Rocksteady: Arkham City gameplay is 80% outdoors

Batman may claim top billing on the box, but the real star of Arkham City is shaping up to be the city itself. And that's good thing, really, because Rocksteady Studios is saying that nearly 80% of the game will be spent stalking its streets.

A preview in this month's PSM3 reveals a large majority of Arkham City's action will take place outside of the buildings, with special interior locations reserved for specific missions. According to Rocksteady's marketing man Dax Ginn, this was in no way done to take away from Batman's story, but instead to encourage a greater level of exploration and interaction with city's unique districts.

"Plot is really important to us. Our objective was not to make a bigger game world just for the sake of it. We want to fill it with content, and there's no better world than Batman's universe to take inspiration from," explained Ginn.

Ginn further detailed the process by which Arkham City has been built, saying it's taken a team of 97 to pull off the "pretty huge technical and creative undertaking."

A large part of Batman Arkham Asylum's appeal was the way in which each new building or boss lair had its own character and meaningful differences. If Rocksteady can replicate that same feeling outdoors, and on a larger scale, then this is a good thing, no?

[Source: CVG]

Mar 31, 2011



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Matt Bradford wrote news and features here at GamesRadar+ until 2016. Since then he's gone on to work with the Guinness World Records, acting as writer and researcher for the annual Gamer's Edition series of books, and has worked as an editor, technical writer, and voice actor. Matt is now a freelance journalist and editor, generating copy across a multitude of industries.