Digging into the dual protagonist design of Marvel's Spider-Man 2

gamedeveloper.com:

The greatest challenge for any discipline in game development is the ultimate demon: math. More specifically, exponential math. As the upper boundaries of game development have become more polished and detailed, the effort needed to meet higher bars of quality requires more assets, more content, and more resources—all variables that grow exponentially larger when designers try to support features built around player choice.

Features like that can include branching narrative mechanics, dense ability trees, or—as seen in Marvel's Spider-Man 2 from Insomniac Games—a wider roster of playable characters.

But the number of playable characters doesn't necessarily dictate the design math that goes with them. Compare Marvel's Spider-Man 2 to, say, TT Games' Lego Marvel Super Heroes 2. Both games feature urban open-world environments players can traverse, both games support a wide roster of player abilities, and both games even feature multiple Spider-Men (with one Spider-Gwen in LEGO Marvel Super Heroes 2's cast).

But TT Games managed the scope of its wide roster by putting hard caps on the amount of dialogue and abilities in LEGO Marvel Super Heroes 2. What that studio accomplished is a technical feat in its own right, but comparing it to Marvel's Spider-Man 2 shows how many technical and design challenges Insomniac Games took on by choosing to tell an epic tale that centered both of its heroic webheads.

To dig into the scale of assets and content needed to design dual Spider-Men, we pinged Insomniac Games senior programming director Doug Sheahan and Ryan Smith to help us break down the studio's goals with the game.

First, let's try to compartmentalize what goes into each playable Spider-Man. Sheahan explained that Insomniac's goal