Dark Knights, Big City

“How does one man protect an entire city? By making sure the shadow he casts is long and wide… so that its reach can embrace – or engulf – all that walk here. So that every man, woman and child in the city of Gotham can feel its touch. If you are good, the shadow’s wings are a welcome, protective blanket. If you are bad, you know its touch as a black splinter of fear.” ~ Batman/Poison Ivy: Cast Shadows

Nestled upon the highest steppe of steel and stone, blackened by age and the corruption of man, a lone sentinel watches.

He watches his city tear itself apart. By fear and hate, its very heart blackened by an evil he has long fought against. For some, this sentinel is merely a legend. An urban myth. But for the innocent in Gotham City, he is a shadowed virtue. An unforgiving retribution to those who prey upon the weak. He goes by many names. The Caped Crusader. The World’s Greatest Detective. Gotham’s Guardian. But the one title he carries that strikes fear into the hearts of evil men is a simple one: The Batman.

It is a strange yet powerful notion. That despite all its evil, this unspoken malevolent will bent on turning once good and decent people into its greatest threat, Gotham’s brightest light of hope….

…. is also its Darkest Knight.

“I bring a message: dark days are coming, Batman. The Prophecy is coming true – you are the warrior who will close the gates of Hell, you are the one who will save this day, and in doing so, events will occur that you cannot stop; from the ashes of Arkham the fires will rage and Gotham will burn, and you – you will burn too. “ – Azrael, Batman: Arkham City.

These words still haunt a man who has dedicated every waking moment of his life protecting a city that once embraced him as its hero. A city that is now tearing itself apart in fear. In the aftermath of the events of Arkham City, what should have been a long and deserved respite for the people of Gotham was simply the all too brief calm before the storm. With the Joker’s death, the hope that the once fractured hold of criminal intent on the city would finally break, instead unified it. Former rivals now work together to bring the city to its knees, to break it block by block until there’s nothing left but ruin.

Set a year after the events of Arkham City, the game kicks off after the Scarecrow begins broadcasting a warning across the city; bombs containing a new and very potent fear toxin have been placed throughout Gotham. And to ensure that Batman is kept out of the picture, former rivals The Penguin and Two-Face now work together to instill anarchy as Gotham’s police department tries to not only evacuate as many citizens as possible, but fight off this growing menace and stop the city from tearing itself apart. It is perhaps the darkest moment this city, and Batman himself, has ever faced.

But we all know that it is always darkest before the dawn. And Rocksteady has been Batman’s dawning light. Looking back at the history of Batman games, you can see a litany of exceptionally poor to mediocre titles scattered over a decade and beyond. All of that changed when Arkham Asylum catapulted the flagging franchise to never before seen heights. It may be a difficult thing to believe, but you’ve only to look at how polarizing Batman: Arkham Origins itself was to see the difference one developer can truly make. In fact, their efforts have paid off in more ways than one. Not only did it pull Bats from the brink of digital obscurity, it also helped put Rocksteady on the radar for many gamers. So it only seemed fitting that Rocksteady would pay back that kindness with a proper send-off to the Arkham titles.

“We knew where we wanted it to go,” explains Game Director Sefton Hill, who let it be known that the team at Rocksteady has had this ending planned since the development of Arkham City. “We don’t work on multiple titles at the same time. We just work on the one game, and we want it to be the single best thing. We make it like it’s the last game we’ll ever get to make. And it felt right to end the story. It felt like it brought the arcs from the first and second game, from Asylum and City, to a close. It felt like the natural fit, really. We’ve been doing Batman games for a long while. We wanted to put everything into this one and really close the trilogy with a bang.”

With every iteration of Rocksteady’s Arkham title, it introduced players to innovative techniques that seemed to compliment, or even surpass, the ideas in each successive title. In Asylum, it was the freeflow combat and predator stealth modes. In City, it was the open world flavor. In Arkham Knight, not only are they expanding that open world nature, they’re also introducing a long time staple of the Batman franchise for players to try their hand at; the Batmobile. “When you think Batman, you do think Batmobile,” Hill says. “It’s the one key thing that we’ve really felt that we always wanted to do.”

