While Kevin Conroy took us deep into the heart of Batman, and Paul Dini unraveled the mind of the character, Batman: Arkham Asylum director Sefton Hill from Rocksteady Studios broke the Bat and his rogues’ gallery down from a video game perspective. The developer addressed our pressing roundtable questions as to why the Boy Wonder was excluded from the game, what kind of gameplay we’ll experience as the Caped Crusader, what influenced the change in the appearances of characters like Harley Quinn, and how the team handled the pressure built up from previous Batman crash-and-burns.
“We really wanted that feeling for Batman. That there’s this epic, epic journey that you’re going on.”
Q: Is there a reason why Robin was left out?
Sefton Hill: I think that at the start, when we broke down the key elements of Batman that we wanted to include … You know, the great thing about Batman is that he’s such a multi-faceted character. But if you want to do all of those elements justice, we have felt there were certain things we couldn’t do as well as that. So if you bring Robin in, then obviously you have to bring in the elements of Robin, so we kind of focused on, ‘These are the main things we want to do for Batman.’ We want to focus on this master of the martial arts. We want to focus on the Invisible Predator; we want to focus on the World’s Greatest Detective, because there’s an element of the game that’s not really been done before. All these amazing gadgets, and the kind of psychological drive of Batman, because that’s another thing that’s really missed out quite a lot when you look at any medium, really. Obviously the comics really mainly, and the new films started to really get that kind of psychological drive and element of Batman, and we really wanted to get that in the game, as well. And then you’ve got obviously the other characters, the antagonists; they’re fascinating. His relationship with those characters … And that’s what I think is one of the key things with Batman, is that he’s driven in a way that other superheroes aren’t. That psychological relationship is what really fascinated us. The whole game really is about Batman’s relationship with the Joker and what drives the two of them on, rather than just … I think a lot of superheroes are maybe about blowing about buildings—you know, it’s about spectacle. And Batman is kind of much more personal, and I think that’s what’s fascinating about him as a character and why he resonates with people. So we sort of added all that up, and then could we fit Robin in as well? [Laughs] No, so …
Q: Going back to the World’s Greatest Detective, does that mean there’s sort of elements of problem-solving, puzzles, and detection that gets in the game?
Hill: Yeah, definitely. I mean there are a number of things that are in the game. There’s forensic trials, and scanning in evidence from different areas, as well. So when you’re sort of following people, you have a guy at the start … I don’t want to give too much away, but this guy at the start is kind of drinking from a hip flask and you can trace the alcohol on his breath after him. [Laughs] It’s only a minor one; it’s quite early on. So that’s a big element of the game, and also it does extend to the puzzle-solving. When you’re tracking down the thugs in a room, you use Detective Mode and it sort of tracks their heart rate and how nervous they are. And that allows you to make decisions on how you take them down. So it allows you to take particular people and alter your tactics, which is really kind of important. Detective for us, it means detective as in the traditional, but it also means thinking smart, thinking like Batman, as well.
Q: And then there’s also ass-kicking to be done, too, right?
Hill: Yeah, there’s a lot of ass-kicking to be done, definitely. We wanted to do something slightly different for the game, because it was … You get a lot of really complicated combat systems where you got to learn sort of twenty button presses in a particular way, and we really felt like that was … And also with the game, because you’re doing combat in kind of a staccato fashion. So you’ll play combat but then you’ll do so detective work, and then you’ll do some adventuring, and then you’ll do some navigation. We wanted a system that was quite simple to learn, but had a lot of depth, as well. The main buttons for the free flow combat are quite simple. You have strike, counter, stun, and dodge, and then you can throw in other things like the gadgets, like batarangs and batclaws. You’ve got a number of different things you can mix in, but the buttons are all very simple, and the real skill in the game is learning how to mix those buttons up and put that together. So you’ll see, and if you guys go and play the game, you’ll get some combos and early on it’s quite easy to beat up five or six guys. Some of the QA guys on the game, they can get 150-160 hit combos. So there’s a lot of depth to the game when you play it, as well.
Q: There’s never been a good Batman game before this, so there’s a stigma behind it. Did you feel like working on this was sort of an uphill battle to convince people that this one’s gonna be good?
