14 DAY TRIAL // In order to really emphasize the massive open world that will be included in Batman: Arkham City, its developer, Rocksteady Studios has revealed that around 80% of the game's action will take place on the streets of the containment facility.
Batman: Arkham City will be the followup to 2009's surprise hit Batman: Arkham Asylum, and have its world be expanded five times over its predecessor, in order to really showcase how big the new prison facility is.
Now, Rocksteady's marketing game manager Dax Ginn told PSM3, via CVG, that 80% of Arkham City's action takes place on the actual streets of the prison, which was a huge technical challenge for the development team.
You will get to check out interiors of buildings, but they're locked to specific missions, so all of the side-quests or extra missions won't take you through the wrecked places of Arkham City, meaning you can start exploring the world right at the beginning of the game.
Ginn emphasizes, however, that the story will still be important, so gamers needn't worry about Rocksteady focusing on just creating a massive world and not populating it with enough content.
"Plot is really important to us," he said. "Our objective was not to make a bigger game world just for the sake of it. We want to fill it with content, and there's no better world than Batman's universe to take inspiration from. We have 97 people on the team, compared to 65 on the first game. Because we've decided to make such a large world we had to bring in more artists, animators and so on. It's been a pretty huge technical and creative undertaking for the team."
Batman: Arkham Asylum had a big amount of different locations, but mostly were interconnected with the buildings located on Arkham island, meaning that if you wanted to go into the lair of criminals you had to travel around the island, enter different buildings and use connecting tunnels or underground shafts to access them.
Arkham City, it seems, will be more straightforward in its exploration gameplay.
The game is scheduled to arrive on the PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on October 18, in the USA, and October 21, in Europe.