New details on Batman: Arkham City, the followup to 2009’s shockingly excellent (for a licensed game, no less) Arkham Asylum, have emerged from an expansive feature in the latest issue of Official Playstation Magazine. Rocksteady co-founder Sefton Hill spoke to the magazine about the size of the environments, Batman’s expanded arsenal of abilities, and more.
What kind of challenges does the team face as they attempt to recreate the success of the first game, this time within an entire city instead of just the grounds of the Asylum?
“Our objective in this game is not to make the biggest game we can, but to make the best game possible,” Hill said. “Gamers who played Batman: Arkham Asylum will know how dedicated we are as a studio to injecting an incredible amount of detail into every environment we build.
“It is this attention to detail that gives our games the deep and intense atmosphere that so many players have found so compelling, and so we have had to seriously scale up our art team in order to bring the same level of detail to Arkham City, which is about 4-5 times bigger than Arkham Asylum.”
That’s a lot of Arkham, and while it may not be as big as GTA‘s Liberty City or Crackdown‘s Pacific City, we’ll gladly take a more detailed environment over a sprawling city with less personality.
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We’ve already learned that Batman will begin Arkham City with most of his abilities and gadgets from the first game intact, and now Hill’s elaborated on how they’ll expand his repertoire from there.
“In terms of gameplay, he said, “we knew very early on that just scaling up Batman’s abilities and gadgets wasn’t going to work as he is fundamentally facing a new game world and totally different range of enemies in this game, so we took his move set from Batman: Arkham Asylum and built from there.
“Looking at the raw amount of animations in this sequel, Batman’s moves have doubled in number and we also wanted to create an authentic sense of continuity from the end of Batman: Arkham Asylum.”
Hill expressed the studio’s feelings about crafting new stories within the Batman universe, and emphasized that they’ve been given plenty of freedom to carve out their own niche therein. “It is simply a privilege to work on a Batman game,” he said. “We have a great deal of creative flexibility to tell our own stories and create intriguing and compelling challenges for Batman.”
If Arkham City can maintain the momentum from the first game, then they’ll definitely have another hit on their hands. The game’s due out next year on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC.
