It’s always nice to see more of Insomniac’s PS4-exclusive Spider-Man game, but you could almost feel the internet deflating when the Paris Games Week trailer took a focus on story. We’ve known this would be an open world action game since E3 - so why have we still not seen any open world gameplay, more than a year after being announced?

“I think just in terms of our rollout we want to focus on different things”, explains creative director Bryan Intihar when I put that question to him. “Trust me, we'll be talking about open world. There's no weird conspiracy or anything like that.”

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The thing is, I’ve met more than a few people who simply didn’t know this was an open world game at all - so if he can’t show us, can he at least tell us how it will work?

“Not really,” he laughs. “I will tell you that, if you think of a character like Spider-Man, who lends himself really well to swinging through a city, we'd be doing the character a disservice if we weren't encouraging gameplay like that. Swinging around the city is very important and a very key part of the experience.”

While he won’t be drawn on specifics about the open world portions of the game, that’s not to say there aren’t new gameplay details to discover - Intihar’s much happier to talk about what it is to control Spider-Man, moment to moment.

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Insomniac’s Peter Parker is a fair bit older than Tom Holland’s MCU version - he’s 23, in his first job, struggling to pay rent and, most imporantly, has been fighting crime for 8 years. Intihar’s clearly excited by the scope that villain-busting experience gives the studio when it comes to the core gameplay.

Spider-Man doesn’t just swing across New York - he combines that with elements of parkour, which should make traversing the (apparently huge) world smoother than we’ve seen it before. That experience shines through in his tussles with criminals, too.

Intihar breaks down the game’s combat into four categories: melee, webslinging, environmental actions and gadgets. Apparently, combat’s a matter of juggling all four, switching between them on the fly (when discussing changing to webs, he says “switching right”, which could indicate that you use the D-Pad select combat types).

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“Then [you add] acrobatics, mid-air combos,” “he explains. “When it comes to combat it's about mixing and matching those four types to how you want to play the game, or what the situation calls for.”

Best of all, an experienced Spider-Man means you don’t have to spend time as he gets to grips with his powers: “It's not like you load up the game and he doesn't have any powers,” Intihar says. “The first time you're swinging, the first time you're fighting, you need to feel like Spider-Man.”

We won’t experience a Metroid Prime moment where we use all our powers, then lose them all, either: “It's not about doing something cool, stripping your powers and starting again. You play Spider-Man to be Spider-Man, and we want you to feel like that right away.”

“ You play Spider-Man to be Spider-Man, and we want you to feel like that right away.”

an out-of-costume Peter Parker and, more interestingly, Mary-Jane Watson will both be playable in certain sections . MJ sounds particularly interesting, with Intihar hinting that she’ll be using some of her experience as a Daily Bugle reporter in her gameplay sections.

“We said right at the start of this project that we want to stay true to the DNA of the Spider-Man universe [...] But we also didn't want to just repeat everything you've seen in the movies or the comics and the games - because there's been a lot of them, right? We had to mix things up, and I think MJ's a good example of that character.

“OK, you see the look, she looks like MJ, she's got the red hair, but her role in this universe is probably a little bit different to what people have expected before. I know I'm really interested in it - I think once people see her role in the game and we expand upon it, how she's tied to Peter and everything, I think she's a good example of what kind of thing this game's going to offer people in terms of being true to the DNA but also mixing things up.”

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It’s not just heroes who appear to be getting love from Insomniac. The latest trailer confirmed or reconfirmed supervillains Mister Negative (a gone-bad version of Martin Li, who employs Aunt May), Wilson Fisk (aka Kingpin), Shocker and Norman Osborn who’s currently acting as New York Mayor rather than Green Goblin.

“That's honestly just a slice of the amount of villains we have in the game,” says Intihar. Peter has taken down Fisk at the time of the trailer, which leads to a flood of new bad guys to imprison:

“I think you're going to see a rise of villains that are not only taking advantage of Fisk now being out of the picture, but you're seeing Peter face off against a villain like Mister Negative, who is much more dangerous than he's faced before. Also there's more of a personal connection to Mister Negative because of Martin Li.

“We talked a lot about how the best Spider-Man experiences are when Peter's world and Spider-Man's world collide. Having someone like Mister Negative in the game really shows that coming to life.”

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It might be that Intihar has a point when it comes to showing the open world. With a license as rich as Spider-Man, the story makes a big difference to how we play. Peter Parker’s experience, his relationship to characters, and the villains he comes up against, will inform the game itself. Intihar even implores me to go back and look closely at the story trailer’s shots of the Manhattan skyline for clues - “it’s a very Marvel version of New York”, he says.

“It was really, really important to us,” Intihar says about the new trailer “to get across that this is an experience, a story that goes beyond just being a superhero. It's about the story of the man behind the mask - and that's what we wanted to get across here. As someone who loves Marvel and loves Marvel stories - whether that's the movies, the TV shows, the comics - what I think makes those experiences so well is when you can connect to the human side of it, and that's we want to show.”

He laughs as he finishes his impassioned speech: “That's a long-winded way of saying we're going to get to the open world.” I have a feeling we won’t be waiting too long for what we want.

Joe Skrebels is IGN's UK News Editor, and he also uses gadgets to fight. He always loses. Follow him on Twitter.