Spoiler alert: this article contains plot details from Batman: Arkham City
Wednesday was one of those days in the video game industry where everyone simultaneously stops what they’re doing to watch the same trailer. In this case, it was Arkham Knight. Set to be the final Batman title from London developer Rocksteady Studios, the forthcoming title ends one of the defining action adventure series’ of the past decade. Not only did 2009 opener Arkham Asylum rejuvenate the super hero tie-in, it also brought both depth and accessibility to the third-person beat-’em-up genre. Alongside Christopher Nolan’s movies it explored and celebrated the dark heart of the Batman mythos. Also, it looked beautiful – as did the more expansive Arkham City follow-up.
No surprise then, that the announcement of Arkham Knight has been greeted with breathless excitement – an excitement fuelled by the huge preview feature in Game Informer, the American magazine that tends to get the scoop on all such revelations. It was here that fans discovered exactly why the title will be on PC and next-gen consoles only: scale. The environment is set to be five times the size of Rocksteady’s previous game, and astonishingly, according to character artist Albert Feliu, the polygon count in one specific Arkham Knight character is bigger than that of the whole of Gotham in Arkham City. Maybe let that sink in for a minute, because it sounds preposterous.
Anyway, according to Warner Bros, Batman: Arkham Knight’s plot picks up after the events of Batman: Arkham City, which cancels out the rumours circulating last year that Rocksteady was about to create a Silver Age Batman game. It also means that The Joker is dead, having succumbed to blood poisoning from the Titan formula. While comic book villains have a long and time-honoured tradition of coming back from the other side, Rocksteady’s Creative Director Sefton Hill confirmed at Arkham City’s launch that the clown prince of crime is gone for good – at least in the Rocksteady canon. The game’s other two antagonists, Hugo Strange and Ra’s al Ghul, also met with sticky ends, so presumably the Arkham City prison project has fallen apart.
The Scarecrow and Mrs Quinn
There’s no word on who is providing the voice that hisses “abandon this city, or I will unleash your greatest fears,” at the start of the trailer, but since fear is basically Dr John Crane’s calling card, it’s clear that Scarecrow is the game’s lead antagonist. The seeds for this were laid in Arkham City; players who searched the game’s map extensively may have found an Easter Egg in the form of a boat, which contained an Arkham inmate driven mad by fear. They’ll also have found a shipping manifesto addressed to Crane listing several containers (contents unknown, but we’re betting it was fear gas). Indeed, the Game Informer Arkham Knight piece states that Scarecrow has discovered a new strain of the fear toxin and is threatening to gas the city resulting in a mass evacuation. This premise seems to be illustrated by some of the scenes in the trailer, which shows the streets of Gotham plunging into chaos, gang members roaming the streets and the Gotham City cops on the run, outnumbered and outgunned.
It’ll be interesting to see which other members of Batman’s rogue’s gallery will take centre stage. The trailer shows Two-Face, The Penguin and Harley Quinn – and according to Game Informer, Troy Baker, Nolan North and Tara Strong-Charley will lend these characters their respective voices once again. The article also states that Wally Winghert will return to voice The Riddler and Kevin Conroy who voiced Batman in both Rocksteady’s games and the Batman animated series from the 1990s, which be on vocal duties once again for the caped crusader.
Who else can we expect? Rocksteady is likely to keep quiet until the E3 exhibition in June, but anyone who played through the studio’s last game will remember that Batman had two unresolved encounters in Arkham City. The first was with the mysterious Azrael, who made a brief appearance if the player solved a series of etching puzzles. The second was with the masked killer, Hush, who evaded capture after the player tracked him to his macabre lair.
Rocksteady has also confirmed that the game will boast a brand new arch rival that the studio has created from scratch with the help of DC Comics – this apparently, is the Arkham Knight of the title. Speaking to Game Informer, game director Sefton Hill said, “[the villain] is definitely a formidable foe for Batman.” Could this be a rogue vigilante or some wraith-like evil manifestation of the hero? Is this Batman’s Venom? The trailer doesn’t give us much, apart from a shadow.
“It’s the car, right?”
Along with his new enemy, Batman will have a new mode of transport in the form of the Batmobile, which features an array of special moves and a remote control feature allowing players to call it from any place in the city. For this reason, the urban layout has been widened, allowing for more vehicular action; Batman can apparently even eject from the car at speed, soaring into the air and zooming over the rooftops.
This may well turn out to be a controversial addition. Part of the appeal of Rocksteady’s games has been the claustrophobic intensity – the way that Batman is trapped in these shadowy Gothic spaces with the scum of the city. It felt sort of symbolic of the character, apparently free to roam a whole city, but really trapped within its darkest haunts, with the criminals he stalks. Furthermore, travelling around open cities (especially those bereft of pedestrians) can often become tiresome, as players seek out the mission hotspots and begin to resent the long drives between them. But no doubt Rocksteady has thought of all that. Hill has said, “We’re not trying to create the biggest open-world game ever. We are trying to create a really rich, vibrant, dense open world.”
The trailer also shows that the free-flowing combat from earlier games has been maintained. Along with throws, counters and cape flicks, it looks as though Batman may be able to use parts of his environment to take down foes and there are reports that Rocksteady will increase Batman’s attack arsenal to include ground strikes and using enemies’ own weapons against them. We can also expect lots of new texture and physics effects thanks to the abandonment of the PS3 and Xbox 360.
Most important of all – far more so than any snippets of information one can glean from the cinematics – the fact there’s a trailer in circulation means we won’t have to wait too long for Rocksteady’s culminative Batman game. There’s no release date yet, just an assurance that this is a 2014 release, which means autumn. There will be plenty more to learn about Arkham Knight before that.
• Batman: Arkham Knight is due out on PC, PS4 and Xbox One later this year
• Batman: Arkham Knight announced
