WB Games Montreal has revealed details about the primary antagonist of the upcoming Gotham Knights—Harley Quinn. Speaking with IGN, creative director Patrick Redding talks about how the Harley Quinn of Gotham Knights isn’t the kind of character you’d expect.
“She is coming not from a place of, ‘Oh, I’ve got to be zany. I’m your manic pixie,’” says Redding. “She doesn’t need to be the manic pixie anymore. She has gotten to a point where she knows who she is. She has a very clear sense of what her identity is, and she’s going to present herself in this much stronger, developed supervillain way.”
Where Harley Quinn retains her look, voice, and even her style of villainy, where she’s different are deeper aspects of the character, like her motivation and story. Gotham Knights’ Harley Quinn isn’t different from her various incarnations in comics, TV shows and movies. Redding explains that it’s the same Harley Quinn that we’re familiar with, just further in her life. She’s older and wiser by the time Gotham Knights kicks off.
“We really did make a conscious choice of allowing her to be a slightly older version of Harley Quinn than we’ve seen elsewhere, and that informed a lot of choices,” said Redding. “It informed a bunch of the performance choices that were made in shooting cinematics. It informed her fighting style. It informed how she presents herself, how she costumes herself. And as we’ll see in some of the middle chapters of the Harley Quinn arc, even how she presents herself to Gotham City.”
While she is older, Quinn won’t necessarily look older in Gotham Knights. Instead, the studio focused on making her seem wiser and more experience through designing her character. Art director Jay Evans refers to a new confidence in the character that she may not have had before.
When it comes to fighting, Harley’s style involves fewer fisticuffs and more relying on her wits and plans to deal with the heroes. Able to control a crowd of Gotham city citizens, Harley can move through this crowd at ease, and strike with her hammer when she spots an opening.
Gotham Knights is slated to release on October 21, and will be comming to PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.