Gotham Nights
The city is burning. His city is burning. Summoning his monstrous steed, the Dark Knight skilfully jumps into the Batmobile and speeds off, two parts of one seamless crime-fighting machine.
As he rockets around a tight corner – a little too tight perhaps – the back of the beastly tank clips a tree, ripping it from the ground. Batman doesn't flinch, continuing his patrol of the city – but behind the PS4 controller, I grin maniacally.
There's no mistaking that the Batmobile will be the centre of the Batman: Arkham Knight experience when the game launches in June. But it was also the centre of the development cycle, dictating many of the technical challenges the team at Rocksteady had while developing the final chapter in its Arkham trilogy.
"The first decision we made on day-one was the Batmobile. We're going to put the Batmobile in this game," explains Dax Ginn, Game Marketing Director at Rocksteady.
Perhaps what's most surprising about this admission isn't that the Rocksteady team wanted to bring the iconic vehicle into the Arkham universe, but that it was done before the team had any idea of what the next-gen consoles would be.
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And they knew, from the moment they decided to include the Batmobile, that they would need more power than the PS3 and Xbox 360 could provide.
"We were sort of building the game with a sense of what potentially could be the horsepower of the [next-gen] consoles," Ginn admits.
"Our tech guys – and especially our lead engine coder Dustin – he was building an engine that was a prediction of the horsepower that he thought the consoles [would have]. And then when we finally got our hands on the hardware, he was like "Yeah, no worries, I always knew it was going to be this way".
As a result, there wasn't a huge amount of scaling up or scaling down the project to fit the hardware limitations of the PS4 or Xbox One consoles.
But more importantly, it allowed Rocksteady to deliver on its dream of a fully realised Gotham, where the Batmobile is not just a cameo, but a full-fledged character of the game in its own right.
The Dark Knight rises
The Batmobile rockets along a straight, black thunder threatening the army of criminals now sacking Gotham.
But Batman's personal tank can't help the Dark Knight get to the top of the crane he needs to reach, so he seamlessly ejects at velocity into a perfect glide. Before him, the lights of Gotham call to him. And in this moment, I am the Batman.
"Laying out the city was something that we did in conjunction with the design of the Batmobile's capabilities," Ginn explains.
"So how wide do the streets need to be? If you miss a corner and you hit the wall and you're going at 100 miles an hour do you just stop dead? Because that doesn't really feel like a very Batman experience, so we're like no, you clearly just have to just rip that corner off that building." And yes, Ginn was grinning wildly while he said that.
That meant creating a physics system, a destructible system for the environment, a regeneration system for the Batmobile, and the team at Rocksteady had to create them all.
On top of that, making the seamless transition between the Batmobile, combat and exploration work was an incredible feat. Ginn can barely contain his pride as he explains just how much pressure the engine team was under to deliver, and how well they performed.
"If they had to turn around and say to [Rocksteady founder] Sefton [Hill], 'This gameplay feature you've designed? We can't technically do it.' That would have been such a massive blow to the Batman fantasy.
"That's what you want to do. If we weren't able to do that – which we wouldn't have been able to on previous generations of hardware – I think the whole team would have been so depressed," Ginn says.
Gotham Adventures
Gritty neon, dirty buildings and rain. Batman sees it all as he stands atop a warehouse full of Penguin's goons.
After a quick discussion with Nightwing, he drops through the glass, black fists deftly delivering pain to those trying to destroy his city. His foes fall before him, as his ally Nightwing moves in perfect unison to keep the bodies on the floor.
This is his city, and for the first time, you can truly believe it.
Batman is one of the world's most loved superheroes, but he is far from universal. Batman belongs in Gotham, a fictional City that is almost as iconic as real-world metropolises like New York.
And finally, the move to next-gen consoles has allowed the team at Rocksteady to truly deliver on the promise of Gotham.
"Creating the atmosphere of Gotham is something that our art team is always banging on about all the time," Ginn reflects.
"It's not just a city. It's Gotham City. And the rain in Gotham City is very particular, the reflections, the bitumen, the way that neon bounces off wet bitumen… Smoke and those atmospherics… I think next-gen allowed us to take that further than we've ever done before."
And making the world of the Arkham Knight feel like it's not just a generic copy of a generic city was something only possible thanks to the hardware improvements of the PS4 and Xbox One consoles.
"If you think back to Arkham Asylum, the atmosphere felt very legit and authentic, but making an asylum feel like an asylum is a pretty easy thing to do because as long as you've got bloodied gurneys and tiled walls and that sort of thing, it's quite a predictable environment in terms of design," Ginn explains.
"But making a city not feel like a generic city, but making it feel like a specific city – when it's a fictional city – is really, really tough. But [in Arkham Knight], I feel like I'm in Gotham, I'm not just in a version of New York or Chicago, it feels like it's Gotham City."
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Original source: In Depth: How technology influenced the creation of Batman: Arkham Knight.
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