Batman: Arkham Asylum Message Board

Bruce Wayne, billion dollar playboy who was recently declared Least Likely Man On Earth To Be Batman (Of The Year) by Time magazine, is at it again. He’s teamed with a gaming storefront known as the Humble Bundle to sell games largely focused on Batman for no specific reason. The proceeds of a pay-what-you-want bundle that includes that likes of Batman: Arkham Asylum and Batman: Arkham City will go toward a sprawling tunnel-based weapons facility beneath Gotham charities and game developers.

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Even when villains are given a good, hard KAPOWTHWACKBIFFZOTT-ing and the day is saved, Batman stories rarely end on entirely happy notes. Thus, it’s almost sort of fitting that Batman: Arkham Asylum and Batman: Arkham City haven’t escaped Games For Windows Live’s years-long countdown to self-destruction entirely unscathed. Yes, they’re finally free of Microsoft’s arbitrary, ages-behind-the-times shackles, but your save files, amazingly, won’t be making the jump to Steam. Kinda justifies some of those fears we’ve had about these DRM systems for all this time, huh? You know, the ones companies like Microsoft tried to reassure us about by promising that they’d never leave us without the things we worked so hard to buy and earn?

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Small victories are important. Games For Windows Live has been minced into a fine paste and sent off to a major supermarket chain as a horse meat substitute, but the effects of it are still being felt. Most games are still saddled with the client, and it takes an act of will on the part of the publishers to swab that canker sore. 2K did that to BioShock 2 last night. All traces of the client have been yanked out of the Steam version, with the publisher adding joypad and Big Picture support in, as well as bringing the DLC to Steam for you to buy (so it’s not totally altruistic). It’s the first time Minerva’s Den can be bought anywhere but the GFWL marketplace.(more…)

We may be in for a third Batscapade from the Arkhamverse, according to Warner suits in the company’s latest earnings call, and it’ll probably be this year too.

There’s almost nothing to go on, other than Warner’s Chief Financial Officer John K. Martin letting slip that “and we also have a strong games release this year, which will include the next release in the Batman Arkham franchise.” This means it’s up to us to let slip the dogs of speculation.(more…)

It was rumoured, and then it was confirmed, and then we were all like :(

For it is true: the man of bats will not strike back on PC in 10 days’ time, but instead in 17 days’ time. A small wait, perhaps, but we’ve already had to hang on for almost a month later than the console-folk. Yes, the already-delayed Batman: Arkham City PC port, mooted to be the very bestest version of Brucie-boy’s semi-open-world swinging adventures thanks to various technical jiggery-pokery done with the help of NVIDIA, has been delayed anew. November 25 is the new date, which at least is safely after all Big Three of November’s remaining new releases – MW3, Skyrim, Saints Row 3 – are all done and dusted and we’ll have time to think about something else/sleep.

There’s no word on why the PC version was delayed, and what the state of play will be for the various DLC by then. Oh well. Here’s a Nightwing DLC trailer to tide you over.(more…)

I’m so sorry. There’s going to be a proper scandal about that. GamesIndustry.biz or Gamasutra or someone will probably run an expose about the awful corruption at RPS. Last week, I brazenly claimed, to your face, that this would be the last Batman: Arkham City trailer we’d post before released.

I LIED TO YOU.

Because here’s the first proper PC footage of Arkham City.(more…)

Well, maybe. Suppose it depends on whether they squeak out any particularly tasty DLC. With the game due for release on the unantialiased darklands of console next week – but sadly delayed on PC – its constant torrent of promotional videos is now capped off by this launch-ish trailer. It’s very dramatic! It implies Batman facing his darkest challenge since all the other dark challenges he’s faced and will no doubt continue to face! It features some slightly troubling voice acting!

It also looks rather cracking, which makes me only grumpier that we’ll have to wait a few weeks to play it on our faithful game-towers.(more…)

It’s been mere months since I belatedly finished Batman: Arkham Asylum and learned what all the fuss was about. Now, with Arkham City just days away from its October 18th PS3 release, I jumped at a rare chance to speak with Game Director Sefton Hill from Rocksteady Studios. I solicited some of your best questions from Twitter and hopped on the phone with Mr. Hill to discuss a wide range of topics related to one of my most-anticipated games for 2011. Before you dive into the Q&A, get into the spirit by watching the new “Rogue’s Gallery” video below.

PlayStation.Blog: In Arkham Asylum I was able to level up almost all of my skills by the end of the game. Does Arkham City bring more skill upgrades and more skill diversification, perhaps specialized character builds?

We’ve certainly expanded the number of upgrades in the game – we had 20 upgrades in Arkham Asylum, and we now have 33 different upgrades in Arkham City. There are a lot of ways to develop your skills and use them in the game. There’s not a massive skill tree, per se, though certain upgrades do unlock other upgrades. Ultimately, it’s more about how you decide to use your skills. We’ve really expanded those options with Arkham City.

