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In Batman: Arkham City Every Single Place Is Unique

BatmanArkhamCity_LogoSmallRocksteady Studios were showing off Batman: Arkham City at this year’s Eurogamer Expo both on the show floor and during 2 developer sessions. After 2.5 years of development, the sequel to the multi award winning Batman: Arkham Aslyum is almost ready for release. I played Batman: Arkham City whilst at E3 2011 earlier on this year and loved every minute of it. Whilst on the Arkham City stand, surrounded by gamers getting their first taste of the new game I interviewed Sarah Wellock, Community Manager and Adam Vincent, 3D animator from Rocksteady Studios.

The most noticeable change when you first get to play Arkham City is the ability to go anywhere you want within the huge sprawl of Gotham City that is 5 times the size of Arkham Asylum. “Every part [of Gotham] is detailed.” Wellock said. “There are some games you play and you go “I recognise this apartment block, I saw it 10 mins ago.” You know where you are in Arkham City because every single place is unique. Every street is different, every building is different. I’ve never seen that before and I’ve been playing games my whole life pretty much.”
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Vincent commented on the challenge of building this new free-roaming Gotham. “Design environment was a big thing. You look at the game and it’s a massive, massive task to recreate a city which is part of Gotham. Most people who have played the previous game and have any sort of knowledge of the comics it has got this real gritty feel. The environment team has almost doubled. Almost every single aspect of the team has had at least one or two guys added to it.”

Gotham isn’t just a giant lifeless city either. The streets are filled with all manner of thugs, villains and denizens of the night all with a collective hatred of Batman. This makes wandering the streets a real action packed experience for you with trouble around every corner and RockSteady have “doubled the number of animations in the combat” according to Vincent.

He went on to say “One of the main parts of my job is working on combat animations. I do animations for simultaneous counters where you can counter up to 3 people at once. The overall sense of flow and there is no game that flows combat like ours. It’s called free-flow combat and it does exactly what it says on the tin. You’ve got this smooth motion and Batman doesn’t glitch into these awkward positions. It’s really flowing and the coders have done the animation system for that. A guy called Tim Rennie has worked wonders. This is really, really good system. You can do environmental counters next to walls and slam their heads into railings.”

I got to see a very skilled demonstration of the combat system during one of their developer presentations featuring Wellock and the Rocksteady Q&A lead. They were showing off both Batman’s and Catwoman’s array of brutal fighting moves. The signature take downs in particular will bring tears to your eyes as Batman twists a thugs arm/leg completely out of shape or as Catwoman strangles a villain unconscious with her extremely powerful thighs wrapped around his face and neck. Gotham is a rough city. Are you tough enough to survive it?

Batman: Arkham City is due for release on the 21st Oct 2011 for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and on PC in Nov 2011.