It is a bird? it is a plane..? what is not certain is a video game, for now. We are still waiting for a great game from Kal El.
It is no discovery to claim that Superman has a complicated history with video games. Although it is true that he is a difficult character for any medium, he has had great moments and stories told in comics, movies, and series with real or animated actors – he has also had disastrous and mediocre, but with such a popular and used character since 1938 It is not to be expected that everything he has starred in works perfectly. But when it comes to video games it is practically a celebration when something that can be considered decent is produced, and it is not because it has not been tried. This week a concept art leaked that may (or may not) belong to the Superman game that Rocksteady intended to make as a new title after ending the Arkham trilogy – in which, by the way, some Easter eggs appeared as a call from Lex Luthor to demand an appointment with Bruce Wayne on a business matter.
What we know for sure is that there hasn't been a new Superman-centric game since 2006, when EA released the lackluster Superman Returns as an accompaniment to the movie of the same name. Meanwhile, we've had some of the best superhero titles ever produced in between – the Arkham saga, Injustice 2, Spider-Man on PS4 – which also coincides with a Warner Bros Interactive making her a respectable powerhouse in the sector, capable of launching winning AAA projects. What we also know, although not officially, is that there have been at least three major canceled projects that could have changed the trend of the man of steel in video games, but that for various reasons they were canceled and which we are going to talk about in these lines.
Blue Steel, the end of a great study
Despite the fact that the memory of Factor 5 may be pawned by the Lair fiasco, the study of German origin is part of the small nobility of independent houses that managed to survive as such since the 80s, working on weight projects in three-machine machines. Generations, from their original works on Amiga and Atari ST to PlayStation 3. Their great technical ability to get the most out of the machines they worked with allowed them to create spectacular games like the 16-bit Turrican or the Rogue Squadron. The fall of LucasArts, who had been its great supporters and bridge of the fruitful relationship with Nintendo, left the team in a precarious situation from which it tried to emerge first with the agreement with Sony for Lair and then associating with a new production company called Brash Entertainment founded by billionaire producer Thomas Tull and several top executives from the world of cinema. With money and connections, Factor 5 launched a Superman game for PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii in which the team's technological mastery was revealed.
Thanks to the priceless work of Unseen 64 we have a glimpse of what was being cooked, including a technical demo in which some of the most notable facets were shown, including combats with a high component of physical destruction in which we could take action momentarily inside any building in a large open Metropolis. Aside from trying to impress with graphics and technology, one of Factor 5's priorities was in control, somewhat motivated both by the assurance that the character's wide range of powers required it, and by surely removing the bad taste of Lair's mouth, highly criticized for a gestural control system imposed with bad judgment by the directors of the studio and that cost the project a delay, the consequent loss of confidence by Sony and a significant punishment by the critic once in the shops. Superman was the new way of studying to get out of a situation that had become complicated and they trusted that Brash's resources and contacts would open the door to their license, something they achieved, but in an already precarious situation, the result of a succession of bad decisions attributed to his lack of experience in the video game. The bankruptcy of the production company, which went from obtaining hundreds of millions in investment rounds in 2007 to closing in 2008, left Factor 5 without access to the license, without financial resources and at the mercy of finding a new production company to support them, in full swing. global crisis from the fall of Lehman Brothers, a death wound from which he would no longer recover.
Warner and his search for Superman
WB has been actively trying to develop an open world Superman game since ~ 2013. A thread … pic.twitter.com/UMYHDGamiL
– James Sigfield (@ Jsig212James) November 10, 2019
Thanks to the work and contacts of the journalist James Sigfield, supported by various publicly leaked images, we know some snippets of the intrahistory that Warner has been trying to carry out a game of Superman in the open world since 2013, without success at the moment. In that year, Warner actively began to listen to proposals from anyone with an interest in working with that premise; The one that advanced the most at the time was a concept defined as "something similar to what Insomniac has done with Spider-Man" that did not advance beyond the prototype phase. The second project that had a chance to exist was aimed at a less open world set in the Kryptonian city of Kandor, miniaturized and preserved by Brainiac, intended as a companion to the animated film Superman: Unbound. But at the time it was discarded because Warner Bros demanded that it be developed with the Arkham engine, which would have required then that Superman could not fly due to its limitations, which made it obviously unfeasible.
