IGN recently had the opportunity to visit Warner Brothers Games Montreal and see a preview of the Gotham Knights game, that’s set to be released later this year. Although the main storyline, and anything to do with the Court of Owls, are still under lock and key, we got to know more about how the game works, and it’s very interesting.
At the start of the video, they state that they weren’t able to play Gotham Knights hands-on, so we still don’t know how smooth the combat and movement are, but we learned plenty more about the game mechanics. Instead of unlocking sections of the map, like basically every game out there, almost all of Gotham City is open to exploration from the start.
As always, the city’s full of gangs with different affiliations that terrorize its citizens. Red Hood dislikes the mob with a passion it seems. The chaos they cause is made to simulate a hero’s never-ending job, in the sense that crime can never be fully wiped out and incidents occur all night, every night.
As Game Director, Geoff Ellenor, says:
You can clean Gotham for a night, but you can never stop it. Even Batman wasn’t capable of that and neither are you.
Unlike the Batman: Arkham Series, in which the games are all set in a single night, Gotham Knights has a day-and-night cycle that’s actually a pretty important part of the game, and really interesting. The cycle is triggered by entering The Belfry, where your chosen character plans for the upcoming night to determine when and where the gangs will be attacking. By stopping their attacks, you learn about crimes they’re planning, which pushes you towards finding the villain leading them.
It’s in The Belfry that you can adapt or change characters to fit your upcoming mission best or help solve a mystery to progress to the next chapter. Not surviving or completing a mission, however, is a fail, there’s no re-do. We have to learn from our mistakes in order not to repeat them. Once you end a night, crimes are reset completely and whatever incidents you didn’t stop, you have to deal with the consequences. The clues you gathered that night could help you to resolve them the next time.
When you collect enough evidence in The Belfry, you trigger a ‘Villain Night’, where you can get your @$§ handed to you by Harley Quinn, Mister Freeze, Blank, and others. In Gotham Knights, the villains are there to show us what Gotham’s really like, not just a side boss doing their own thing that doesn’t affect the rest of the game. Unless that villain is Riddler because his voice made me irrationally angry throughout the Arkham games, specifically Arkham Knight. In Gotham Knights, you dare many tools you can craft for each of the other playable heroes.
For all of those who like playing co-op, you can! Even if you don’t, you can enter someone else’s Gotham and not even need to meet the host. The levels of the players and enemies will scale to match, and progress is actually fair. All players will play the host’s story, but all progression will be saved for all players. When you return to your Gotham, you continue where you were in the story and when you get to a part of the mission you’ve already played in co-op, the system will give you the choice of skipping that part or replaying it.
Other than the team repeatedly references an ‘Endgame’, this is all we know for now. The game certainly looks much more interesting than it did before, not like the repetitive open-world games that many of us are starting to get tired of. There is hope yet.
Gotham Knights is scheduled to release on October 25 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.
Source: Youtube
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