Marvel's Spider-Man 2 PS4 might be a distant pipe dream: Is the latest sensation too powerful?

Marvel's Spider-Man 2 for the PlayStation 5 is easily the most visually stunning open-world superhero game out there. Although the previous two titles in Marvel's Spider-Man series were also graphical powerhouses, they don't hold a candle to the latest PS5 flagship in terms of sheer visual fidelity and performance.

Developed exclusively for the PlayStation 5, Insomniac Games took complete advantage of everything the hardware has to offer. Featuring a significantly more advanced lighting model, global illumination, and texture streaming method, Marvel's Spider-Man 2 is the ideal PS5 showcase title.

However, apart from the ray-traced advancements, the sequel still appears to be quite a lot like its predecessors, especially when it comes to character models, general open-world geometry, and some post-processing effects. This makes me wonder if a PlayStation 4 version of Marvel's Spider-Man 2 is even possible.

Note: This article is subjective and reflects the author's opinions.

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Is a PlayStation 4 version of Marvel's Spider-Man 2 even feasible?

On the surface, as mentioned, Marvel's Spider-Man 2 seems considerably similar to its predecessors, especially when it is compared to the PS5 versions of previous titles in the series. However, once you dig deep, it quickly becomes apparent that the sequel packs some impressive technical features that can only be made possible on the PlayStation 5.

Within the first hours of the game, it's made incredibly obvious that Insomniac Games has made significant improvements to their proprietary engine to work seamlessly with the PS5 hardware. The Sandman boss fight is the perfect example of the incremental updates made to the engine.

There's a part in the boss fight where Sandman chucks both Peter and Miles across multiple districts. However, due to the PS5's ultra-high-speed SSD, the sequence plays out without any hitching or intermittent loading. The use of PS5's SSD is further exemplified by the increased swinging and traversal speed.

While Marvel's Spider-Man 2 can be visually paired back to accommodate the PS4 hardware, the slow 5400RPM HDD will clearly be a massive bottleneck. One can argue that installing a SATA SSD in a PS4/ PS4 Pro can somewhat help, but the PS4's Jaguar CPU isn't made to work in tandem with SSDs.

Coming back to raw graphical fidelity, Marvel's Spider-Man 2 is nothing to be scoffed at. In my opinion, Insomniac Games' latest title is easily the best-looking open-world game I've played on the PS5 to date, perhaps even surpassing Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores.

This claim is due to one crucial aspect of the game's visual presentation: ray tracing. Yes, it is quite easy to dismiss RT over traditional rasterized techniques such as SSR. However, in practice, RT always supersedes rasterization, especially in an open-world setting like the one portrayed in Marvel's Spider-Man games.

While it's common to see RT in PS5 games, it's extremely rare to see the feature left intact in both "Fidelity" and "Performance" modes. Games like Devil May Cry 5 Special Edition, Doom Eternal, and now Marvel's Spider-Man 2 are examples of such rare titles where even with the 60fps Performance mode, RT is left on.

And let me tell you, RT truly makes a difference in Insomniac Games' latest title. It affects the game's many reflective surfaces as well as introduces a significantly more advanced lighting model, making the in-game rendition of New York in the sequel look almost identical to the real-life counterpart.

And honestly, it's tough to imagine how the game would look and feel without RT. While it is possible to scale back Marvel's Spider-Man 2 to make it somewhat viable on a PlayStation 4, the changes made to its visual makeup and gameplay systems will significantly hamper the overall experience.