If there is a commercial failure of an IP, there is a good chance that its failure will be seen as the IP generally failing or falling out of poluarity instead of the failure to best utilize the IP that likely occurred.
For example, when EA released Tiberian Twilight and it was absolutely awful and didn’t sell, they said that people just didn’t want RTS games anymore and shelved the entire C&C franchise. That was fourteen years ago and we haven’t had a new C&C since then that wasn’t mobile shovelware.
There’s a popular urban legend that Square was on the verge of going under and expected the game to be their last, hence the title, but in reality what happened was that the creator wanted the game to initialize as FF and his first choice, Fighting Fantasy, was already taken. He was planning on retiring after the game was published, though, so he eventually settled on Final Fantasy. Still didn’t work out, though, because he directed 1-5 and then contributed to 6-10.
Might just be because I’m just starting out, but Spider-Man’s combat is much more punishing for me. Could just be the higher emphasis on using specific combos on certain enemies, which I have some difficulty keeping straight.
They also said popularized, though. System Shock never really got beyond cult classic status, so while it invented them, I’d say BioShock popularized them.
The base campaign is kind of awful. It really just existed to demonstrate what you could do with the tool set. The expansions, Shadows of Undrentide and Hordes of the Underdark, are much better written with more interesting characters. None of the three campaigns hold up to modern game writing standards and all are pretty heavy on dungeon crawling. The deciding factor is probably going to be how much you like the D&D 3.0 rule set.
Obsidian’s sequel is based on D&D 3.5 and the core campaign has writing roughly on par with the first game’s expansions, with the quirk that it’s Obsidian doing high fantasy straight rather than their usual deconstructions. NWN2’s Mask of the Betrayer expansion is easily the best written thing out of either NWN game and is genuinely pretty great. NWN2 has some pretty terrible optimization, though, and runs rough on even high end modern systems.
Generally, but it has some issues. I found the C-stick to be very uncomfortable with the lack of a cap, and you can’t really press two face buttons at the same time unless one of them is A. The latter isn’t usually a problem, but certain games, like the Arkham series, would be virtually unplayable. That there’s only one shoulder button on one side is also pretty weird. The dual stage triggers are pretty neat, though, and the only other controller I’ve used with them is the Steam Controller, which has a pretty steep learning curve.
Devs tend to go with simplified or cartoony graphics for legibility on the small integrated screen, but that’s just an art style choice. Doesn’t look too far off from Xenoblade 3, especially given polygons will be saved by not having to render a mile out. Or consider that Doom 2016 runs decently on the Switch.
The Wiimote worked with a pair of IR blasters to locate your screen. Joycons have no idea where your screen is. In that light, that they work as pointing devices at all is actually rather impressive.
I’m guessing a single release, and the game being used to show off the backwards compatibility features of the next system. Probably the usual 800p-900p 30fps on Switch and something higher on Switch 2.