Batman: Arkham City

Rocksteady talk Arkham City. Collectable Audio Tapes Return + RPG Elements

ArkhamCity.co.uk Interview Rocksteady

 

ArkhamCity.co.uk had a chance to sit down with Sefton Hill (Director), Dax Ginn (Marketing Game Manager), Paul Crocker (Lead Narrative Designer), Kan Muftic (Senior Concept Artist) and Sarah Wellock (community manager) from Rocksteady to discuss all things Batman: Arkham City. Here’s what they had to say!



 

Your first published game was Urban Chaos: Riot Response. Were a lot of Rocksteady huge comic fans before setting out on Arkham Asylum, or has it been something that has grown internally through time?



 

Paul Crocker: I used to work in a comic store and I’ve always been into this stuff. 10% of Rocksteady are über nerds and at the other end of the scale there were 10% that had never read a Batman comic before we started, but that helped us. It meant we were appealing to everyone. That’s our job when making the game, to make sure you know about Batman, even if you’ve never read anything about Batman.

 

Sefton Hill: I think that’s something we’ve worked really hard to do. We’ve got that balance between hardcore and real mainstream fans who have only seen the films. Everyone here at Rocksteady loves Batman and we were super excited when starting on Arkham Asylum. But we always realised that this could be peoples’ first Batman game and they might only have a very casual knowledge of the characters. We’re not going to jump in and start overwhelming you with obscure characters. If you want to know more about the Batman world this is a great place to start. And if you know about the Batman world this game will drive that mythology even deeper. We have to constantly keep ourselves in check because we’ve spent four years talking and thinking about nothing else except Batman so you can almost become too entrenched.

 

Has your approach to marketing changed due to Batman: Arkham City being the sequel to such a critically acclaimed and successful game like Arkham Asylum?

 

Dax Ginn: It’s changed a lot, mostly due to the expectation and anticipation for the game. I think Arkham Asylum was a very unknown entity for a lot of people, where as our challenge with Arkham City is more about trying to tell as many people about it as possible.

 

The core fans who I think really enjoyed Arkham Asylum were hardcore Batman fans. Whereas Arkham City has not been designed to appeal just to hardcore Batman fans. People who might not buy many games but will buy the big hits of the year, we’re making sure that those gamers see Arkham City in the top five games they’re going to buy in the year.

 


Our whole attitude is to try and turn the release into an entertainment event, not just a game launch. But an event that’s more like a movie launch. Games are traditionally marketed in quite a geeky techie way - we want to treat this as more of a piece of entertainment rather than just a game.

 

Do you feel that interactive marketing like Arkham Asylum's Arkham Care site and Bioshock 2’s SomethingUnder The Sea site are more beneficial than traditional marketing? Do you have plans to do a similar project with Arkham City?

 

Dax Ginn: We briefly considered doing an ARG (Alternate Reality Game) that was really complicated because we know serious fans really dig that kind of thing. The problem with doing that is that there’s only one entry point and if you try and come in halfway through you feel as if you’ve missed the boat. Also, as mentioned before, we’re trying to reach as many people as possible.


 

We’ve still got loads of amazing features to come online, with the website. We have a really active community in the way we never really had with Arkham Asylum and we’re really putting a lot of effort into the community. There’s so much stuff I wish we could talk about - the website (Community.ArkhamCity.com) is going to really evolve.

 

Sarah Wellock: There’s a lot of really cool stuff coming!

 

Dax Ginn: It’s not going to be a really complicated sophisticated ARG that you’re either on board from day one or you miss completely. We’re creating something which is designed specifically for really hardcore fans, for community people, for those who loved the first game and who are eagerly anticipating this one.

 

You recently unveiled Calendar Man’s character model for Batman: Arkham City. His design is very different from past appearances in the comics. Do you work closely with DC to try and stay true to previous character’s portrayals or do they give you creative freedom to change them?

 

Kan Muftic: My job as a concept artist is to always try and push things as far as I can, to give them a new twist. But you have to keep the old elements, the stuff that people actually like about it. I call this method the +1 method. You take something existing and you shave off all the versions from the comics and movies and you’re left with the core character. Then you add this +1 element which is Arkham.

