Nire Bryce

AAA superhero games suffer even harder than comics and movie adaptations from the "Superman can't actually change in any significant way or be examined deeply enough to effectively redefine any of his core identity traits that we consider to be the franchise's bread and butter" by virtue of being power fantasies and immortal "IPs" and the weird conservatism and lack of true social-political agency that is kind of baked into the superhero genre in its most conventional expressions. But at the same time it's ripe for, practically screaming out to be, subverted and critiqued - Watchmen and a few other works are regarded so highly partly because they are filling a gap everyone knows is there. And even lots of parodic superhero stuff does kind of the same thing, acknowledge the stuff we know would be happening. So I think there's a huge opportunity for a game to come along and do a lot of this stuff you're talking about. And Spiderman has been a progressive enough franchise that it's more likely to come out of there than say, Batman or Superman. But it'd be a real tone shift and it'd pour cold water on some of the power fantasy aspects, and executives would get pretty twitchy about that. I hope a good creative team gets the leeway to do it someday. I'd play it.

I think a old spiderman game had a thing where if you ignore helping people in the world enough then people see spiderman as a enemy/bad person and you will be attacked while swinging around sometimes. Everybody seemed to despise the mechanic from what I remember.

I think with the level of crunch and the like that programing in multiple ways for every mission to go doesn't seem particuarly feaeible or something to justify using up so much dev time and budget on sadly as intresting as it could be.

"whatever, I'm not a nerd"[citation needed]

I remember playing Watch Dogs 1 as a young lad, and its sort of "reputation meter" thing was so icool (to my 12yo self, at least!)

If you were at a high level of... vigilantism (i guess?), people would call the cops on you if they saw you walking around. The news flashes would call you out on your actions, citizens would be scared of you...

And the fact that, really, there was no "fully moral" course of action. Shot a cop in the head? Boo! -10 good-boy points!! Shot a cop in the kneecaps? The game counted that as a non-lethal takedown (I think there were special animations and everything,) but there was still a penalty only less severe.

This really made me want to be an ok guy. I did the stealth takedowns a lot more. Used all the fun hacking gimmicks to try and flee my pursuers instead of engaging in a shootout (the traffic lights!! Good Lord that was such a fun game.)

I think if Spider-Man 3 had something similar, where failing to super-hero well could damage your reputation with New York, where people would criticize you when you walked around, where JJJ and Danika could, ya know, actually be characters? Instead of just being this dumb black-and-white shtick?? Maybe JJJ could ease-up to Spider-Man when you did good, and Danika could lose some faith on you if you let people get hurt. That would be cool.

"In this game, it is good to kill a Spider Man from time to time, to encourage the others." - Voltaire or some other supervillain IDK.

There has been at least one time where a Spiderman game had some consequences: https://youtu.be/ngORPZj4wwY?si=1FEaHBMC8Y-3RG0w

The people yearn for Infamous.