Rocksteady Interview: On fan service, Open World Setting
Batman: Arkham City shifts events from the tight, dark corridors of Amadeus Arkham's institution in Batman: Arkham City to the sprawling and crime-filled streets of a city-prison in Gotham, home sweet home to a glittering galaxy of super villains, such as Mr Freeze, Two-Face, The Penguin, and Hugo Strange. If dealing with these old foes was not enough for the Dark Knight, he must also cope with having Catwoman on the loose wreaking her own particular brand of havoc. Digital Spy talked to Dax Ginn, the marketing manager at developer Rocksteady Studios, about open worlds, cockney Penguins and the stressful life of Batman.
You were voted the most eagerly anticipated game after the E3 Expo 2011 by Digital Spy readers, but that is quite a change on Batman: Arkham Asylum, of which, it's fair to say, expectations were pretty low...
"I think we won the most unanticipated game!"
The video game of Batman Begins got a pretty poor reception in 2005 and there wasn't even a game for 2008's The Dark Knight, but then Batman: Arkham Asylum came along and surprised everyone. Expectations are astronomically high for the new game, so there must be more pressure on Rocksteady to get the game right?
"It's a real double edged sword - having such little expectations [for the first game] meant that we had more time to breathe and we had more time to keep our heads down and do what we thought was right. But I literally have been travelling for the last 12 months showing Batman: Arkham City in every corner of the world and it never seems to be enough. So the hunger for the game is amazing and the anticipation is incredible. The support that we get from gamers and Batman fans is just wild. But the bottom line in all of this is that no one puts more pressure on us than we do."
Why do you think Rocksteady has been so successful in creating superhero games while other developers have missed the mark?
"A journalist at Comic-Con said to me, 'You guys take this really seriously'. That was a real turning point for me, because within the four walls of Rocksteady, every single minute of every single day, we take it really seriously. I don't know how other developers operate, but other developers working on superhero titles may view those titles as more of a kids' property or a family property, which means that they don't take it seriously. I am just theorising here, but its not the feeling that is within Rocksteady. We see this as a really golden opportunity to make an incredible game and Batman is an amazing character. There is not a lot of laughing that goes on at Rocksteady, we are just really hard working people and we take our jobs really seriously. I have never been on set at Nolan's films, but I imagine it's a similar feeling."
The fan community for Batman is incredible - there are websites and blogs purely devoted to the rumours about the comics, films and games, while some people know Batman and the supervillains in amazing detail. So, how difficult is it trying to please the fans?
"It is and it isn't difficult. It's great that we have DC Comics at the other end of the phone. That makes it incredibly easy. We don't have many question marks as the people who make the final decisions and know Batman inside out are just a telephone call away. They give us all the support and all the knowledge that they have, so all we have to do is focus on making a great game. When we get to the point where we say, 'Would Penguin do that? Or would Riddler say that?' We just ask them, and they say, 'Well, in episode blah blah blah, that happened, so there you are'. Having the link between Paul Crocker, our lead designer and Paul Levitz at DC is great, that's an active link. We have everything in place to make a great Batman game."
And in Batman: Arkham City, Penguin is a cockney?
"(Laughs) Yeah. That is a great example of the creative freedom we have when we are thinking about what these villains would do in a place like this. The concept of Arkham City is an urban prison where there are no rules and there is a simmering turf war between all these horrible, nasty criminals. And we have really interpreted them in the most horrible, nasty way. Penguin is not the type of guy who is going to survive for a day in there unless he forms some kind of defences. It's about having a big gang to protect him and a reputation for doing nasty things, being brutal, that is the only way he is going to survive so that's what he becomes. That is our interpretation of him because he needs to be that way. It's the same with Two-Face, and it's the same with Joker. Look at Riddler, he's taking hostages and he is going to kill people unless Batman plays his game. That is not the sort of thing that you associate Riddler with doing but that is what Arkham City does to these villains."
You explored some really dark themes in Arkham Asylum - Riddler talked about dead babies in one of his riddles, while Killer Croc said that he wanted to eat Batman's flesh...
