Gotham Knights made a splash last weekend, and not only because the game is a new promised fixture in the universe of DC video games. In a surprise narrative twist, the opening trailer for the game revealed the death of Batman, setting the stage for four other characters to step into the lead as Gotham’s premier crime-fighters.
I spoke with creative director Patrick Redding and senior producer Fleur Marty about the reveal of the game, and learned some additional details about just what players can expect out of this latest expedition into the dark streets of Gotham. Read our full interview below.
Gotham Knights is slated for release in 2021 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.
Now that the announcement is out there, what have been some of the elements of the game that you’ve been most excited to get to share?
Patrick Redding: First and foremost, we managed to keep a lid on the fact that we were killing Batman. That was the thing I was most excited about. I know that sounds a bit morbid. But the promise of delivering a new guard of heroes from out of the Batman universe, and really putting the spotlight on a playable Batman family, and the reason why. Why is that cool? Why is having this range of characters that are so different and distinctive, and early enough in their careers that they have a lot of room for growth, why is that a cool promise for people?
So that’s one consequence. The other consequence is: What happens to Gotham City when Batman gets killed? People understand intuitively, no matter how familiar you are with the franchise, that all hell’s going to break loose. That’s exciting. What kind of hell is going to break loose? We are able to start planting the seeds of that.
But the reveal was really all about the heroes. We knew that going in.
Are those four characters really the core characters of the game?
Redding: We’re going to have more detail later about our post-launch line-up. But those are the four.
Fleur Marty: Yes. Those are the four playable characters of our game.
How is Gotham Knights distinct from the Arkham universe? What are the ways it’s different, other than the obvious, that it’s a separate fiction?
Marty: There are many ways. But first and foremost, this is not a Batman story or game. This is about four really distinct characters that each have their own unique playstyles, personalities, and abilities. It’s really about taking them from the start and growing them into dark knights.
The second is the ecosystem of Gotham City. It’s not a game that takes place over just one night, in that kind of deserted city. This is a vast open world city and it takes places over many nights of crime-fighting. You are going to encounter the citizens of Gotham City as they try to go about their business, even as all the gangs and criminals are prowling out of the shadows, now that Batman is gone. The state of Gotham is a big difference.
The Arkham games often focused on a particular part of Gotham. Is Gotham Knights different from that – is it a larger part of Gotham?
Redding: Gotham City is a really important element of the game, as it would be for any Batman universe experience. What we wanted to do is have a whole city. It has five distinct boroughs, each of which has their own sub-neighborhoods and districts. What that lets us do is two things. As a gameplay environment, it lets us create architecturally distinct spaces that offer a different kind of story from a traversal and party-crashing-on-crime point of view. But also, it allows us to take a lot of the bigger themes of the game, narratively, in terms of the overall focus on mystery and the Court of Owls, and say: “How does a Gotham City grow, historically?” So, our neighborhoods reflect different influences, and the role that different families have played. It becomes an exploratory environment, a kind of environmental storytelling space that’s very different.
In order to do that, we needed to deliver density and quality of details – like with every crack in the sidewalk that has a cigarette butt wedged into it, and weeds growing out of it, and graffiti on the walls – all of it, down to the masonry and the stuff that’s carved into the bricks, which maybe points you toward some hidden piece of history. That’s the level at which our Gotham City needed to flourish and be amazing. It’s a full city, and it has a lot of different districts, but it’s the size we wanted it to be to support all that crime and all the missions we have in the game.
The Court of Owls is a favorite corner of the universe for many fans, but for more casual fans who may be more familiar with Batman from the movies or other sources, they might not even know what that is. Would you tell us about your team’s take on the Court of Owls, and why, for someone who might not know about it, that might be just as exciting as Joker story, or some other more familiar villain?
Redding: That’s a deep question, and we are going to have a lot more details later in the campaign to share. But the punchy version is that the Court of Owls is a secret society of Gotham’s most decadent and corrupt wealthy, who have been around since the founding of the city, 350 years ago. Over time, as they’ve sought to entrench their power and hold over Gotham, they’ve warped it into the twisted east coast city that it is.
In a lot of ways, their influence is really embedded deep in the bedrock and foundations of the city. But because they protect their secrets, they remained in the shadows for a really long time, to the modern era, and even Batman struggled to learn what he could about them.
That becomes the jumping off point for serving up a very different kind of enemy and adversary for the New Guard to deal with. Who better for the new guard to deal with than the old, crusty, entrenched power of the city.
Marty: And to the question of how the Court of Owls is not as well known to the general public, I think what will make people relate to it is that it brings the mystery, and at the core, Batman and the Batman family – they’re detectives! Conspiracies and secret societies are a perfect gateway to put on your detective hat and dive into the mystery.
When you have four distinct characters, that means you have to reflect four unique playstyles that all work. What can you tell me about what makes each of these characters distinct,and compelling on their own within the game world?
Redding: For us, they aren’t supposed to be four mini-Batmans. They are people who have trained and have some of that crimefighting DNA as a starting point, but either through virtue of their story or just their personalities, they’ve started to evolve in these four distinct ways.
For example, our Robin, Tim Drake, he’s relatively young. He’s a teenager. But he’s still formidable. It’s just that his focus becomes more on stealth and using the tricks to disrupt the AI and confuse and apply status effects.
Conversely, a character like Nightwing – while he’s still very much a martial arts combatant – he’s a very acrobatic character. He’s more ping-pongy. It allows him to tackle groups of enemies.