Rocksteady On Batman: Arkham City

Last Friday TheSixthAxis was invited to spend a very enjoyable evening down at BAFTA with Batman: Arkham City developers Rocksteady. You’ll have no doubt heard about the spoilers from the end of last week and we too were shown around half an hour of the game which ended with that unfortunate event.

Anyway, after the demo ended (if you thought the game looks stunning you should see it on a cinema sized screen) a Q & A session followed and first Rocksteady were asked why they had made the game open world.

[drop]”We didn’t want to play it safe with Batman and when we started Arkham City,” the developers said. “We knew what we wanted to do. To be honest we didn’t even know if we could do it but if we worried about it too much I don’t think we could have made the game, but the idea of the open world got us really excited.”

“We sat down at the start and said ‘This is the game we want to make, let’s make it happen.'”

The team revealed why, almost five years ago, they decided to make a Batman game with Arkham Asylum.

“We loved the idea of the vulnerability versus power of the character,” they said, referring to the original game.  “If you make mistakes then Batman is vulnerable but at the same time, if you get it right he is incredibly powerful. If you stay one step ahead, if you plan, he’s someone who almost cant be beaten. One of things we like is that if you do badly in the game it’s always your fault.”

The demo we were shown was running on a Xbox 360 and all versions of the game will feature 3D using 3D televisions and also the old school anaglyph red and cyan glasses. Did Rocksteady find it hard trying to squeeze the game on the ageing hardware?

“Getting the game to run on the current hardware was the biggest challenge,” said the team.  “Countless times we wondered if we hae set the bar too high. We kept on optimising the graphics, the collision detection, how things loaded in to memory and very near the end it came together. Incredibly close to end in fact!”

“We are hopeless optimists and kept saying ‘It’s gonna work, its gonna be awesome!’ Arkham Asylum is the biggest technical challenge we’ve taken on as a company and it scared the shit out us.”

It was noted that unlike Arkham Asylum, there were no loading pauses between areas and the team elaborated on this.

“We’re very comfortable with the Unreal engine now. The great challenge we had was streaming in the world and allocating the memory. We have a ‘bubble’ round the player and anything close is rendered fully, then there is a level of medium detail further out and finally there the distant backdrop. We had to learn how to stream this on and off the disc and were constantly optimizing this code and finding the best way to place assets on the disc.”

Quickly dodging a question about Kinect, the team revealed that when the studio worked on Arkham Asylum they had around sixty members, for Arkham City they have increased the headcount to over one hundred as the extra hands were needed to create the vast play area.

“We didn’t want build an empty city,” said Rocksteady.  “It’s full of detail and every square inch feels like something someone has actually built and is interesting to see and has a gameplay purpose. By no means is this the biggest open world game ever but we think its the most richly detailed.”

[drop2]Rocksteady made full use of Warner Brothers testing team and ran many focus groups to get the game right, but also paid attention to the fan’s reaction to the first game.  “We listened to feedback from the gaming community.” they said, “but we don’t get obsessed by it. We focused on the strong points of the first game and tried to make them better.”

Arkham City has a huge roster of characters including Dr. Hugo Strange, The Joker and Mr. Freeze, so how did the team decide which characters to use?

“We all have our favourite villains and we did have a lot of arguments of who to include, but as we were writing the story we said ‘What’s the coolest Batman story we can make?’ and then we picked the villains that worked best. We are just very lucky to have such a fantastic rogues gallery to pick from.”

The team were asked if they had ever considered a brand new original character for game.  “We’re like kids in a sweet shop as it is with all the great super villains so putting in a new character would be like asking for the one sweet the shop doesn’t stock! It would be a waste when there are so many great characters, introducing someone new would be pointless.”

New to the game will be the Tim Drake version of Robin, why this version rather the Dick Grayson character?  “We talked for many days as to which version of Robin it would be and there are a number of reasons which unfortunately I can’t really go in to, but the decision was made because it fits in with our story. There were many lengthy discussions with DC.”

Also joining the fight will the frisky feline Catwoman.  “Catwoman is such a lovely contrast to Batman, you play someone who is ambiguous throughout the game,” said Rocksteady.

“Catwoman is the closest thing Batman has to a friend in Arkham City so we felt it was a nice opportunity to have an interwoven story, as you play through the game you will swap between the characters and although it’s Batman’s game we have her as a ‘special guest’. The game starts with you playing as Catwoman and Two Face is making a power play by trying to kill you and that is when Batman shows up.”

Batman has his gadgets but the Batmobile has only made a fleeting appearance at the start of the first game. Would vehicles be used in Arkham City?

“The vehicles question was one we always kick around at the start of development, the Batmobile, the Batwing, a whole load of great vehicles but we felt the vehicle we wanted to focus on most was Batman himself, the ability to glide through the city. We hope that when you get your hands on the game you will be able to see that if we had the Batmobile in the game you just wouldn’t be able to get around as quickly as you do with just Batman himself.”

[videoyoutube]The detective mode was used extensively in the first game and you could play the vast majority of the title with it permanently turned on meaning that that gamers missed some of the gorgeous graphics. Have Rocksteady added incentives for people to play Arkham City with it turned off?

“Well you have the opportunity to turn it off when you want! The detective mode is more about hunting enemies down but when you use it the Bat symbols in the sky and the compass are not on screen. To navigate and fly around you have to be out of detective mode. There was never any question of nerfing Batman for using it.”

The challenge rooms were a great success in Arkham Asylum and return for the sequel.  “We have a lot of cool new features with them,” said the developers. “We’re doing campaigns in them now with a string of challenge rooms in a row and you have six different modifiers that can apply to any of the rooms. You can apply the modifiers as you want, three to the first match, three to second, none to the third for example. The modifiers really change how the game plays so they are really cool.”

There was one last question for the team, and you can probably guess what it was.

There was nervous laughter.