You won’t be able to see the full Gotham Knights story in one playthrough, say developers from the team at WB Games Montréal. As the Gotham Knights release date approaches, game director Geoff Ellenor and cinematics director Wilson Mui discuss the narrative of the Batman spin-off action game and how its four-character approach affects the way players will see the story unfold.
“You will not see all of it in a single playthrough,” says Ellenor in an interview printed in PLAY magazine issue 19 (initially spotted by MP1st), “just because there’s so much content that is unique to the hero’s perception of what’s going on and what happened.” The DC Comics game features four playable characters from the Batman universe – Nightwing, Batgirl, Robin, and Red Hood – and missions can be undertaken with each of them, featuring distinct changes depending upon who you choose.
Mui speaks to the difficulty of the cinematography, explaining that “Structurally, we’re gonna have a very similar scene for each character, but each character has their own version of that. So because they move differently, they speak differently, they have different histories with all the different characters, it allows us to make a scene that would be their version of that.” As a rather silly example, he notes that in Nightwing’s version of one scene “we have a butt shot because, you know, there’s a butt thing for Nightwing out there that we need to appease the fans with!”
The concept of seeing how different heroes will react to a given situation is certainly one of those nuances that will appeal to hardcore DC Comics fans, and should add plenty of replayability value to the game. Ellenor says the team jokes “that we made four games all the time, because there’s a lot in Gotham Knights.”
The pair also speak to the team’s decision to kill off the iconic caped crusader for its latest game. Ellenor explains that creative director Pat Redding came up with the idea of how the four characters would deal with having to “go do Batman’s job if Batman wasn’t there,” and says that the setup “became a really energising idea for the team, and we just ran with that almost immediately.” Mui adds that the emotional consequences on Gotham Knights’ protagonists “is an untouched area – we don’t see much of that.”
Gotham Knights arrives on October 21, and we have everything you need to know about the Gotham Knights characters ahead of release. Redding also recently talked about the team’s more subdued take on Harley Quinn in Gotham Knights. If you’re looking for more of the best superhero games on PC, we’ve got plenty for you – including the first footage of the Spider-Man: Miles Morales PC port arriving later in 2022.