This should not come as news to anyone, but Rocksteady have come out and claimed that the upcoming Batman: Arkham Knight, the final entry in the Batman: Arkham franchise, and the first one ever to be made for the new generation consoles, is the largest game that the developer has ever made.
“We found that, with Batman: Arkham City, we had a lot of side missions, but because you were never even forced to encounter the starting point of any of those, it was very easy to just miss them completely,” said Rocksteady’s marketing director Dax Ginn in an interview with Gamespot. “So we wanted to give gamers a taste of them on the mandatory story path, and then it’s up to you if you pursue them. As you’re focusing on Scarecrow, which is the main path, you will come into contact with all of those characters. But then, their stories branch off. So you’ve got a decision point, for example, to say, ‘Well, I’m just going to really focus on the Riddler, and go after the Riddler from that main path intersection’. Or, you can branch off to any other.”
This, according to Ginn, should help the game keep its focus. “If the game was five hours long, yeah, we’d be in trouble cramming that all in,” he continued. “If you had Penguin and Two-Face and the Riddler and Harley Quinn simultaneously coming at you, that’s just a mess. So you have to break the game out so you’ve got a buffet to choose from, but you can take those meals on discretely. But the game is massive. I can’t put a time on it, but it’s far and away the biggest game we’ve ever made.”
All in all, Arkham Knight certainly sounds intriguing, though whether or not it is better than Arkham City, which is widely considered to be one of the greatest games ever made, remains to be seen.
Batman: Arkham Knight launches next month on PS4, Xbox One, and PC. Stay tuned for more coverage.