So, I was a tester on Superman Returns. I specifically scrolled down through the article to see if you gave it a mention because to me the way Arkham treats civilians feels almost like a reaction to Superman Returns' failure to execute on its concept.
I saw the design documents. It was an interesting concept. I honestly can't remember the difference between the mechanics in some of the early versions I tested and what actually got released to the public, so my post is going to be a little nebulous and might not reflect the game as released.
The idea was that Superman is basically invincible. So instead of giving him a health bar, the city would have a health bar. And this wasn't just about physical damage dealt to the city, but about the city's faith and trust in Superman as its protector. So you could actually interact with civilians as Superman and affect the meter. You could punch civilians, and the meter would go down. You could wreck cars and street lights and newspaper stands, and the meter would go down. You could pick civilians up and drop them from the top of a building, and the meter would go down. But you could also save civilians. I forget how the mechanics were supposed to work, but if you saw someone on the ground injured, you could pick them up and move them somewhere else and it would save them, or something. I think there were ambulances you could drop them near. This would make the meter go back up.
It was a little bit like a primordial version of how you can grind good/bad karma in inFamous. Except as a DC licensed character tied to a major motion picture, they couldn't exactly have Superman go full renegade. Being a jerk meant an eventual game over.
The idea that the failure state was Metropolis no longer trusting Superman to be its protector has merit, and is something that has been explored in other stories about Superman, but isn't one I remember being covered much, if at all, in the Superman Returns movie specifically. From what I vaguely remember of the movie, the city already trusts him pretty implicitly. It feels like an idea that would have fit into a Man of Steel movie game.
It's also way too nebulous and imprecise of a concept in the Superman Returns game. It's like losing because Superman loses faith in himself. He only loses because he believes he has failed at a personal standard he has set for himself about how much of the city he can allow to be destroyed. The karma system in inFamous, for all the criticism its received for being too ham-fisted and black-and-white, communicates the gameplay idea of either helping or harming citizens and gaining or losing their trust a lot more effectively.
Unfortunately, they were making a movie licensed brawler masquerading as an open world game that was supposed to launch on the same day as the movie's release, on a relatively new console, and they were trying to make it back-portable to the previous console generation. Oh, and the studio had only ever made Madden and NASCAR for like the past 10 years. Basically, it was scoped way too big, was trying to be too many things at once, and was extremely limited by the license.
The 5 month delay it got was required just to make the game run, basically. A lot was cut that didn't make sense or was counter-productive to the core gameplay of "being Superman", which was mostly punching robots and scripted boss fights. When I played inFamous, I remember feeling a bit like "this is the game the Superman Returns devs wished they could have made."
So, the point being, when you have a licensed character that has to be a good guy all the time in your story, it just seems ridiculous (and potentially a violation of your license) to have him going around punching civilians, or putting them in harms way. Making invulnerable civilians (which is what Superman Returns did) is greatly immersion-breaking, and makes it seem like the citizens are actually more powerful than the hero (since the hero can be defeated but the civilians can't). The Arkham devs just didn't want to deal with it. So they come up with a reason to get the civilians out of the game. inFamous had a lot more freedom because it was an original character and story, and they leveraged the presence of the civilians as part of the game's mechanics and story.
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