"My favourite part from the first game was when you come out of a room and there was a massive present from Joker that wasn't there when you walked in. You don't detonate it but you later get information from Oracle that all that was in it was kittens and marzipan. Paul Crocker wrote that and I can remember ringing him up and saying, 'Paul that is mental'. All of that stuff comes out of his head and he makes the crazy s**t happen."
How long will it take players to beat the main story in Arkham City, and the entire game?
"To take down all the main villains in the game, as in to do the main story, takes about 25 hours. To 100% the game, as in do all those side missions, takes about 40 hours plus. There are challenge maps on top of that playable as Batman, Robin or Catwoman, so it's a really big game."
On a design level, Arkham Asylum was an experience totally focused within the prison institution, even though that was a very large space. The new game switches to an open world, so how tough has it been to thread a narrative through the campaign to always keep the player gripped?
"Very, but we are up to challenge. We wanted to take the lessons that we learned from Arkham Asylum and write them large on the canvas of Gotham. We moved the action out into an open world structure, and it is genuinely an open world but I wouldn't say that it its sandbox as it doesn't have flippant physics puzzles and things. Our objective wasn't to make the biggest open world game, it was to make the most detailed open world game.
"So when you are gliding across the skyline you have freedom of choice, but when you hit the streets the aesthetic is amazing. We wanted to get the sweet spot between action-adventure games that are big but not very detailed, they generally copy and paste buildings to fill out the world, and the games that are very small but very detailed. There has never really been an exploration of what happens in between those games, so we wanted to explore that ground and still really tell a tight story."
Batman: Arkham Asylum depicted the worst night of Batman's life, in which he had to take down the Joker and get out of Arkham alive. There was some freedom of movement, but generally the player was always focused on where they were going next. So, are you not worried that Arkham City's open world approach could lose some of that sense of clarity?
"The way we told the tight story in Arkham Asylum was very simple because it was a very focused experience. We knew where the player was going to be at any point in time. In Arkham City we don't know where the player is going to be so we have developed narrative systems that bombard the player with directions.
"One of those is an expansion of Batman's detective mode which enables him to listen in on surveillance conversations that are happening all around Arkham City. So you can be gliding around and there will be two thugs below, you don't have to go down and beat the crap out of them, you can just stop on a gargoyle and catch their conversation. They may be saying, 'Hey did you hear about Harley [Quinn]? I heard she had a sex change,' and the other says, 'Oh, I thought Harley was always a guy'.
"So there is this rumour mill going on and even when you have done something in the game you will hear talk about, and maybe an hour later it has been mutated into something else. That narrative component is coming at you even when you are not in a narrative cinematic. But the main way we keep the player focused is the Bat Signal and so if you need to know where the next mission is, just look in the sky. If you spend 15 hours tackling the Riddler challenges or teaming up with Bane, or doing side missions, actively ignoring the core narrative path, all you have got to do is look for the signal and you will pick up the path from there."
But is there not a danger of diluting the experience by going open world?
"I don't think so because it is something that we have been acutely aware of right from the beginning. We don't want to create a diluted experience. We want to create the same intense atmosphere as Arkham Asylum. Having played the game so many times I can make that guarantee to you that even though you have this incredible sense of freedom, what you feel - and maybe this is personal to me and I don't know if anyone else is going to feel this - but a couple of hours into the game you have triggered a few things all around the place, so the world is coming alive.
"You will be heading to find out what the hell Joker is up to but you know that Catwoman is in trouble over here, you're getting Zsasz on the payphones giving you crap, there are a dozen Riddler trophies that you can now get because you've got this new gadget upgrade that you have unlocked, but you have got Riddler himself getting in your grill, there are a load of Penguin thugs that have got new assault rifles who are going crazy in the streets - the feeling I get is that every single villain wants a piece of me and I have got to keep them all under control at the same time. And that is what I assume it must feel like to be Batman. Everyone is doing their own thing and I am the only one standing between us and chaos. And that is an incredible feeling."
Digital Spy.