 

I think the reason Calendar Man works the way he does is because he exists in the world that we created. And to me characters are always dictated by the world that surrounds them and never the other way round. Arkham’s a gritty, dangerous, filthy horrible place and in reality no one would want to be there. So that’s what always dictates the look and feel of all the characters.

 

What was it like seeing your Arkham City concepts and ideas practically come to life within the CGI Hugo Strange trailer?

 

Kan Muftic: I got goosebumps. It felt like a big budget holiday block buster. The little quick sketches I did were moving, jumping, shooting, it was absolutely mind-blowing. But wait til you see the game, it’s even better in the game because you interact with the world and all these characters.

 

You’ve explained how Arkham City is going to be almost five times the size of Arkham Asylum - what constraints are you putting in place within the city to avoid early exploring? Will you be able to explore the entire city from the start?

 

Sefton Hill: You’ll be able to explore most of the city right from the start. We really wanted to keep the player empowered as Batman and didn't want to put any artificial barriers in there to stop him getting around.



 

There are areas which you’ll uncover obviously as you play through the game - there’s lots of secrets and rewards as you play through the game and new areas you get to explore. But you can go and explore the main city right from the start and if you do explore it right from the start, you’re going to find lots of secrets around the place and different things to see. We worked really hard to try and tell the story of the different sections of Arkham City.

 



As you go into different zones, the gang leaders will have different levels of security so if you go to areas that are away from the main part of the story you’re going to find them a bit more challenging, which gives it almost an RPG style.


 

Interview tapes were a great way of giving a further insight into the characters of Arkham Asylum. Will a similar collectible appear in Arkham City?

 

Sefton Hill: There are tapes, there’s also some new things as well. We spent many many hours just discussing the many back stories of the characters.

 

Paul Crocker: The great thing about the tapes was that you could find out about the back stories and it was a great way of tying events in the universe that we can’t do in gameplay. It’s also a great way to bridge the game between Arkham Asylum and Arkham City. Obviously time has passed between the two and Batman’s life’s moved on between the games - things have happened, and we’re not going to show all that,

 

Sefton Hill: There’s things other than the tapes, but we can’t talk about them yet!

Batman: Arkham City will be open from the start with no load times. Boss battles return

 

Rocksteady marketing game manager Dax Ginn has been telling CVG more about the open world nature of Batman: Arkham City. From the very start of the game, players will have the freedom to explore every outdoor area. The city streets will be full of sidequests, and you’ll be able to fly around knocking out crims without having to worry about any loading times. Ginn also talks about how Rocksteady plan to improve on the maligned boss fights of the first game.

 

Talking about Arkham City’s open world approach, Ginn says: “Everywhere that’s open to the sky is available to the player from the off. So they can go anywhere they want,” adding “there’s loads of content out there in the streets and you can engage with in any order you want right from the beginning.

 

“It’s all open, all the time. Our technical director was like, “What? You want an open-world that’s open all the time that’s five times bigger than anything we’ve done before? Are you crazy?

 

“That was the emotional feeling that we wanted to convey; you’re Batman, you can do what you want. That’s the empowering thing that Arkham Asylum didn’t really deliver because it was such a linear, tight, intense story.

 

“As long as you’re outdoors, there won’t be any loading times interrupting your exploring, either. “Not in the exteriors,” says Ginn, “you saw the loading from going inside the courthouse from the outside but no it streams seamlessly throughout and that has been a massive, massive challenge.”

 

The other challenge facing Rocksteady is to improve upon mediocre and often frustrating boss fights that dragged down Batman: Arkham Asylum. “Boss battles; they came pretty late in Arkham Asylum, we weren’t really planning on doing big boss battles and then we got to a point where we were like “We need climaxes throughout this game.

 

“We needed to give them more development time and we didn’t have it so we’ve front-loaded the boss battles this time around so that we’ve got dedicated people working on them right the way through the dev cycle.

 

“It’s hard to tell until we go into intensive focus testing if they’re working but they certainly look pretty epic.”

 

Batman: Arkham City is out in the US on October 18, and in Europe on October 21.

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