The modern mainstream media landscape is awash with trends that seem to permeate every possible medium. Since Marvel started making movies and TV shows that continuously dominate the culture (and box office), it feels like the world has been superhero crazed. Marvel is everywhere. People, inexplicably, want familiar superheroes in everything, including video games, and developers are happy to fill that need, with varying levels of success. You’ll likely think of the Spider-Man and Batman games first, but we’ve also gotten Guardians of the Galaxy, Midnight Suns, and Marvel’s Avengers, some of which are sorely underrated, and some of which have flopped.
Simultaneously, triple-A video games have overwhelmingly begun to focus on open-world games. A lot of the best selling games of the last decade have been open-world games – think Red Dead Redemption 2, Breath of the Wild and its sequel, Horizon Zero Dawn, Elden Ring, and Fallout 4, all of which have sold over ten million copies.
Naturally, these factors have converged in a number of different series. Rocksteady and Warner Bros.’ Batman: Arkham games are widely beloved and sold extremely well. Rocksteady then expanded on that series with Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, and we all know how that’s going. Most prominently, Insomniac Games is leading the pack (for better and for worse) when it comes to the modern open-world superhero game. It’s already developed three Spider-Man games, and is working on a Wolverine game as well.
Insomniac is now so tied up with Marvel IP that it’s the first developer that comes to mind for many when they think about superhero games. Deadpool & Wolverine also released last week, and is top of mind for many fans right now. That’s probably why I came across a tweet today that asked if Insomniac should make a Deadpool game.
Deadpool Would Be Wasted On An Open-World Game
It’s quite an innocent question on its face, but I was immediately repulsed by the idea. Not to dunk on this one poster, but this line of thinking is indicative of the general player’s desire to turn everything into the safe familiarity of an open-world game, whether or not the source material is suited to it.
In open-world games, you spend a lot of time just moving around the world. Insomniac’s Spider-Man games work because the fantasy of swinging between buildings and doing flips off ledges makes moving around the city fun and engaging. In contrast, the Arkham games let Batman glide through the air and tear the roads up with the Batmobile, and I hated the vehicular gameplay so much that having to move around the city made me angry. Deadpool has… a scooter, I guess, and he could teleport as fast travel. But that’s not as fun! If moving around the world doesn’t feel amazing, an open world game just won’t work as well.
Besides, I imagine playing a snarky, self-absorbed dude who chatters incessantly would get tiring after the first fifty hours, and open-world games tend to run much longer than that because players want that good side content. Deadpool is much more suited to a linear action game, like the one that already exists.
2013’s Deadpool was a hack and slash, third-person shooter developed by High Moon Studios, but is no longer purchasable on digital storefronts because of licensing issues. While it received mixed reviews on release, largely because of its controls, combat, and repetitive gameplay, many critics seemed to feel it was gesturing at a potential it couldn’t quite reach. If we put Deadpool in the hands of the right developer, one who does linear action games well and can pull off his offbeat humour and fourth wall breaks, we could have a winner.
But an open-world game? Absolutely not. Not every character needs to have an open-world game, especially when the genre is already so oversaturated. Deadpool has potential for a video game, but not if I’m going to spend most of my time playing as him zipping down streets on a scooter.