PSB: Since you start with most of the gadgets from Arkham Asylum, will there be room for new gadgets?
Yeah. You start with five of the gadgets from Arkham Asylum: the Batarang, Bat Claw, Remote Batarang, Explosive Gel and Cryptographic Sequencer. And every single one of those gadgets has new features and improved useage. Overall, we’ve expanded the number of gadgets from eight to 12.

We have a number of new gadgets as well, such as the Remote Electrical Charge, called the REC for short. It’s a projectile-taser weapon that you can fire into enemies to stun them or fire at their gun to make it go off and create a distraction. The REC can also power machinery and create magnetic fields that work in some puzzles. Another new gadget is the Freeze Blast technology from Mr. Freeze: it can freeze enemies in place, or you can use it to freeze an enemy’s weapon and take it out of action. Our focus was to give the player as many options as possible.

PSB: What are the biggest refinements you’ve made to Batman’s controls, gameplay mechanics, and overall “feel” since Arkham Asylum?
The biggest thing we’ve focused on is his navigation and his ability to get around Gotham City, making that as exciting and fun as possible. The game is much bigger, a larger expanse but also much more vertical. We worked a lot on the glide system; when you’re gliding you can pull R2 to throw Batman into a dive. And as you hurdle towards the ground you can build momentum to propel you around the city. You can also get a grapple boost upgrade that boosts you off ledges and rooftops. And you can combine these two moves, the dive and grapple boost, to get around Gotham City without even touching the ground, if you get good enough.

What’s really nice is that you have to constantly be evaluating your surroundings like Batman would: where to dive, where to move as you weave through back alleyways and over the tops of buildings. It gives you the feel of being Batman in Gotham City. We wanted to live up to that promise.

PSB: Will the Bat Cave be returning in Arkham City, and will it be featured more prominently than it was in Arkham Asylum? (via @PSIPodcast)
I don’t want to give away any spoilers! I can definitely say that we’re focusing on the key Batman elements: you have the action, but obviously the cerebral, the forensic, the psychological, being the world’s greatest detective and so forth. Those are all important elements, and we have them all in Arkham City.

PSB: All the new villains are part of the main quest or from side quest? I fear too many characters and too little time to develop them (via @OverlordZombie)
I think I understand that concern. From our point of view, though, we wanted to make the best story we possibly could. There was never an attempt to squeeze in extra characters for the sake of doing so; we just wanted a really strong Batman story. The story is about this relationship between Batman and the supervillains. Some of the villains are part of the main story, others are part of the side missions. We’ve spent as much time crafting the side missions as we’ve spent on the main story. They are in no way filler, they’re really great entertainment.

PSB: The boss fights are different, right? In Arkham Asylum many were very similar. (via @KevJones311)
In Arkham Asylum I guess we never really thought of the Titan henchmen as boss fights, but as part of the normal combat flow. I can certainly see the concern. When we think about boss fights, we look at the supervillain and how he can challenge Batman.

Take Mr. Freeze. He’s very powerful with his suit, so Batman can’t take him head-on. But Freeze is also super intelligent, so that fight is all about trying to outsmart Freeze. When you find a way past his defenses, when you manage to sneak up and hurt him, he’ll study your behavior and shut down the techniques you’re using. It’s dynamic. If he sees that you’re using the glide kick, he’ll reduce the temperature of the air in the room to freeze up Batman’s cape and stop you from gliding. If you use the floor grates, he’ll freeze them up so you can’t use them. As the fight goes on, the environment dynamically evolves.

PSB: How has freeflow hand-to-hand combat been improved since the first game?
We didn’t want to overcomplicate the system. I think its strength is that it focuses on selecting the right move, not long combos or complicated sequences. You really feel like Batman when you play because it’s a very simple, very rewarding combat system. Now the number of options has been expanded massively.

We’ve added a lot of things, like simultaneous counters so that Batman can fend off two, three enemies at once. We added projectile counters, too, so he can throw objects back at enemies. Enemies can use combo attacks now, and you have to pull while countering multiple strikes. You can perform beatdowns, a series of really fast blows that can finish an enemy off without you having to use a takedown. You can even use your gadgets in combos: the Bat claw, the Explosive Gel, REC, even the Freeze Blast. It’s still really easy to pick up and play.

PSB: How much time will the average gamer spend in Detective Mode this time around? (via @TheMarriedGamer)
I understand those concerns. On the flip side, the whole point of the game is to experience what it’s like to be Batman: we didn’t want to reduce his effectiveness or drop a battery life meter on Detective Mode, because that wouldn’t be Batman. So we looked for other ways to solve the issue. We’ve done that by thinking of Detective Mode as being a way for Batman to hunt enemies down; you turn it off to navigate. That balance works well.

