As part of our visit to Warner Bros. Games Montreal, we got to see a lot of Gotham Knights being played, but we weren’t able to go hands-on with the game ourselves. That makes a traditional preview a little difficult - without having had a controller in our hands, it’s hard to say how combat, working through missions, or making gear choices feels.
With that in mind this preview will be a little more structural - with the help of the game’s developers, we’ll walk you through how the game is put together, revealing brand new information about the open world, how supervillains fold into the fabric of the wider game, the game’s neat approach to a day-night cycle, and more.
Gotham City and Its People
As we’ve spoken about previously this month, Gotham Knights’ world is aiming to feel like a real city, with centuries of history behind it. Part and parcel with that is how truly open it is - the developers ensured that almost the entirety of their Gotham is open from the very beginning, with each of its five boroughs offering different traversal opportunities, different threats, different activities, and different characters.
But the team also wanted to create the sense of a city reacting to the presence of new vigilantes hitting the streets. Partly, that comes in how villains can physically change the city (more on that later), but it primarily comes down to something we haven’t seen much in gaming takes on Gotham - regular citizens. While the streets aren’t packed, Gotham’s regular folk certainly outnumber its criminals here - but they don’t necessarily see you as much better in the opening stages.
“I would say we start off the game in a pretty cold version of Gotham,” says game director Geoff Ellenor. “The police don't like you, the citizens don't like you and there's chaos in the city. And as a hero or the heroes that you're playing are wounded, they're missing Batman, they don't totally get along with each other. And over time, the tone evolves because you identify major threats to the city. You find out to a certain extent what's going on beneath the surface in Gotham and you gradually build the confidence of the citizens.”
Citizens react to the heroes they see and, based on the gameplay we saw, seem to reflect your crimefighting work back to you. Of course, some will always be on your side, and a group of citizens called The Watch act as an informant network for the Knights, offering up missions that will help stitch their parts of the city back together - all of which will see you head out into the darkness to help bring some light back to the city.
Night vs. Day
As it turns out, Dark Knights-in-training like to come out during, well, dark nights. Key to Gotham Knights is that it’s not a game with a shifting day-night cycle - rather the entire game is set over consecutive nights, with new crimes emerging every evening, and villain storylines progressing alongside your work to stop them. The only time you’ll see daylight in the main game is inside the Knights’ headquarters, the Belfry, where you’ll plan for what to do after the next sunset.
“The central loop of the game experience in Gotham Knights is what we call the Belfry Loop,” says creative director Patrick Redding. “And that experience is, when you exit the Belfry, it's always nighttime. You don't have to worry about when the sun's going to come up, but in the course of that night, there are going to be some crimes and other activities that are happening in the streets of Gotham that are premeditated.”
Redding continues, “The point is that we're hitting the reset and re-rolling the state of affairs in Gotham City every time you go out. So when you complete a night of crime fighting, and it's up to the player to decide when they're done, it could be a case of them saying, ‘Well, I think I've hit most of the major crimes I needed to,’ or it could be the case of them saying, ‘I learned what I needed to learn and now I need to go back to the belfry to advance the story.’”
It makes for something of a unique structure, not just a way to sensibly repopulate the world with crimes to fight and goons to take down, but also a way to show how the Knights’ path to succeeding Batman takes time and training. Of course, as part of all this, you’ll be following major story paths and hunting down rogue supervillains, but the core of most nights on Gotham’s streets comes in the form of regular crimes.
Crimes and Clues
Crimes in Gotham Knights come in many forms. They can range from procedurally generated muggings, right up to entire gangs running complex operations - and the more you foil, the more you’ll learn about crimes to come. Head out into Gotham’s streets and you’ll always find crimes ready to stop - complete those crimes, or interrogate informants, and you’ll earn clues, an in-game currency that helps populate your next night’s map with the major crimes you can go and stop.
“We wanted this concept of information scarcity, because you are taking on the role of the world's greatest detective to protect Gotham,” explains Ellenor. “So you need to find stuff out about the city night after night and that takes a number of different forms inside the game. There's the investigation board inside the Belfry, where it tracks the unwinding threads of the story that you're getting on the trail of a villain or searching out secrets about the Court of Owls. And in the open world, it's about clues - because clues reveal crimes.”
Redding adds, “You already have an activity queue that you can be tracking and deciding, ‘Okay. I think that's going to be more important for me to take on. Maybe this is more interesting to me because it maps better to one of the challenges that I'm trying to complete, or maybe this has direct impact on me finding that next chapter in the larger mystery.’ So there's a lot of different reasons why a player might choose to go after one particular crime or another, but those are a feature of that particular night.”
Unlike the game’s checkpointed story missions, if you fail a crime, there’s no opportunity to replay that exact situation again - it’s all part of the superhero learning process. Once you end a night, crimes are reset. Redding makes clear that, while it’s possible to clear all of the premeditated crimes in a single night, you’ll always have generated smaller crimes to go after should you want to keep playing. Once you do finish a night, you always return to the Belfry to assess.
“So that night is over,” Redding continues, “the crimes that you didn't solve continued unabated, and now you're in a situation where you can look at what's coming up for the next night. So maybe you've collected enough clues that you're going to know in advance, ‘Oh, there's going to be a heist at the bank, or there's going to be am armored car robbery, or someone's going to try to break somebody out of prison, or there's a known criminal that's going to be in hiding here. I'm going to go try to hit those locations.’
“But then when we generate that night, in addition to that, there's a bunch of things you don't know about. There's all of the other crimes that haven't been revealed, and you can find out about them through patrolling. You can find out about them because you grabbed a mugger in the midst of some random street crime and interrogated them, and they gave up a piece of information that revealed the presence of one of those crimes. But those crimes were already planned and were already a feature that night.”
It’s a system designed to keep offering new ideas (we saw multiple versions of the same base crime type in our time watching), without feeling inauthentic to how a real city might work. But of course, in a comic book city, not all crimes are created equal. Sometimes in your nightly patrols you’ll stumble across information that points to a much bigger, more recognisable threat.
Villain Arcs
We were shown precisely nothing of the game’s main story campaign after its tutorial - the team clearly wants to keep its take on the beloved Court of Owls storyline as clandestine as the group itself - but the game’s villain storylines aren’t necessarily a part of that darker conspiracy. Like any good comic book world, multiple supervillains are running riot across Gotham simultaneously, each with their own agendas. In Gotham Knights that means that supervillain arcs are optional side stories, taking place over multiple nights, and made part of the open world itself, not just ‘story dungeons’.