14 DAY TRIAL // Rocksteady Studios, the developer of the upcoming Batman: Arkham City game, has talked about the new title, specifically its Challenge Rooms, which offer players unique scenarios to test out either their combat or stealth skills in custom designed scenarios.
We've been hearing a lot about Batman: Arkham City in recent months, with Rocksteady detailing how the single-player mode will work, with its wide and open virtual world, as well as the variety of side missions which see Batman take on villains like The Riddler.
Now, at Gamescom 2011, the studio, together with the game's publisher, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, held a special demonstration of the Challenge Rooms in the game, as we described in our hands-off article with Batman: Arkham City.
Rocksteady's Marketing Game Manager, Dax Ginn, has just talked with the PlayStation Blog, explaining the purpose of the Challenge Rooms in an open-world game like Arkham City.
"They’re kind of like a dojo where you can go to sharpen your skills," he said. "For all its atmosphere and emotional intensity, Arkham Asylum was a very driven, focused experience; with Arkham City the design is aimed towards giving the player freedom, so there are a lot of choices on offer at any given moment. The challenge in that, for us, is not being able to control and ramp up the difficulty in the same way we did in the first game, so if you find at any point you’re getting slaughtered in the main game, you have the challenge maps to work on your skills."
The Challenge Rooms are also integrated into the conflict between The Riddler and Batman, as they have secondary objectives in each of them.
"The second function of the mode is to massively blow out the amount of content in the game and we’ve added in a reward structure with the Riddler Revenge feature, where you earn up to three medals for getting a high score in combat or taking out enemies in specific ways in the Predator maps, and online leaderboards."
After completing everything there is to do in the single-player mode of Arkham City, players are certain to enjoy a lot of the Challenge Rooms, at least from what we saw during our Gamescom 2011 coverage.