As an example, in Detective Mode now, the environment doesn’t look quite as clear. We pull the enemies out of the environment so you can identify and inspect them instantly but the environment itself doesn’t look quite as distinct. Then when you navigate, it will feel very natural to switch Detective Mode off. We still let the player use it when he wants to, though. We just had to find a more natural useage for it.

PSB: Can we drive the Batmobile or Batplane? (via @mitii5)
We did look at that, those are obviously key elements of the series. But after a lot of thought, we wanted to focus on the feeling of Batman moving through the city, this very vertical city. It’s an inhospitable place: it’s quarantined, it’s got roadblocks in place, so the best way to get around is to glide across the rooftops and through the streets. So that’s what we focused on. When you play, you’ll see why that’s the most effective way to travel.

PSB: I’d like further clarification on the things to expect in the Challenge Rooms. (via @Felix824)
People really enjoyed them last time — it’s a place to develop your combat skills and push them to the maximum. We added this idea of modifiers. There are 12 modifiers in all, and any combination of them can be applied to any challenge room to get a different experience. One example is a a protective aura that moves around the room between different enemies, so you have to pick and choose when to attack. Some of the modifiers are positive, too, such as one that allows you to smash through enemies who hold shields or tasers.

On top of that, we have a campaign mode where you face three challenge rooms in a row. But you start with as many as six modifiers and you have to use them all before you finish all three rooms. You can do them in any order: two in this room, four in the next or however you want.

PSB: Will there be any hidden secrets similar to the Arkham City blueprints in Arkham Asylum? (via @RetroDLC)
We love that feeling of the Arkham DNA being throughout the environment in Arkham City. There are going to be lots of secrets and Batman references and Gotham folklore. And the Riddler’s coming back with a vengeance – he’s been plotting his revenge since Arkham Asylum. Throughout Arkham City are 440 different trophies to collect, and each one has its own puzzle. And to raise the stakes, Riddler has taken hostages this time. So if you don’t play his game…

PSB: What are you personally most excited for players to experience in Arkham City?
The thing I’m personally most proud of is how we balanced an open world with the strong, focused story. The feeling that you really are Batman and that feeling of being almost overwhelmed by the sheer number of things that you’ve got to do.

The other thing is just gliding through the city, grappling-boosting off the top of buildings, diving down through alleyways. I can’t tell you how many hours of work we’ve lost to that.

As a seemingly random comic book-licensed action game, Batman: Arkham Asylum had virtually no expectations to meet. As the sequel to Arkham Asylum, on the other hand, Batman: Arkham City has a hell of a lot more to live up to. It's been tempting to label Arkham City as a known quantity--the first one was so good, how could the sequel be anything but better?--but I have to admit some skepticism about this follow-up after I played it at E3, where the frame rate out in the open world was poor, and the new grappling and flight controls didn't immediately click for me. Could it be that Arkham City might actually be underwhelming in any way?

Nah, probably not. Half an hour with the more-or-less finished game earlier this week, and--big surprise--I'm back on board. Arkham Asylum felt like such a tightly designed and perfectly paced action game, with its back-and-forth Metroid-style progression through a succession of areas, that Rocksteady's ambition to wrap all of the new game around a big urban open world seemed like it might stretch thin what made the first game so good. But what I got to see and play of the open world in this latest demo was tentatively encouraging.

Granted, I saw very little of that open world. This was the sort of tightly controlled press demo that intends for you to play only one specific part of the game, and that part was a story mission a couple of hours in where Batman has to infiltrate a foundry to track down Harley Quinn and rescue a doctor she's holding hostage. So I didn't get to spend a ton of time exploring Arkham City itself, but at least I was out there long enough to see that the game's performance outdoors is now nice and smooth, at least in the 360 version I was playing. And the flight controls--particularly where you grapple onto a point high up somewhere and then use your upward momentum to keep going past the grapple point and straight into a glide--have gotten a little easier to pick up.

Gliding around is all I really got to do in the open city, since my objective was already locked in and time was short. Whatever there is to occupy your time while your'e out in the city, I can at least tell you that once you're inside a major location like the foundry, the game is straight-up Arkham Asylum. Transitioning into the foundry was a matter of soaring right over the lip of the building's giant smokestack and gliding down through the hellish inferno at the bottom. (How else would Batman do it? He's Batman.)

The flow of gameplay when you're in a complex interior like the foundry is identical to the last game--creep into a room, scan the position of enemies with your detective vision, soar up to a gargoyle, then laugh like a maniac while you taunt, harass, and pick off the goons one by one. But a few minor improvements and additions to this formula stood out to me in the few minutes I had to play.

