14 DAY TRIAL // After plenty of leaks and reports, Batman: Arkham Knight was revealed to the world yesterday, and now developer Rocksteady has discussed why it decided to bring the new title only to PC, PS4, and Xbox One, saying that the increase in visual fidelity and performance has been colossal.
Batman: Arkham Knight is the next entry in the Arkham series and marks the return of original developer Rocksteady to the franchise, after spending three years working on the new title.
As opposed to quite a few 2014 titles, Arkham Knight isn't a cross-gen game, as it will only appear on the PS4 and Xbox One, not on the PS3 or Xbox 360 consoles.
This is largely because Rocksteady considered that a cross-gen game would mean making sacrifices for the PS4 or Xbox One editions in terms of quality or performance, in order to keep things as balanced as possible.
As such, it decided to completely focus on the new machines and to make sure that the game is taking advantage of their power, according to Rocksteady's Sefton Hill, who detailed this strategy in the latest issue of GameInformer, via CVG.
"It's not a challenge to move to next-gen. The real challenge is making sure you're getting the best out of the machines," he said. "It's easy to get the game running, but it's about, 'what can we do that really pushes those machines?'"
"Obviously, you see a lot of games that are cross-gen, and they feel a bit reined in because of that," he added. "Because we were able to make that decision quite early, we were able to be more ambitious with the design and make a real, genuine next-gen game."
In order to highlight just how Arkham Knight uses the power of the new consoles, Rocksteady confirmed that it still employs its highly modified Unreal Engine framework but supports an open world that's five times bigger than Arkham City. There are also no actual loading screens when switching from interior to exterior locations, and there are three or four times as many thugs present on the game's streets.
What's more, the character models have also received a huge upgrade, bringing the same amount of detail during gameplay as seen in pre-rendered cut scenes.
"At the beginning, we started making characters that were about three to four times the polygon count and texture sizes of Arkham city," the developer added. "As we kept going with every character we just pushed it more. It's the kind of thing that sounds insane. Like one character is as big as the polygon count of Arkham Asylum, the whole environment."
Batman: Arkham Knight is set to debut this fall for the PC, PS4, and Xbox One.