Here’s a problem you just can’t get around when you’re working with superheroes and their nemeses – how do they go up against one another without incurring one of those instantly regrettable, instant death incidents? Because that’s no fun at all.

“It’s something that games often have difficulty doing simply because a big character like Penguin or Joker or Riddler or whatever is usually treated as boss encounter,” Rocksteady’s Dax Ginns tells Gamasutra.

“And you don’t just walk up to a boss and floor them with one punch, but in actuality if Batman was going to throw a punch at the Riddler, he would knock him out.”

So the devs have to get clever about this stuff. In the case of the Riddler, that means taking each other on in other, less fist-in-the-nuts-oriented ways.

“I think that’s kind of a nice, very emotional connection where you really cannot wait to get your hands around his neck. That’s the sort of things we’re talking about, that’s the intimacy we’re really talking about,” Ginns says.

“They’re humans. They’re mortal. Batman’s a mortal guy, but he’s a total badass, so we’ve got to make sure that all of a sudden someone like Riddler doesn’t just develop superhuman strength because it makes gameplay sense. No. Riddler is a smart guy but he’s not a powerhouse, and so the combat between Batman and Riddler exists on the intellectual level.

“We are, through him, giving ourselves the flexibility to spec out a whole new range of much more physical, much more threatening mortal challenges that he’s constructed that lay on top of the verbal challenges, the puzzles, these quizzes that he sets on Batman.

“So that personality interpretation of Riddler opens the door to new gameplay opportunities for us, and characters have to meet that criteria before they’ll be included in the game.”

Batman: Arkham Asylum is due to launch on PC, Xbox, and PS3 in October.