Batman Returns

Batman is a great superhero because he doesn't have superpowers. There's a definite relate-ability there. Everyone secretly dreams that with enough dedication they could become Batman in some way. He's such a great character, but he has all these weaknesses, which was something we wanted to get across in the first game. So much of what he does is about his relationship with other characters. It's not just about spectacle. It's not just about buildings blowing up.

The great moments of Batman are when you see Batman and Joker on screen, Batman and Two-Face together. It's those great relationships and how those characters spark off of each other, and how they're so different. That's something we embraced, and it's something we're fortunate to have as well. We have this great rogues gallery. No one gets close to matching Batman for rogues gallery. So being able to draw on those relationships between those different characters allows us to let the player experience what it's like to be Batman and what all these other characters are like. That's what hopefully sets the game apart - it's in the characterisation rather than just the spectacle. A lot of games are just about spectacle, but don't bring it back to having a deep underlying characterisation.

It's always hard to know the state of evolution of a particular mechanic. In the first game we spent a lot of time polishing it and making it feel good for the player. A lot of these things are born of a certain level of frustration. I've never been good at fighting games because I've never been able to memorise all the different button combinations and pull them out at the moment you need them. So when coming up with our combat system we were thinking, let's not make it about remembering long chains. Let's just make it about, you can link any of the moves together. We're not going to tell you which moves to link together. It's more about deciding the situation you're in and picking the right move in that situation.

There's so much game people haven't seen, that, when people play it they're going to be really surprised and excited.

Sefton Hill

When we finished the first game, we asked ourselves, OK, where do we go there? For Arkham City we wanted to give the player more choices. In Arkham Asylum if someone was attacking you could counter. You had the ability to strike. In this game you have other options. You can beat down, so you can stun someone and repeatedly attack to focus an attack on one person. You can combo in your gadgets as well. But these are all simple things to do in of themselves. It's still giving the player lots of options on a fundamentally simple system. You decide how complicated you want to make it, by picking from this inventory of different attacking and defensive moves you have.

Where does it go from here? I don't know. That's a question for another time. That's tomorrow's problem. We've just finished this one, so I'm just going to enjoy this one for now.

I feel with Arkham City we've got a game in a nice position between the two. When you play the final game, there's a huge amount of freedom. You can choose what you're doing at any given time. You can choose which side mission you're going to do, if you're going to go after Riddler Trophies, if you're going to rescue political prisoners who are getting beaten up. At any given moment there's a hell of a lot of choice in there which you would normally associate with an openworld game. But at the same time you still have this focused story you can follow. We've got a nice combination of those two gameplay elements.

Because of how important the characterisation is to a Batman game, I wouldn't want to give that up just in the name of letting Batman run around a bigger area. When people play this they'll see it feels like an openworld game, it feels you've got the freedom of an openworld game, but still with the crafted characterisation you get from a more story driven game. That's one of the big strengths of the game.

Now I get to see a bit of sunlight again, which is nice, and then we look at what to do next. We're all really excited by seeing what people make of the game. What's quite exciting for us as well is, we haven't shown off a lot of the story. We've shown off some of the mechanics, but we've deliberately not talked too much about the story. There's so much game people haven't seen, that, when people play it they're going to be really surprised and excited. It's a definite, deliberate tactic. We didn't want to show off too much because it's a story driven game. We wanted people to enjoy the story when they get to pick up and play it.

For us, it's the excitement of seeing how people take it when it goes out there, and seeing what the community think. The community has been behind us, which has been great. Just seeing how that works and then deciding what we're going to do next.

Yeah. Batman is a phenomenal license. We're hugely fortunate. For me, personally, I'm a huge Batman fan. Getting the opportunity to work on Batman every day is amazing. It is a genuine privilege to get to work with such an incredible character, so many great villains and create something in the Batman universe. I couldn't ask for anything more than that.