• You can target specific limbs on enemies with thrown weapons like the batarang. At one point from my perch high up, I kneecapped one of two goons to disable him long enough to swoop down and knock out his buddy. By the time the other guy was ready to get up... well, he didn't get up.
• Detective mode isn't the catch-all it used to be. We've heard in the past that Rocksteady was trying to ensure players don't play through all of City with Detective Mode on, the way some people did with Asylum. (Why you'd want to miss all that art design I don't know, but that's beside the point.) That mode is still plenty useful for scanning a room full of enemies, but now you lose most of your other HUD elements when you turn it on, depriving you of some other vital information. Best to find a balance and only use the enhanced vision when you need it.
• There's a new gadget called the REC, or remote electrical charge, that lets you manipulate some mechanical devices in the environment in two directions. The best example was a gigantic hook that you could pull back one way, then push in the other a few times in a row to build up momentum so you could smash through a wall with it. The REC can also be used to open some specific doors remotely, and things like that.
• There are some massive regular enemies to fight, like a hulking one-armed thug who wielded a hammer. While I absolutely loved Arkham Asylum's melee combat and I think it perfectly captures the essence of how Batman should fight a group of goons, I didn't actually try the old one-two on the hammer guy, since the REC also has its uses in combat. You can zap a single enemy to confuse them so they start wildly flailing and attacking everything nearby. Some subtle electrical persuasion caused that hammer thug to take care of a whole bunch of his cronies for me.
• You can scan inaccessible Riddler trophies into your map. This is probably only valuable to people who want to get every last thing there is to get, but like the melee combat, Arkham Asylum's collectible trophies and challenges were best-in-class, so I'm on board to get it all once again. As long as you can see a trophy, you can mark it for retrieval later, once you've got whatever requisite gadget or ability you need to actually get to it. Rocksteady says there are over 400 Riddler-related trophies and challenges, and that getting them all is probably a good 10 hours in itself. The Riddler is an actual character in the game, you may have heard, but finding and completing every last trophy and challenge is required if you want to take him down. I'm in. You?

Oh, hey, did I mention the Joker flat-out dies at the end of the section I played through? Once you've completed the foundry mission, you come upon Harley sobbing over an unresponsive Joker flat-lining in his wheelchair. I got a little more insight into the core plot driving this game--it calls back to the runaway mutation the Joker went through at the end of Arkham Asylum, which is apparently now slowly killing him, hence the kidnapped doctor. Or quickly killing him, I guess, since he appears to have croaked barely two hours into the game, which is roughly how far in Rocksteady says this sequence takes place.

I don't doubt for a second the Joker will actually bounce back shortly in some fashion, assuming that was even really the Joker sitting in that chair in the first place. If the game's developers considered this any sort of truly pivotal plot twist worth keeping hidden, they wouldn't have shown it to the press, and instead Rocksteady's Dax Ginn seemed almost giddy for me to see it, though he wouldn't answer any questions about what exactly was going on. If nothing else, it's evidence there's more going on with Arkham City's storyline than meets the eye. That's just one more of the many things that are getting me really excited to finally play Arkham City when it hits consoles in just a few short weeks.

I have nothing but sympathy for poor old Mr Freeze and the comics writer who created him, Ian Cold. From Batman’s already ludicrous rogue’s gallery (Man-Bat! Calendar Man!), his star is surely the most fallen, thanks to the governor of California’s chilling portrayal in the most nippletastic of all the Batman movies. How to make this pun-spewing pastiche remotely fearsome again? Well, give him a massive helmet, Terminator-esque body language, all manner of complicated-looking technology including some natty robot goggles and the sum total of zero one-liners: that’s the Arkham City approach.(more…)

Gotham City Imposters, which can very loosely be described as Team Fortress 2 populated by armies of crazies pretending to be either Batman or the Joker, is two important things: 1) the first game from NOLF-makers Monolith since the dour FEAR 2, and more importantly their first attempt to do humour and outlandishness rather than po-faced horror since 2003 2) bonkers.

This is why my bat-sense is tingling at news GCI has opened beta sign-ups.(more…)

Batman: Arkham City gets closer and closer, and we get exciteder and excitider, and in the heat of our anticipation become less gramatickly accurate. After what feels like years of teasing, concept art and pre-order incentives, finally we get to take a long, lingering look at what it’s really like in action. Below: 12 minutes of the game, including playable funtimes from both Batman and Catwoman, good acting, awful acting, Two-Face’s disgusting head and many many many goons and hi-tech shenanigans.(more…)

And here was I thinking that all the non-comics Batman spin-offs were doing their damndest to pretend that the dark knight detective wasn’t in the habit of dragging a boy along to his late-night soirees with angry street thugs. Robin has been resolutely absent from Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies and went without mention in the solid, tight Arkham Asylum. But the Boy Wonder has found his way into upcoming sequel Batman: Arkham City after all. How’re they going to reconcile the wee lad’s bright costume and cheery demeanour with something so grim? Let’s take a look…(more…)