It’s simple: we kill the Batman. Not only was this a phrase uttered with a real sense of gravitas by Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight, but this all-out attack to topple The Caped Crusader will serve as the crux for Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkham Knight.
With Scarecrow leading the charge, the upcoming threequel will see the streets of Gotham descend into a full-blown war zone, and Batman will have his hands full with a rogues gallery of menacing foes, including Penguin, Two-Face the Riddler and Harley Quinn.
This is in addition to the inclusion of the titular Arkham Knight, a character said to be exclusive to Rocksteady’s universe. Above all else, it’s evident that the studio’s latest is shaping up to be a blockbuster release – no thanks to the relentless slew of DLC – and in a recent interview with GameSpot, the game’s Marketing Director Dax Ginn described Batman: Arkham Knight as the “biggest game” the company has ever built.
“If the game was five hours long, yeah, we’d be in trouble cramming that all in,” he continues. “If you had Penguin and Two-Face and the Riddler and Harley Quinn simultaneously coming at you, that’s just a mess. So you have to break the game out so you’ve got a buffet to choose from, but you can take those meals on discretely. But the game is massive. I can’t put a time on it, but it’s far and away the biggest game we’ve ever made.”
It makes sense, of course, considering the way in which Arkham City expanded the focused, water-tight setup of Arkham Asylum into a huge open-world setting. For the threequel, now that Gotham has been tweaked to support Bruce Wayne’s trusty Batmobile, Rocksteady looks set to take this approach one step further.
Batman: Arkham Knight is due to release just a couple of weeks after E3, when Rocksteady’s trilogy-capper hits store shelves on June 23.
