The new Spider-Man: Miles Morales game for PlayStation 5 will feature ray tracing in its puddles and more as part of the engine's visual upgrades from PS4, thus adding a final page to the ridiculous saga of "Puddlegate." Back in 2018, on the lead-up to the release of Spider-Man on PlayStation 4, a far-fetched controversy emerged, which came to be called Puddlegate. Back when Spider-Man first launched, fans noticed a visual difference compared to the game's earlier showings to the press. In a certain area of the game, there were many puddles showing off cube-mapped reflections of the game world. In the final release, though, the amount of puddles were drastically reduced, leading some to believe the PS4 couldn't handle the advanced puddle technology of Insomniac's superhero opus.
Regardless, the hubbub died down once players got their hands on the game and could cease being distracted by nonsense topics like Puddlegate. Now, with the looming release of the PlayStation 5 and Spider-Man: Miles Morales, some are questioning if the new standalone game will utilize the same reflection technology as the original, or if it will employ more high-end solutions like ray tracing.
On Twitter, Greg Miller asked Insomniac's community director, James Stevenson, about how puddles work in Spider-Man: Miles Morales, to which Stevenson replied, "They are ray-traced now." Provided he wasn't joking in his answer - and there's no real reason to suspect he was - this means the reflections in the puddles will not be pre-determined art or limited to what is already visible on the player's screen. Instead, they will be produced in real-time via the magic of ray tracing, which simulates real-world properties of light and its interaction with surfaces.
Ray tracing is a next-generation technique that was all but impossible on the current generation of systems. It's a hardware-intensive solution to capturing offscreen data and implementing it into a game's visuals, usually in the form of real-time reflections, though there are other applications for the technique, as well. It's unknown if this ray tracing solution is limited to the puddles of Spider-Man: Miles Morales or if it will also be applied to other reflective surfaces like larger bodies of water, windows, and other reflective objects throughout the world.
Spider-Man: Miles Morales is set in the same version of New York City seen in the 2018 PlayStation 4 game. Initially, messaging indicated that the Miles Morales spin-off would be an expansion included in a next-gen port of the 2018 original, but sources at Insomniac have since clarified that Spider-Man: Miles Morales is its own stand-alone title, along the lines of Uncharted: The Lost Legacy. Still, the addition of ray-tracing to the game engine only fuels hope and speculation that a spiced-up port of the 2018 Spider-Man game may yet be in the cards for PlayStation 5, if only so players can directly compare the puddles on a one-to-one scale, comparing every pixel from the new version to its last-gen counterpart.
Source: James Stevenson