What a Superman game needs to be good

Welcome back, my beautiful freaks, to the Assassin's Den!

So, after rereading my blog post about how to make a Green Lantern game good, I thought about how to make a Superman game good.  And hoo boy, do we have plenty of examples of how to do it wrong.  Between Superman 64, Man of Steal and Superman for the NES, there's a lot of "what not to do" stuff.

The problem with making a Superman game is that you have to both feel like Superman while still having some real stakes.  So the best thing you can do is take what Superman Returns tried to do and make Superman physically invulnerable while making the city of Metropolis, as well as others that pop up in the story for certain missions, the health bar.  Doing this right will make you act like Superman, and not a generic action hero; do you break off from a battle with Darkseid or Doomsday to save civilians, or continue the fight and try to limit future damage to your city? How do you protect the people of the Earth?

Now, the major downfall of the way Superman Returns was how they handled how Superman reacted to civilians and the city.  And in this current landscape, with the DC movies and the Injustice series, Warner Bros is more open to a darker Superman. So they must introduce an alignment system; if you let too many civilians die, cause too much destruction or allow the villain cause too much destruction, you take an alignment hit. This still allows you to have access to all the power of Superman, but it allows you to have two different ending; a Classic Superman ending, or a Utilitarian Superman ending. 

Now, villains. Unfortunately, Superman's rogues gallery isn't as well known as some other DC rogues gallery; outside Bizarro, Lobo, Cyborg Superman, Brainiac, General Zod, Lex Luthor, Doomsday and the forces of Apokolips, most aren't known to the general public.  Heck, I'm looking at his Rogues Gallery, and I don't recognize half of them, and I'm a fan!  So, you take those well known guys and make them boss battles, and instead make most of the game's open world missions doing other things that only Superman can do; saving people in fantastic ways.  For example, say there's a burning apartment building and there are people still trapped inside. Superman would have to go inside the building, unharmed the entire time due to his own invulnerability, and he'd seek out people in danger. And, as I stated, the people's lives are his health bar; he's got to use his assortment of powers to seek out the people trapped and get them to safety.  If he lets too many die, he gets an alignment hit, and is pushed ever closer to the bad ending. From there, Superman can use his powers to put out the fire once people are safe.

You can even have Superman fight other disasters, like dam breakages, tornados, hurricanes (yes, he does have the power to fight natural disasters), and do all sorts of things that protect the people of Earth. And yes, I mean the people of Earth; he may make his home in Metropolis, but his duties are to the entire planet.

In fact, since Superman protect the entire world, you can have cameos from the Justice League to ask for help.  You can have Superman go to places like Gotham, Central City, Coast City, etc, and have him aid the resident heroes there in missions they can't handle on their own.  And this again brings in the alignment system; do you help, or do you leave them to handle things on their own? And if you do help, how do you help?

And this gives me an easy segue to the alignment system.  Basically, you start out with Superman's classic moral code; soft touch with humans, don't kill people, protect innocent civilians while trying to appeal to the better nature of those around him.  However, you can lose alignment points if you cause too much destruction, through action or inaction. And if you lose too many alignment points, Superman's outlook starts to darken; a sort of "what are the lives of a few million civilians to the fate of billions?" sort of thing.  And depending on how far down you go, you may lock yourself in to the bad ending. 

Now, certain missions would give an alignment boost; that fire scenario I mentioned earlier, for example, or things like saving a falling construction worker, repairing a dam or stopping natural disasters.  Your ending would be entirely determined by what you do in the game.

And finally, his powers. In order for Superman to feel like Superman, he needs to have access to his full array of powers from the start, and there's and there's an easy way to integrate a tutorial in a natural way; Jonathan Kent. Jonathan Kent is Superman's son with Lois Lane, and he's got access to all of Clark's powers.  The tutorial mission would take place on the Kent farm in Hamilton County and would be Clark teaching Jonathan how to use the powers they share. This would be a great way to demonstrate the powers and the alignment system; Clark would teach Jonathan of his classic values, and Jonathan would ask if they took a more utilitarian mindset regarding protecting the Earth, since Jonathan's still a child, but Clark said that they could, but remind his son that they have a responsibility to the people of Earth, reminding him that people can do amazing things without having access to their powers if given a chance. 

Superman is the toughest superhero to make a good game for, and for good reason.  But if a developer takes my advice, and put the love and care required to make Superman who he is, I'm certain a fantastic game can be made.