LMAO! Evolved, right. My bad. I pre-ordered that one thinking it was going to be huge, played it a lot for the first few weeks. Unfortunately, I haven’t played it at all in years, particularly since the servers shut down; none of my friends own it so I have nobody on XBL to play it with. And anyhow, I’m terrible with remembering names. But as to Supes, I’m not a huge Superman-fan, myself. Grew up on Marvel properties like Spider-Man (my personal favorite hero) and X-Men, back when those shows had kick-*ss 90s cartoons and the X-Men comics were hawt and flying off shelves like beads at Mardi Gras. But like I was trying to explain to my buddy, the point isn’t so much the character itself so much as taking something people have been failing to do for years and make it work really well.
I’m reminded of the Spider-Man 2 game based on the similarly-titled Sam Raimi flick. The game originally was going to use the same static web-slinging as every other Spidey game that came before it, but one dude on the team (couldn’t tell you the name if my life depended on it without looking it up) was like, “No, forget that noise, lets improve on the existing designs and make this better than it could be.” So I guess he modeled some web-swinging physics and showed it to the team and it blew everyone away. Now, that game sucked by almost every metric. The random activities were repetitive and boring AF, the story was as weak as it was short, and even the combat was mostly meh. But to this day, the web-swinging has stuck with me and most of my friends as being SO COOL. I never even beat the story, but I spent a frankly unhealthy amount of time just swinging around, completely enthralled by the novelty of BEING Spider-Man. Because before that, web-swinging just felt like a pale imitation, y’know? Cut to… when was it, 2018 when Insomniac’s Spider-Man came out? And that game blew everyone away. Spider-fans in particular, sure, but it wasn’t a crappy retread of the character and systems that the property has been burdened with for ages now, they actually went at it from the vantage of how they could make an amazing game AROUND the character, rather than approaching it from a vantage of just being another licensed product.
The Batman Arkham series is another great example of one studio approaching a licensed character from the perspective of game design rather than cash-cow design. They had some excellent ideas about combat and they turned it into something incredible. Like, before Rocksteady got their hands on it, the Batman property was just as boring and lazy as any other licensed superhero game out there. The point that I’m making is that consumers are stubborn and willful (I know this all too well, being one, myself) but ultimately if you make something mind-bogglingly cool, they will pay attention. And if you can prove that the coolness has substance, too, well… I mean, you’ve basically just written your legend in the stars, my friend. There are a lot of dev studios that phone it in these days, which means that the truly gifted studios just end up standing out all the more. Take CDPR, for example. They aren’t even a ‘Murican studio, they aren’t Japanese or British or any other nationality we associate with AAA-game design. They’re freakin’ Polish! How many triple-A game studios can you name from Poland?? CD Project Red is the only name that comes to mind, and the reason for that is that they’ve tossed out almost all the industry rules, done some incredible stuff, and as a result, their company has earned a reputation for original and crazy-high quality work.
So, sure, the idea of Superman isn’t going to excite anyone who has seen any Superman game every at any time. But that’s why making a GREAT Superman game when there is literally no precedent to speak of would be such a powerful maneuver for any fledgling studio. And, sure, licensing any iconic character is a big-budget proposition, but you know what talks louder than money to a big corporation with loads of money to throw around already? The promise of taking a lemon property and turning it into something incredible. DC/WB already own Superman. But what good is a property that never gets used? They can accept that the high price-tag costs too much for smaller, hungrier studios to foot the bill for or they can take a risk on a phenomenal idea and potentially turn the property around so it matters in this industry again. Just because Superman games have always sucked doesn’t mean they always will, it just means that the tech and the talent had to incubate enough to enable magic to happen. 
Anyway, I kinda rambled there, my bad. I get wordsy when I’m tackling a deep issue and explaining unrecognized potentials that I can see. XD
Customization is something I’ve always enjoyed. I bought a Lifetime subscription on Champions Online in spite of the ■■■■ gameplay specifically because of the deep customization elements. I never play it for long, but I always log in every one or two months, sometimes longer, to buy new costume pieces with the free monthly Zen-currency they send Lifers. (Speaking of CoH.) Oh, and I’ve got some MMO-related stuff I was going to add to the original post later, when I feel compelled to do so. Some of it’s superhero-stuff, other parts are more fantasy-related or just general design ideas disconnected from any larger theme.
It’s incredible to me how they got away with Brightburn. I mean, literally everything about that flick was ripped straight from the Superman lore that’s been established for literally decades… The only differences are the names! The only thing I can think of that might protect the studio who made that from legal action is that they could claim it was an artistic critique of the Superman tropes. Certain forms of copying are expressly protected, for example, YouTubers who use movie footage when they review the displayed works can’t be sued because they’re only displaying the content so they can discuss it publically. Things like that. But still, the stones it takes to make a clone that close to the intended model… Wow.
I never played EDF, but I think I got it for free as an XBL Gold freebie. I wasn’t too interested even when it first came out, mostly because it did seem a bit too silly without being ROFLcopter-level outrageous. But if someone did a more (or even less) serious clone of the underlying game, I might be tempted to take a look. I remember reading that it had a very arcadey style of gameplay. A better rendition could be fun with some four-player co-op.
That ARG-idea has a lot of potential! Remember Cloverfield? Could do something like that, where you have to shoot smaller monsters with your phone while you avoid getting trampled by the big ones, something like that could be really engaging. I hadn’t heard about Chaos. I’m not much into the coding-end of the process, but that sounds technically bad*ss. I’ll have to Google some articles on it in the morning.
LMAO! Man, my Spidey-senses are always tingling. Sometimes it gets hard to single out specific ideas enough to focus and make any of them viable. The curse of being an ENTP, the flip-side of the coin from being fonts of inspiration. XD