Exclusive interview: Superman Returns

How will you make sure that gamers aren't caught up in lots of little tasks and make sure that the experience is always on the epic, Superman scale?
We looked at the types of scenarios you might do as Superman - we'll leave muggings, carjackings, or bank robberies to other characters.

We just decided to set it apart from other games and focus on huge events such as big natural disasters, a meteor storm, an insanely powerful lightning strike. Or a character who's 60 stories tall, and you might have to pick up something the size of a gas tanker and throw it at him to even put a dent in him. Although we made an exception for saving kittens. That was just too iconic to pass up, so there're helpless kittens that must be rescued.

You've given Superman a fully-formed, active Metropolis to explore, but how do you split up the particular missions throughout the game?
We take certain elements from the film and turn them into playable objectives, and the rest of the game is made up of objectives that are triggered in a somewhat non-linear way. As you progress through the game you open them up, but you can optionally do some and not others. Or there are minigames, like racing through the city using your super speed.

Objectives are found with your super hearing, so you actually see a visible icon on screen that tells you where the objective or the situation is. Once in a mission we tune out some of the other things in the world - it's not fair to fight a super villain while you're trying to put out fires around the city. Unless, of course, the super villain is causing those fires, which they might happen to do.