14 DAY TRIAL // The development team at Rocksteady has emphasized that it has no plans to include The Joker in the upcoming Batman: Arkham Knight and it seems that the studio had a long-term plan for the character and other villains that was in place since the launch of the trilogy.
Dax Ginn, a producer working on the title and a marketing executive at the company, tells Eurogamer that, “I know it's easy to say that now, but the narrative structure of Joker and Scarecrow kind of being of similar levels of power in Arkham Asylum, then focusing exclusively on Joker in Arkham City, killing him at the end of it and then bringing Scarecrow back for Arkham Knight. That was always the high-level plan for what these villains are doing.”
Since the first Batman title was announced, Warner Bros., who owns the DC Comics brand, has explained that the Rocksteady studio had a lot of freedom to create new narratives linked to the core characters.
This gave the company a chance to reshape the way gamers saw The Dark Knight and the way he related to his most important adversaries, something that was also a major theme in the movie trilogy.
Rocksteady says that Arkham Knight will close down the story arc it was aiming to tell and that the changes it is making to cannon will then be incorporated in some comic book storylines.
Ginn adds, “I think, as a gamer, I love a sense of completion. Closing the book on something feels very satisfying. From a developer's perspective, it gives us the opportunity to say what's next: do we look at Batman from a completely different perspective, or do we do something else?”
Warner Bros. will probably continue to deliver Batman-themed video games, but development duties will be taken over by the new studio is has set up in Montreal, which handled the creation of Arkham Origins.
The coming experience will give gamers more freedom than ever by adding the Batmobile and increasing the size of the city, while also further improving the core combat and gadget system.
The villain gallery that players will have to deal with includes Scarecrow, the Penguin, Riddler, Two Face and Harley Quinn.
Batman: Arkham Knight will be offered on October 14 of this year all over the world and can be played on the Xbox One from Microsoft, the PlayStation 4 from Sony and the PC.