Games
The Batman is bowing out on a high, but what about the studio behind the Arkham trilogy?
The caped crusader has returned for one final outing on consoles, and this time on a brand new generation of hardware. Batman: Arkham Knight is out this week, marking the end of a six year journey that began with the classic third-person brawler-slash-puzzler Batman: Arkham Asylum, and has seen the the dark knight take on classic DC villains in an ever expanding recreation of Gotham city.
The game – aside from its rushed and reportedly buggy PC port – has swept the board with glowing reviews, even being dubbed the best game of this generation so far by Polygon; praise has been dished out like exclamations from an over-excited Robin allowed outside of the Bat Cave on a rare day out (Holy open-world sandbox! Jiminy extensive array of sidekicks to fight as!) It may be the first of a series which has spawned a prequel and even a handheld spin-off on 3DS to launch on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, but it’s also the last. Rocksteady Studios is hanging up its cape on the series, calling Knight the conclusion to the trilogy six years after it began with 2009’s Asylum.
It’s been a much longer journey for the team at Rocksteady Studios than for us players though. The team, based in Highgate, north London, have been working on the Arkham series non-stop for almost a decade. Apart from the forgettable PS2 title Urban Chaos: Riot Response, Batman is the only property they’ve ever worked on – which means they were determined to go out on a high. And that meant making the most of the new consoles and the tech they offer.
“Very early on, when we were looking at the scope of the game, we knew we wanted to make a bigger city,” lead engine programmer Dustin Hulm explains to Red Bull. “But we didn’t really want to sacrifice that level of detail or level of content. So we figured that it wouldn’t really work very well with the previous generation. We knew that we wanted to jump onto next-gen hardware in order to maintain that really high level of detail. And it turned out there was power to spare so we could push the graphics side, we could push the level of detail up as well, make it render a lot better and still keep all the content. We didn’t have to put any caps on that side of things.”
This was more of a gamble than it sounds at first. In mid-2015, it seems only natural that Arkham Knight would be made for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One generation, not PS3 and Xbox 360. Yet with the exception of The Witcher 3 and Assassin's Creed Unity, Arkham Knight is still one of the first blockbuster sequels to ditch the previous generation of hardware. Others are coming, but few are here on shelves, now. Games of this scope have a gestation period of years, and back in 2011 with tablet sales surging and free-to-play mobile games on the rise, it was by no means clear that people would buy another new console in the numbers studios needed.
“It definitely was a gamble,” says Arkham Knight game director and Rocksteady co-founder Sefton Hill. “No one really knew what the uptake of next-gen would be like at that original point, but when we looked at the scope of what we wanted to achieve with Arkham Knight, we knew within the first few months that if we were to remain on previous gen systems we would really have to compromise the vision. We could either make a game that we knew was worse or really just go for it and make the game we all wanted to make and forego the previous generation of consoles. Credit to [publisher and parent company] Warner for that as well, because it was a bold decision, no-one knew what the install base was going to be.”
Next generation consoles or not, we still have to ask how it’s taken four Arkham games to introduce the Batmobile. Hill however doesn’t see the iconic vehicle as mandatory canon, so much as a privilege.
“You have to earn the right a little bit for these things,” he says. “We don’t really have a kitchen sink approach. We don’t put everything in the game, see what sticks, take some stuff out and then put some stuff in the next year. We tried to make something that is everything in the game has to really justify its place in the game.”
“You look at Arkham City, that was us going to a more open world approach with Batman free to move everywhere. We’re not going to add in a feature because we want to do a tick in the box, we want to do it right. And that meant integrating it into every core system of the game, even into the combat and puzzle solving. That required a huge amount of memory, a huge amount of design work to make sure the city worked with the car, basically a huge overhead which wasn’t really possible to put on previous generation of consoles without compromise. It was stepping up to the more horsepower that we had.”
While the team was plugging away at Arkham Knight in a leafy London suburb, the character of the Batman was also undergoing some drastic changes elsewhere. In the movies, the gritty Nolan-Bale vision of the dark knight has been replaced by one that includes Ben Affleck with enormous arms gazing despondently at something just off screen. There’s a new look Joker on the big screen too, one who is apparently so crazy he shaves his armpit hair regularly. In the comics, Batman isn’t even Bruce Wayne anymore.
