Batman: Arkham Knight is sort of a big deal. It’s the final game in a series of some pretty great games, it stars Batman, which is always a plus, and it follows Batman: Arkham City, which is often regarded to be the greatest game ever made. For Rocksteady, that can mean a lot of pressure- how do you follow up on something like that without getting lost in the mire of expectations? How do they get out of the towering shadow of Arkham City with Arkham Knight?
Their answer? Make it flat out the best game they have ever made. This may sound obvious to you, but far too often, developers are too afraid to fiddle with success, particularly when said success is as big as Arkham City. Not Rocksteady. They’re making Arkham Knight bigger and better than anything they have ever attempted before, including Arkham City.
In a recent interview with GamingBolt, which will be posted in full soon, they confirmed as much. “We’ve had such an incredible experience working on the Batman: Arkham games over the last eight years that I think it’s important for us as a studio to give the series the send-off it deserves,” said Gaz Deaves, Social Marketing Manager, Rocksteady Studios. “That’s not just for our amazing fans – many of whom have been with us since Batman: Arkham Asylum – but also for ourselves, to give a satisfying conclusion to this trilogy that we’ve put so much care and effort into over the last eight years.
“Part of that for us is about creating a game that builds on everything we learned while developing our two previous Batman games. There’s no way we could have made something as ambitious as Batman: Arkham Knight when we first started out: the scope, the scale and the detail of this game is leagues ahead of anything we’ve ever done before.”
I have my fingers crossed, then, that this turns out to be the game that everyone, including fans and Rocksteady themselves, are expecting it to be. Stay tuned, because we will have our full interview with Rocksteady posted soon.