{"id":12716,"date":"2011-07-04T12:14:00","date_gmt":"2011-07-04T10:14:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"-0001-11-29T22:00:00","slug":"rocksteady-talks-batman-arkham-city-villains-and-new-gameplay-opportunities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/business\/12716-rocksteady-talks-batman-arkham-city-villains-and-new-gameplay-opportunities","title":{"rendered":"Rocksteady talks Batman: Arkham City villains and \u201cnew gameplay opportunities\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Here&rsquo;s a problem you just can&rsquo;t get around when you&rsquo;re working with superheroes and their nemeses &ndash; how do they go up against one another without incurring one of those instantly regrettable, instant death incidents? Because that&rsquo;s no fun at all.<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;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,&rdquo; Rocksteady&rsquo;s Dax Ginns tells <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/35295\/Interview_The_Surprising_Challenge_Of_Balancing_Batman.php\" target=\"_blank\">Gamasutra<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;And you don&rsquo;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.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;I think that&rsquo;s kind of a nice, very emotional connection where you really cannot wait to get your hands around his neck. That&rsquo;s the sort of things we&rsquo;re talking about, that&rsquo;s the intimacy we&rsquo;re really talking about,&rdquo; Ginns says.<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;They&rsquo;re humans. They&rsquo;re mortal. Batman&rsquo;s a mortal guy, but he&rsquo;s a total badass, so we&rsquo;ve got to make sure that all of a sudden someone like Riddler doesn&rsquo;t just develop superhuman strength because it makes gameplay sense. No. Riddler is a smart guy but he&rsquo;s not a powerhouse, and so the combat between Batman and Riddler exists on the intellectual level.<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;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&rsquo;s constructed that lay on top of the verbal challenges, the puzzles, these quizzes that he sets on Batman.<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;So that personality interpretation of Riddler opens the door to new gameplay opportunities for us, and characters have to meet that criteria before they&rsquo;ll be included in the game.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>Batman: Arkham Asylum is due to launch on PC, Xbox, and PS3 in October.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The delicate problem of balance<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":161,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12716","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12716","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/161"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12716"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12716\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}