Hill says that the Batman and the cast of the Arkham games are the studio’s own take, independent of these changes to canon happening in other media. “We’re lucky we get to do our own thing. DC and Warner have trusted us and this is our own sort of self-contained Batman universe, so we’re sort of insulated from any changes outside of that. We get to watch that, we get to watch Batman as fans the same as everyone else does, but it doesn’t affect us.”
We ask Hill to try to define the tone Rocksteady has tried to set with the superhero over the years, and he considers his answer carefully. “I think for us... in a sense, the Nolan films and our games both took the concept of being Batman quite seriously. We wanted to give it that resonance of something that feels real and consequential, so if something happens in the game it has ongoing repercussions as you play through the story... For us, the tone is darker on Arkham Knight than it was on Asylum or City as we’re going to a pretty dark place with the conclusion to the trilogy and we didn’t want to compromise that, we didn’t want to take a backwards step away – you know Batman’s going to show down with super villains in Gotham and that’s not necessarily going to end particularly well for anyone.”
The team have already cycled through most of the major bad guys in the course of two games, but as well as the Batmobile, Arkham Knight provides the first real opportunity to fight as sidekicks like Nightwing and Batgirl.
“For the first time in this game a supporting cast was something we wanted to push,” says Hill. “This is the first game we’ve got to feature those people in the main story: Oracle has been in the story before but you’ve never seen her, but here you get to go to the clock tower. That was one of the things we got to push, how Batman gets to work with his allies.”
The game is in shops already, but the work doesn’t quite stop yet for Rocksteady, as the studio is planning a long campaign of downloadable content.
“Batgirl is the first big drop coming in July, that's a whole mission you can play as Barbara Gordon, so it’s a prequel to the main story, a whole standalone story and unique location separate to the events of Arkham Knight. And then after that every month for six months we have a new content drop which includes new Batmobiles, new tracks to drive around, new challenges, new missions that take place in Gotham.
And then, after a holiday… well, if Hill knows, he’s not saying. Is Rocksteady really done with Batman?
“It was our decision to stop working on it, something that we wanted to do. We didn’t want to outstay our welcome, we wanted to end on a real high. It felt like that was a good time to make sure we left at the absolute top of our game. This is the end of the arc, this is the end of the story. It just felt right from so many angles.”
Rocksteady is in an unusual position now. Warner Bros Interactive Entertainment acquired the studio back in 2010 because of the success of the Arkham series. It is the most successful video game franchise based on a comic in history – but Rocksteady is walking away from that and into the unknown.
“We only make one game at a time,” Hill insists. There’s no Team B, no The Last Of Us on the way to follow up Uncharted 3, or rapid 1-2 combo like Dark Souls 2 followed by Bloodborne. The team have genuinely not decided what to do next.
Other licensed IP [intellectual property] – also Warner owns Batman creator DC Comics – seems like the logical next step (It may be no coincidence that Arkham Knight features multiple references to Superman, but as anyone who has ever been forced to endure Superman 64 will tell you, the man of steel does not translate well to video games). And yet Hill also says Batman is as good as that gets. “We’ve worked with what I genuinely consider to be the best licensed IP in the world,” he insists. Extrapolate out from that, and you’re left with one of two options: Rocksteady starts working on something it doesn’t like as much as Batman, or Rocksteady starts on its own original IP.
“We just need to figure out where we go next,” says Hill when we ask which of those roads they’re heading down. “We’re in a headspace now where we’ve literally just finished this. It’s very difficult to have the perspective on what to do next when you’re here.”
We press again, but Hill stays tight-lipped. “We’re genuinely investigating what we’re going to do still... we’ve got some ideas for what we’re going to do but nothing’s really set in stone yet. The key thing is whatever we do, we want it to be something that really inspires us, because that’s our big learning from the Arkham series. Work on something you love, because that’s what gives you the best results.”
The story goes that Bob Kane came up with the Batman when he was asked to come up with a complementary hero to Superman; he held a sheet of tracing paper over a picture of the man of steel and swapped out different costumes until he struck upon the idea of applying a set of wings a la Leonardo da Vinci’s famous design for flight. We can’t help but wonder what process Rocksteady may or may not be going through right now to come up with a new game of their own. Based on the calibre of Arkham Knight though, we can’t wait to find out.
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