The possible future for the man of steel
At this point, having reviewed what (little) we know of the latest misfortunes with the license, we launched into an exercise in imagination about what that future game could be that will redeem the son of Krypton, assuming that it will be done someday. The first step of that potential development should be "throwing away all the pre-established ideas, both of the character and of the superhero video games themselves." A hose that sounds a lot when talking about Superman, in any medium, is that of "it is difficult to create exciting stories with someone who is invincible", which in video games has an even more complicated translation: "it is difficult to create a interesting game when the protagonist plays in god mode by default. " But that is because fans are educated in a concrete way of posing things.
Undefeated, a way forward
The structure of any title starring superheroes is that of many video games: open or linear: the idea is to destroy dozens of enemies from the bunch to end up waging exciting duels against truly iconic villains. If the character lends himself to it, we can have more or less attractive variations, but the main column is in this structure, so familiar. The obvious problem is that the part about fighting "putties" doesn't make much sense because his fighting style doesn't lend itself to doing something interesting with it. It is not a question of invincibility, Superman has been frequently beaten for three quarters of a century and his omnipotence has never been an inconvenience to present emotional duels, but his way of winning is usually by heart, hitting harder, resisting more than his rival and finding imaginative solutions to desperate situations, reaching extreme limits that only certain characters can take you.
Comparatively, what makes combat attractive in the Arkhams is not that Batman is human and "anyone" can kill him – Bruce Wayne's abilities are so inflated by now that it is more credible that Superman would die at the hands of anyone before him. -. The fun thing about Arkham combat is that it is fluid, dynamic and fits well with the character's abilities. If they kill us in the Rocksteady game it is not because we believe that Batman has lost against a nobody, but because we have failed and we have to do better to live up to the character we embody. At the same time, Bruce's martial demonstration to end any thug is visually and aesthetically appealing in an action video game, while Clark's combat system tends to be either too flat or too sophisticated to translate into a video game. Therefore, the first priorities in a Superman game would be to create a credible and interesting failure condition, which does not necessarily have to be linked to a life bar, and at the same time an agile, dynamic combat system that fits with the character
A possible answer is found in Undefeated, a free game developed as a proof of concept by three Osaka students using the Unreal Engine and starring an obvious Kryptonian clone, wearing sunglasses. Its appearance on Steam caused a sensation, with thousands of downloads and the attention of numerous media (including Meristation) thanks to its unquestionable virtues: good control, great sensation of flight, variety of powers … But the most striking thing about it was its approach: the protagonist was invincible, had no life bar. What did have a life bar was the city, beset by attacks by thugs and supervillains; The goal then moved to protect citizens, saving them from disaster and repairing structural damage while dispatching rivals, before the damage was unacceptable to the hero's conscience. In this way, normal enemies are not a direct threat, but a hindrance that must be overcome with skill in order to continue saving lives, while encounters with supervillains are the kind of high-octane confrontations in which you can give Unleash our powers in the most spectacular way possible.
Megaton Rainfall is another interesting example to follow
Under that premise, the skill system would not be exclusively focused on combos and offensive skills. We should develop all kinds of skills to save lives and save structures: laser vision to melt stone and metal to avoid collapse, blow to extinguish fires, super speed to save potential falls victims in extremis … A really big map should be a priority and in this we could take notes of another independent game, this one also Spanish: Megaton Rainfall, in which we are put in the role of a superhero saving the earth from an alien invasion: the size of the game exceeds the planetary scale and It also bets on a system in which the objective is to avoid the maximum number of victims while entire buildings collapse before the alien attack. This kind of extreme ideas is needed to make sense of a hero capable of going around the world in a few seconds, although certainly a Superman-based AAA has to have the density, variety and quality of content expected of a great production – and of course you shouldn't have the option of annihilating the earth from an energy beam like in Megaton.
You could think of many ideas – which are surely easier to formulate than to execute – but the fundamental thing is that two indie titles offer clues on how innovative approaches could be adopted to make sense of a Superman game that did not look like any other. other. The worst superhero games are those that would work the same if the protagonist were changed by any other, while the best are the ones that base their best ideas based on the primary fantasies that their protagonists evoke. In the Arkhams we are not only the figure of Batman but we embody his soul as a vigilante who neutralizes the villains using a mixture of stealth, martial arts and high technology; In the best Spider-Man games we have been allowed to feel the magic of defying gravity by swinging vertiginously through the skyscrapers of New York; In Hulk Ultimate Destruction, a pioneer of superhero sandboxes, the grace was in jumping great distances and fighting leaving a path of destruction in our path. A great Superman game should be one that is unquestionably associated with your character and we look forward to seeing him in the future.
