One of the biggest releases of the summer, Sony continues to release PC ports of its enviable back-catalogue of first-party PlayStation titles. After shaky beginnings with Horizon Zero Dawn, these PC conversions have gone from strength to strength – and we were very impressed with the conversions of Days Gone and God of War. Just over a year ago, Sony acquired Dutch developer Nixxes – a studio that has previously delivered excellent PC ports of console titles – and with the team having already helped in improving the Horizon port, it has now delivered its first full project for PlayStation: Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered.
We’ve already covered the quality of the conversion elsewhere on Digital Foundry and we’ve also assessed how the same code runs on both Valve’s Steam Deck and the cute AyaNeo Air – and crucial to our work was the assistance of Nixxes itself, who made four key staff members available to us during the review period for this discussion – as well as continuing dialogue and taking on our feedback the more time we spent with the game.
This interview is quite lengthy and took considerable time to transcribe but it offers a unique insight into the developmental process of this port from beginning to end, the choice of rendering API, the implementation of key PC enhancements including ultrawide support, plus how and why Nixxes boosted the fidelity of the game’s already impressive hardware-accelerated ray tracing.
Answering all of our questions here is Nixxes studio head Jurjen Katsman, software engineer Michiel Roza, graphics programmer Rebecca Fernandez and lead software engineer Coen Frauenfelder.
Digital Foundry: The Insomniac engine for quite some time has been limited to PlayStation consoles, so we are curious about this project’s start point. When did Nixxes start helming the project? How long has the game been in development up until release? And what were the starting building blocks that you were given to make a PC port?