Gotham Knights Team Explains How the Game is Fixing a Common Arkham Series Critique

One of the big reveals from the first day of DC FanDome was WB Montreal's new game Gotham Knights, which will feature a whole new timeline and story for DC fans to explore. The game will star Batgirl, Nightwing, Red Hood, and Robin, as in this world Batman is dead. That's a pretty massive change from the Arkham games, but that's not the only difference fans will find when they give this game a go. ComicBook.com had the chance to speak to Gotham Knights Creative Director Patrick Redding all about the game, and he explained how the game will address one of the more criticized aspects of the Arkham games, and that's worlds without anyone in them.

First Redding described the feel of the world, which aims to convey the city's distinct history. "So right away there were... I want to say there are two big things that drove it," Redding said. "One is The Court of Owls themselves and the focus on a Gotham City that has 350 years of history, plus the overarching focus and emphasis on mystery and on uncovering hidden secrets. We knew we wanted a Gotham City that reflected that history, which is why it has five distinct boroughs and different neighborhoods within those boroughs that are architecturally distinctive. All of the feeling of the historical influence and the influence of the major families in Gotham is really embedded directly into the architecture of the buildings and the foundations of the buildings and the bedrock of the city itself."

The second part of that equation is the people that live in the city, and unlike what has come before, this city will feel alive, acting as a big component to getting you excited about going back out into the city every night.

"Then the other part of it is we knew we wanted it to have a real ecosystem," Redding said. "We wanted a city that you would go back into night after night after night. It's not just one really bad, intense evening, but it's many, many, many nights of you patrolling and fighting crime as a driver for your growth, as a kind of crucible for transforming you into your ultimate Knighthood version of yourself, and so that also helps to create a rhythm to the game because you're always fighting crime at night, and you're always back in The Belfry in the day, and what you're doing at night needs to produce a lot of variation and a lot of surprises."

"So that meant having citizens that live in that city that are trying to get by and trying to survive and try to make sure they wake up the next morning to go to work," Redding said. "It means having a hostile police force, that's ostensibly trying to protect those citizens, but is doing it in a very heavy-handed, not necessarily very benevolent way. Then you have all of the criminal factions, including the villains that are really seizing the opportunities granted by having no Batman around, right? And so that ecosystem is what we're dropping the player into and asking them to navigate and to thrive in. It creates a pressure cooker that continues to serve up surprises, continues to serve up challenges and new types of enemies and new types of crimes and new types of situations as you engage with it night after night after night."

Gotham Knights is set to hit consoles in 2021, and you can check out more of our coverage right here!

Are you liking what Gotham Knights is doing so far? Let us know in the comments or talk all things Gotham Knights with me on Twitter @MattAguilarCB!