Hill: I guess a number of people have said that. But for us it was sort of … because we were on it every day, and we’ve kind of worked on the game for about twenty-six months now, you kind of start to feel it out. I mean, that’s what you’re doing every day. You kind of have a vision that you want to stick to; you’re not so outside-influenced, like that doesn’t kind of really affect things. We kind of always wanted to make it a real celebration of Batman. A celebration of the Batman that we really love, and that was really important to us. So I think we sort of deliberately don’t look at all the games. I mean, for me as the director, I sort of would say, ‘Let’s not look at all the games,’ because you can kind of get a kind of bum stare off them. You can kind of get pushed in directions you don’t want to go, if you’re trying to avoid things that they’ve done. Sometimes the things that they’ve done haven’t worked for reasons which they could be successful again. I think the best answer to your question, it wasn’t something that really affected the way that we worked. We just said right from the start, ‘We’re gonna get all these elements in, and that’s gonna be our vision of Batman. We’re gonna be really passionate about it, and we hope that people are passionate about it, too, when they get to play it.’
Q: What were your inspirations with the character? What did you take from when you created this?
Hill: Yeah, I mean, obviously the fantastic thing for us is that the license is the comic book license, so there’s like seventy years of Batman history that we could really tap into. I think the Batman that we love, who you can kind of see in the game, is a little bit darker. Everyone sort of, I think, has part of Batman which they really enjoy, and obviously it appeals to kind of a younger audience, through a lot of the gadgets, and the cool cars and stuff. Also, I guess the older audience through the gadgets and the cool cars. [Laughs] But then also kind of a psychological edge and angle to the character. We obviously have quite a dark take on Batman, and we really enjoy stuff like the Frank Miller, classic Frank Miller comics … Serious House on Serious Earth. In terms of kind of tonality, as well, very kind of dark and twisted. And they really represent, as well, the kind of psychological torment. So it was kind of those things added together, but there was lots of different influences from different areas. It wasn’t just, ‘Okay, these comics.’ It was really our interpretation of all those things put together.
Girls Entertainment Network: You changed the look of Harley Quinn in the game, and you mentioned with the darker story you kind of get to do that. How did you play with the look and feel of her and the different characters?
Hill: She looks very different. Kind of the idea that we had was, what would she do if she was trapped in the asylum? How would she kind of pimp up her own outfit? So maybe she doesn’t have access fully to her normal outfit, so she’s gonna try to create this own look for herself by taking what she’s got and using different things in the asylum to kind of put it together to create this unique style. It was a character that we pushed a little bit more. We kind of wanted her to have a feel that obviously felt consistent with the other characters in the game, as well, and with our kind of very realistic, sort of styled universe. We wanted to be very authentic, as well, so we worked very closely with Paul as well on Harley Quinn. We showed the concepts that we had—working with Jim Lee’s Wildstorm, as well, on the concepts. And we constantly went back to Paul and said, ‘Is this okay? Because obviously as the kind of co-creator of Harley Quinn, are you happy with it?’ So it certainly wasn’t a decision we took lightly, but it was something that we really felt that, to sort of have a kind of consistency of tone with the rest of the game, we needed to sort of change her outfit a little bit. And she has a lot of things that she takes. So she walks around with a cane that she steals off the Warden, because she kind of takes on the role of the Warden, and she wears his name badge, as well. So she’s making her own kind of cheeky outfit, which is what we felt that she would do in the circumstances.
“But we can beef him up to how he really is in the kind of Jim Lee, sort of much tougher, stronger Batman, as he really is in comics.”
GEN: Do you mess around with the other characters a little bit?
Hill: Yeah, a little bit. I think Harley’s probably the biggest change. [Laughs] Harley’s probably the one that we changed the most. I think that Scarecrow, recently revealed a couple days ago, he kind of looks a bit different as well—very evil, our Scarecrow, very nasty. I think those are probably the two that had the biggest changes. I think Joker we wanted to keep very kind of authentic. Batman, I think, was interesting, as well, because we wanted to realize him in like his proper, kind of big, pinnacle of masculinity form, rather than the sort of toned down … maybe you see in the films, obviously they can’t use kind of real Batman, because they’ve got to use an actor. But we can beef him up to how he really is in the kind of Jim Lee, sort of much tougher, stronger Batman, as he really is in comics. He is a big guy, he’s at the peak of physical perfection.
Sefton Hill ended the roundtable by commenting on his inspiration for B:AA from a video game standpoint.
Hill: There was nothing specifically that we picked, but you’re always inspired by the stuff that inspires you. So I love like Metroid and Zelda, games where you really feel like you’re going on an epic journey. We really wanted that feeling for Batman. That there’s this epic, epic journey that you’re going on.
Missed our interviews with Kevin Conroy and Paul Dini? Check ‘em out, and remember—Batman: Arkham Asylum comes out for both the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 tomorrow, August 25.
August 24th, 2009 at 6:49 pm
Ok my anticipation is officially at a fever pitch.
August 24th, 2009 at 10:21 pm
All part of the plan, Jill.
Random tidbit: I didn’t realize it until later on, but when Hill refers to the one guy drinking from a hip flask “early on”—he really does mean early on. You can see him in the demo.