Design Thoughts: Self-Interrupts in Spider-Man PS4

I was playing Marvel's Spider-Man for PS4 and then Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales, and I started trying to analyze what makes the gameplay feels so incredibly fluid, fast, and fun.

I think a big part of this feel is the way the game deals with interrupts. In this post, I'm going to specifically talk about self-interrupts. There are other interrupts. I won't go into them in this post for the sake of imitating brevity (lol).

What are interrupts? Anything that can interrupt an action like: other player actions, collisions, NPC actions. Also, anything that can interrupt a player's thoughts: like visual and sound cues.

Basic scenario in Marvel's Spider-Man: you're punching and kicking enemies and you're in the middle of a combo when the Spider Sense visual cue lines light up Spider-Man's head, telling you an attack is incoming. You tap the dodge button during the Spider Sense window, and Spider-Man slips away from the attack. And then you can go right back to attacking after your dodge. Or if you fail, the enemy attack interrupts you. As far as I can tell, no matter where you are in a combo or attack animation or otherwise, you can always tap dodge to dodge an attack, even during a longer animation like webbing toward a distant enemy to attack them or doing a swinging kick. This is a powerful tool for both the designers of the game and the player. On the design end, this means you can have an attack come at Spider-Man at any time and it never feels unfair because the player always has the option to dodge. On the player end, this means that every action you take is theoretically "safe," which is very empowering. As far as I can tell, the only limiters on the ability to dodge are how quickly you can take a second dodge after dodging once and that you can best dodge an attack during the Spider Sense cue timeframe, which means that harder enemies have attacks that come at you right about at the threshold of how quickly you can dodge, or they have much shorter windows of Spider Sense during which you can dodge properly. This is empowering to the player and also feeds directly into the fantasy of Spider-Man's improved reflexes, allowing the player to use their own reflexes to evade attacks and become Spider-Man. Additionally, the fact that you can interrupt any of your own attacks with a dodge and then go right back to attacking from wherever the dodge puts you keeps the action fast and fluid, again feeding into the fantasy of the character.

Marvel's Spider-Man is full of these kinds of fluid interrupt mechanics. In Miles Morales, you can interrupt your own attacks with electrified "venom" attacks. You can interrupt a ground combo with a upward launching attack and go right into attacking in the air. You can interrupt your aerial attacks with a swinging kick. You can interrupt aerial actions with pulling an enemy up in the air. 

This pattern of self-interrupts helping the game feel fast and fluid extends into exploration as well. You interrupt webbing to a point with a timed jump to point launch and go faster. You interrupt your rolling landing after you fall with a jump to launch right back into swinging. At any given time, you have Spider-Man shoot out webs and pull himself in a completely different direction and continue swinging in the new direction. As you circle around the corner of a building, Spider-Man interrupts his forward movement to swing around it and keep moving if your camera is pointed around it. Taking what would normally interrupt movement and giving players tools to keep going is a fantastic way to make traversal fun. This is a big reason why I very rarely fast-travel in Spider-Man. Even just traversing the city feels really fun.

Interrupts (the self-interrupt kind)! They're cool, and they're a huge part of what make the PS4/PS5 Spider-Man games feel soooo good.