Incline Freedom Force (2002)

[luj1]

There wouldn't be so many people hating on RTWP if the game was more popular. RTWP is fine, the incompetent Russian jank factories are the real problem.

I always preferred TB (cleaner system) bit RTwP doesnt make a game trash automatically

There are bad TB games too and excellent RTwP games

 

[AndyS]

I get that the first one didn't sell well, and the second one did even worse...but Take-Two doing nothing with Freedom Force in the fifteen years since the MCU has been around, and especially the past ten years where they've been this monumental money maker has always been one of the odder "why the fuck is nobody doing anything with this" of recent times. I mean Take-Two/2K wouldn't have any problem selling a Freedom Force 3 and Ultimate Freedom Force made by an Irrational Games post-BioShock coming out in 2007.

Well, even at the time, superheroes were reasonably popular but virtually no one was doing anything with them in games because Levine said they'd pitch a superhero game and just be told that people only want D&D fantasy or space marines. I imagine that prejudice is still pretty strong.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

I get that the first one didn't sell well, and the second one did even worse...but Take-Two doing nothing with Freedom Force in the fifteen years since the MCU has been around, and especially the past ten years where they've been this monumental money maker has always been one of the odder "why the fuck is nobody doing anything with this" of recent times. I mean Take-Two/2K wouldn't have any problem selling a Freedom Force 3 and Ultimate Freedom Force made by an Irrational Games post-BioShock coming out in 2007.

Well, even at the time, superheroes were reasonably popular but virtually no one was doing anything with them in games because Levine said they'd pitch a superhero game and just be told that people only want D&D fantasy or space marines. I imagine that prejudice is still pretty strong.

I'm not sure how true that really is, and 2002 wasn't anything like the past ten years. You had some superhero movies around that time, but the 2002 Spider-Man movie was really the only one that presented itself as a superhero movie. X-Men really downplayed being a superhero thing with the Planet of the Vampires looking suits, and a lot of people didn't even know Blade was a comic book movie.

But on top of that I don't think being a PC exclusive for an unknown property was doing them many favors in 2002, and it really didn't do them any favors with their smaller self-published 2005 follow-up. Even apart from the market being totally different after 2005, Irrational Games was so beloved by the general gaming audience and press after BioShock that anything they did afterwards would've been a hit. I don't know, I just always found it odd Ken Levine never did the follow-ups he talked about like he was dying to do when he seems to have carte blanche to do whatever now, his name following BioShock almost guarantees it'd be a success, and superhero stuff has only become more off a moneymaker since Iron Man and Knight came out in 2008.


I'd think post BioShock the thinking people only want D&D and space marines would be gone...the D&D bit after like '97 doesn't even make sense since D&D games aren't exactly huge sellers. I mean, the IGN interview where he's talking about these things is 2009. By that time the final Lord of the Ring movie was six years ago, Bungie was no longer directly part of Microsoft, and space marines had been dethroned by Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Although Levine does say in that interview they found a buyer for Ultimate Freedom Force, and that it had a good sized budget; it's just Irrational Games went with BioShock (which they were also shopping around at the time) instead and never went back to that idea in the 15 years since then.

Assisted Living Godzilla Console controls would be helpless to play this game. That's probably why they never did anything with it, even as Marvel overtook pop culture.

It sounds like the Ultimate Freedom Force game they were mulling over had direct controls. How exactly that game would've been I don't know since at least as far as I know they never really went too much into either that or FF3; but, Raven Software's X-Men and Marvel games were practically a lesser direct controls version of Freedom Force.

Although it's not like they couldn't easily make a standard Freedom Force game work on a console. You can already pause combat anytime you want. You've only got a party of 4. It's alright got a pop up menus to do stuff.