Among other successful games like Red Dead Redemption 2 and God of War, Marvel’s Spider-Man stood out as a hit game among the stacked year for gamers that was 2018. With web-swinging mechanics that reminded players of the nostalgic Spider-Man 2 game and a story that gave Spider-Man fans the chance to fight some of the character’s most notable villains, it’s unsurprising that the game was such a success. Even four years down the line, Spider-Man for the PS4 is seeing players find new ways of engaging with the game.
The release of Spider-Man: Miles Morales for the PS5 brought some new content for the game, and a shorter story revolving around Peter Parker’s successor. With Spider-Man 2 still likely a ways off though, players of the initial game are finding ways to pad out the time until that anticipated sequel arrives, such as one user who has taken to modding Marvel’s Spider-Man so that other characters become playable.
A user known as ObviousChoice98 is behind the majority of the mods seen on the Spider-Man PS4 subReddit. Just last week they began their modding process of making Rhino from the game playable. After a couple of days, ObviousChoice98 released a YouTube video showing off Rhino gameplay, and has since added Scorpion and Kingpin as playable characters. This is not the first time someone has modded a villain to be playable, as back in 2020 another Spider-Man mod allowed the player to run around as Kingpin.
According to u/ObviousChoice98, and others commenting under their Reddit posts, the reason behind the modding is through “jailbroken” PS4s. This allows users to tweak some parts of games as they see fit, and mess around with the coding. At the moment, the mods for Spider-Man rely on the fact that in the game players can choose from a multitude of skins for Peter Parker to wear. Using this mechanic, modding allows some of those “suits” to actually be the models of the villains in the game.
Usually, modding is something that is associated with PC gaming, and many seeing the modded skins for Spider-Man had expected the game to now be available on PC, as was the case with other Sony exclusives like God of War which received attention from modders once it made the jump. However, Spider-Man’s modding is currently exclusive to the PS4, and there is currently no update on when a PC version of the game is released. Modding on PS4 as well is treated as quite the dangerous task, as a “jailbroken” PS4 cannot sign into the PSN, for risk of the user instantly receiving a ban.
Marvel’s Spider-Man is available now on PS4 and PS5.
