‘Batman: Arkham Origins’: Lessons Learned

Batman: Arkham Origins is in the works, and the developers have learned a few things from previous Batman games.

After changing hands from developer Rocksteady, Warner Bros. Games Montreal looks back on the previous successes of Batman: Arkham Asylum and Batman: Arkham City, pulling lessons they can apply to Batman: Arkham Origins. They talk about how Batman: Arkham Asylum changed the industry of videogames as well.

Ben Mattes, senior producer for Batman: Arkham Origins starts:

“I remember the guy … coming to me one day and just asking me if I’d read about this Arkham Asylum game. I guess I was a little prejudiced … I had dismissed it. ‘It’s gonna be another licensed superhero title, and I don’t really expect too much.’ I remember one day hearing about it, it’s been pushed back, and I started going ‘Wow, wait a second, what’s that all about? You don’t do that for a license title, obviously, this isn’t a standard license title. There’s something deeper to this.'”

Reid Schneider, WB Games Montreal’s head of production picks up from there, “I remember first seeing the campaign for Arkham Asylum. … I was with a buddy of mine named Alex, who was the creative director on AC3, we were looking at this and we were like, ‘This looks good,’ and she was like, ‘It’s amazing.’ I’m like, ‘Really?’ … I guess the game came out a few months later, we’re like, ‘Well played, Remy.'”

Ben Mattes continues:

“Obviously when it did come out, it was all anyone on my team talked about for a solid month. In particular, what they talked about and what we all aspired towards was how immediately you were Batman. They did not break that fourth wall. Everything you did, every UI element, every mechanic, every narrative element just further immersed you into the fantasy of being Batman. We salivated at that, we broke it apart and analyzed every little bit of it to try and extract from that techniques that we could make sure we were applying to our game so that ideally, players would feel as immersed in our lead characters as you were in Batman in Arkham Asylum.”

The rest of the interview can be seen at Game Informer.

What do you think of what the developers of Batman: Arkham Origins learned from the past games?