC

Marvel’s Spider-Man was a record-breaking, web-slinging mega-hit on PlayStation 4, and Marvel fans are already waiting for The City That never Sleeps DLC. The DLC will release in three parts over the next three months, and will introduce players more intimately to characters we’ve had brief ecounters with in the main campaign. So what exactly do you need to do to get ready for the new content, and what should you expect?

Polygon spoke with Marvel’s Spider-Man lead writer Jon Paquette about how the team at Insomniac Games settled on the Peter Parker story they told in the game, and how they decided to spin their stories for the follow-up DLC. What’s important to the team, according to Paquette, is that fans feel like they’re getting to interact with new personalities that were teased in the original game; bringing novelty and new adventures to the player-base instead of revisiting past challenges.

“We see how people are reacting to certain characters,” Paquette said. “We see what people enjoy as part of the main game and then we ask ourselves, ‘How do we give them more of that?’ At the same time, how do we give them something that feels new and fresh? So our strategy with that is to focus on distinct characters.”

One of those distinct characters that we only get to interact with in a very passive way in the main campaign is Black Cat. Black Cat will be the star of The City That Never Sleeps‘ first batch of content, called The Heist. We saw Black Cat and Spider-Man play a fascinating game of cat and mouse through a series of side-quests in the game, so if you haven’t been paying attention to some of that side content in your own playthrough, now would be a great time to start. In fact, that’s exatly what Paquette recommends for anyone wanting to prepare for the DLC.

“[Players] should be focused on a lot of the storytelling we do in the open world,” he told Polygon. “There’s probably things that you haven’t discovered yet unless you’ve got the platinum already, in which case, congratulations. But the team worked really hard to build this amazingly authentic city that is so much fun to play in. So just keep looking for hidden things.”

So there you have it. If you beat the game, you’ve got a good head start, but you need to dive in to the side-missions and observe some of New York’s more hidden delights if you want to truly prepare yourself for The City That Never Sleeps.