First Sense
Daredevil’s debut season has garnered huge acclaim so far, and part of that is due to its darker tone and brutal combat. When compared to Captain America’s political spy espionage, Iron Man’s action comedy tone, Guardians’ cosmic sarcasm, and so on and so forth, Daredevil is a stand out. He’s the only hero thus far to not be roped into the goings on of the Avengers (even Guardians falls in this circle due to the Thanos connection). All of his hopes, his issues, revolve around Hell’s Kitchen. The game should keep that same grounded and isolated feeling. Go the Arkham Asylum route and have only that part of New York be the entire environment for the game.
As a young child, Matt Murdock suffered from an accident involving a truck transporting harmful chemicals that left him blind. But, the accident also greatly enhanced his other working senses. These newly obtained, heightened senses combined with martial arts and athletic skills turned him into the vigilante Daredevil, a persona he uses to fight crime in Hell’s Kitchen.
To truly immerse you in his world, the Daredevil game would be most effective in first person. His blindness is the most important part of who he is, and it wouldn’t entirely be the same if the gameplay revolved around third person. What would first person mean for the player, though?
Being blind wouldn’t just mean not having the foggiest idea of what you’d be looking at. In the game, you would be blind – as in no health meter, no indicator of how close or far away an enemy is, and most importantly, no minimap. You’d have to get around the environment organically, but this wouldn’t mean that you’d be screwed. You’d simply be using Matt’s senses to get to your objective.
Say, for example, you start at Matt’s apartment and a mission starts on the other side of town. But you’ve met someone associated with that mission and picked up the smell of their cologne or the sound of their voice. Similar to how crouching worked in The Last of Us, pressing a button would activate Matt’s enhanced sense of smell, creating small trails that lead you to the mission start. Or perhaps Matt would mentally play back the last thing he heard the mark say via the controller.
In the show, Matt mentions that everything he sees is like fire. Ben Affleck’s Daredevil film portrayed Matt’s vision as just blue, but Netflix Daredevil’s “fire vision” could be utilized for certain play modes or difficulty levels.