The one caveat to this element, however, is that old gen systems just wouldn’t be able to handle the potential firepower Rocksteady is getting ready to push out the door. “The Batmobile in memory is like 160 megabytes in the game,” says Arkham Knight’s Art Director David Hego. “It will fit just about in an Xbox 360 if [that was the whole] game. There are so many textures and hundreds of thousands of polygons. It’s very next gen; very expensive shaders and textures. We’re working a lot with brushed metal, shiny, glossy metals. But also with high-tech surfaces like with carbon fiber.”

So the move to current gen systems was not only necessary, it was required. “It’s not a challenge to move to next gen,” Hill explains. “The real challenge is making sure you get the best out of the machines. It’s easy to get the game running, but it’s about, ‘What can we do that really pushes those machines?’ Obviously you see a lot of games that are cross-gen, and they feel a bit reined in because of that. Because we were able to make that decision quite early, we were able to be more ambitious with the design and make a real genuine next-gen experience.”

Even though the PS4 and the Xbox One could easily handle the addition of a multi-player component, Hill was quick to put that idea to rest. “This is a single-player game. There is no multi-player,” he says. “Right at the start, this was our vision. It’s going to take all our effort for all of this time. We don’t have the time to do multi-player. We want to focus on making the best single-player experience we can. We don’t feel that it needs a multi-player element. Warner Bros. backed that up [from the] start.”

Completely new to the Arkham-verse is Rocksteady’s next addition to not only the game, but the Bat-mythos as a whole: The Arkham Knight. Working closely with DC and it’s Chief Creative Officer Geoff Johns, Rocksteady is prepping the all new antagonist to be a very formidable thorn in Batman’s side. “We hadn’t in the previous games introduced someone new to the universe,” Hill says. “We wanted to introduce someone who could really challenge Batman to go head to head with him in a lot of different ways. We’re not talking about those ways just yet, but this guy is definitely a formidable foe for Batman.”

While the mysteriousness of just who the Arkham Knight is has fueled rumor and speculation across various forms of media across the internet, Hill stated who it couldn’t be right from the start. The Joker. “One thing we really wanted to respect were the events of Arkham City,” says Hill. “He;s Dead. Dead Dead Dead.” But don’t think the grinning man’s legacy died with him. “There are references to Joker in the game,” Hill goes on to explain. “We wanted it to feel like what happens when Joker dies? What does that create in this universe? And it creates this kind of power vacuum.”

What we do know of the Arkham Knight is that he knows some of Batman’s closely guarded secrets. In recent demos, The Arkham Knight directs his men not to shoot Bats in the chest, since that’s the strongest part of his armor. That might seem like a small and trivial bit of knowledge, but it’s knowledge that some of Batman’s own allies don’t know about him. Something that hints that whoever it is hiding within that suit knows quite a bit about our hero.

Originally scheduled for a late 2014 release, Rocksteady decided to delay the title to allow for more finely-tuned polishing. “If we didn’t give the team more time to do it, then we would be releasing something that we weren’t happy with. We want to make sure we’re absolutely nailing it 100 percent,” stated Rocksteady’s Marketing Game Manager Guy Perkins. “Making something that big in intricate detail was a challenge. It’s five times bigger than in ‘Arkham City,’ 20 times bigger than ‘Arkham Asylum.’ It’s no small undertaking, making sure everything works, [the] progress has been challenging.”

As the team prepares to end their run on the highest note possible, the one they hope rings the highest with players is one of emotion. An emotional resonance not only between player and game, but the ties that bind Batman to his world, and the people who inhabit it. “We’ve always had a Rocksteady vision of what Batman is,” Perkins says. “We take influences from lots of places, but our heart is in DC Comics. Warner Bros. allowed us to make decisions and take the franchise in the direction we want. Batman means a lot to a lot of people, lots of fans have their own favorite stories and versions of Batman. What we’ve tried to do in this game is tell a really emotional story. It’s something that we really haven’t attempted before, it hasn’t been delivered in such a way. There’s a relationship between Batman and Jim Gordon, Oracle. We want to really play off of that and layer in more emotion.”

Batman: Arkham Knight is scheduled to release for the Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Microsoft Windows some time in 2015.