Multiplayer for Batman: Arkham City Would Have Affected Single Player Story

The developers at Rocksteady seem to have seriously considered adding a multiplayer mode to last year’s Batman: Arkham City, but found out early on that the resources needed to create it might actually make the single-player story less compelling.

Speaking to the Official PlayStation Magazine in the United Kingdom, Sefton Hill, who is the director working on the Batman series at Rocksteady, stated, “We’re really thankful to Warner on that. At a time when a lot of publishers said you have to have multiplayer, they backed our ideas for single player.”

He added, “We did look at multiplayer early on and we looked at what it could actually bring to the table. We tried some ideas out but it always felt like it was just there as a requirement.

“If we did multiplayer then we wouldn’t have been able to deliver the quality of game that people wanted – that we wanted. We would end up delivering two watered down products.”

Apparently, the developer believes that there are quite a few titles on the market which seem to have a “bolted on” multiplayer and would have benefited from having the time and development resources deployed in service of the single player.

Batman: Arkham City takes the ideas that Rocksteady has introduced in Arkham Asylum and expands on them, giving players more tools to play with and a bigger area to explore.

The game was very well received by the public and by reviewers.

Those looking for a multiplayer experience built around the Batman world can now get their hands on Gotham City Impostors, a title that is available via Xbox Live, the PC and the PlayStation Network.

The game is built exclusively around multiplayer and allows players to create a character and customize it before battling other teams of gamers who look like the Joker and Batman himself.