The Gotham Knights story is "completely original", and will not draw on any existing comics, Warner Bros. Montreal has confirmed.
"It's a completely original story," explains Fleur Marty, senior producer on Gotham Knights in an interview with GamesRadar. "We're not re-enacting any of the existing stories from any of the comics. Gotham Knights' story is fully original."
There is an existing comic book series called Gotham Knights, as well as series based on the Court of Owls, so it was possible the game would pull some narrative elements from those series.
However, it's clear that although the developer is delivering what it calls an "iconic interpretation of a lot of these elements" when it comes to the Gotham Knights characters of Bat Girl, Red Hood, Nightwing, and Robin, it is "connecting them in an original way".
"One of our goals was to really tap into aspects of the Batman universe that hadn’t necessarily had exposure yet in games," explains Patrick Redding, creative director. "We drew on the idea of the Batman Family, really as a core element of that."
"But it’s how the Batman Family has evolved in this kind of very divergent cast of characters, who each have their own unique spin on the crime-fighting vigilante."
"I think that was kind of a starting point. And then when we started looking at where in the Bat-universe lore we could really make a stylistic choice that would be different. We looked at more recent editions, like the Court of Owls storyline. We were very fortunate in a way because, with our relationship with DC and the fact that that element of the story is relatively recent, we could get into a room and have conversations with some of the main stakeholders of the DC side, and really figure out what was the best way to interpret some of those ideas and these characters – the heroes as well as the adversaries, for the kind of game we wanted to make."
Gotham Knights is due to release on PS4, Xbox One, PS5, Xbox Series X, and PC sometime in 2021.
Here's what we discovered from the Gotham Knights trailer breakdown.
