Rocksteady’s marketing game manager Dan Ginn has detailed some tasty new details and changes to the upcoming Batman game in a recent interview with CVG.
Addressing criticisms regarding the original Arkham Asylum’s potentially overpowered detective mode, Ginn says his team have “identified what [was wrong and] it was an easy fix.”
“People weren’t complaining saying it was a stupid thing that shouldn’t be in the game, they were saying it was more like an exploit than a tool and so we’ve returned the balance between the information you get in Detective Mode and default mode.”
On the previous game’s boss battles Ginn said:
“they came pretty late in Arkham Asylum, we weren’t really planning on doing big boss battles and then we got to a point where we were like “We need climaxes throughout this game.”
“We’ve front-loaded the boss battles this time around so that we’ve got dedicated people working on them right the way through the dev cycle.”
In regards to the open-world aspects of Arkham City, Ginn has said:
“it’s all open, all the time,” rather than being split into different sections as in Asylum. He’s also said that, regarding load times, “it streams seamlessly throughout and that has been a massive, massive challenge.”
When it comes to side-missions Ginn has also said that:
“everywhere that’s open to the sky is available to the player from the off. So they can go anywhere they want and that was the emotional feeling that we wanted to convey; you’re Batman, you can do what you want.”
Sadly we get yet another confirmation that multiplayer wont be a part of the game.
We considered it pretty briefly and then realise that it would have hit and hurt our production and also it didn’t really make a lot of sense for a game that is so single character-centric.
But I can totally see that multiplayer is a super popular thing and online playability seems to be growing and something that people desire. So I can’t say that what’s going to happen down the track but for Arkham City we’re focused on the single-player experience.
The interview also tells us about the expected length of the single player mode which should be about 8-10 hours which can obviously be extended to more if you are performing side missions:
I can tell you that our QA guys, who are ninjas and obviously know everything in a game can just do the core story missions in about eight hours with nothing else, just in a straight line, and they know exactly where to go and what to do
And finally a bit about the side missions:
We’ve got these simmering turf wars between Joker, Two-Face and Hugo Strange’s factions – there’s a power struggle between those three factions going on. So if you go into an area at one point, you might go into it a few hours later and previously it was a Joker area now it’s a Two Face area and so the fiction within that district is different as a result.
Exciting stuff indeed. Let’s hope that Arkham City can match up to the excellence of its predecessor.