<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"Batman: Arkham Knight is a sequel that follows the trend set by Arkham City, offering more of everything; a bigger city, an added mode of transport with the Batmobile and additional adversaries - all only on new hardware. Rocksteady Studios&amp;#039; brand marketing manager Daxx Ginn explained the decision to go next-gen only, what players can find within the expanded Gotham City and why Arkham Knight needed the new, titular villain. Was the decision to go for a larger city largely driven by new, better technology? &amp;quot;It was more by the Batmobile. We&amp;#039;re not really a technology studio, we&amp;#039;re a gameplay studio. The first decisions we made were all about, &amp;#039;what is the big new feature for the next game?&amp;#039; And then all the technology decisions really flowed from that. &amp;quot;Very early on, we were like - the Batmobile it is. That is the piece that we&amp;#039;ve never done, it&amp;#039;s piece we know fans want us to do, and it&amp;#039;s the piece we want to do, so let&amp;#039;s commit to that.  &amp;quot;What are the tech decisions we need to make in order to make that happen? A massive open world \u2013 you kinda need that, because the Batmobile moves so quickly, which means it&amp;#039;s got to be next-gen. &amp;quot;It seems obvious when you retro engineer it like that, but it wasn&amp;#039;t that clear cut at the time. It was just, &amp;#039;Batmobile!&amp;#039; That was our focus.&amp;quot; So it was a case of a few things that came together that fit in with your vision... &amp;quot;I should probably be sitting here saying, &amp;#039;We planned it all that out from day one&amp;#039;...&amp;quot; Well, I think that shows a real clarity from what you wanted from a sequel, right? The Batmobile. I believe it was teased in the first game. Was it always intended that you would reach this point? &amp;quot;I think we only started seriously thinking about [it] towards the end of the development of Arkham City, when we really started to think, &amp;#039;What are we doing next?&amp;#039; Our preview of Batman: Arkham Knight: Why fly when you can drive?  &amp;quot;We always sensed what the narrative arc was going to be, in terms of Batman and Joker and Arkham Asylum, and then Joker being the central piece of Arkham City, and then Scarecrow being the central piece of Arkham Knight. &amp;quot;But from a gameplay perspective, it&amp;#039;s more, what are we doing now, what are we doing next? Where is the evolution?&amp;quot; You&amp;#039;ve opened it out to the whole city, and there&amp;#039;s five distinct districts. Can you talk about the settings? I imagine we saw a small part of that city today. &amp;quot;The breakdown of districts is really driven by that desire to create a space where players feel very confident in where they are and where they&amp;#039;re going. &amp;quot;You need unique graphical identities, visual identities, because at any point you can eject and glide up to the skyline and look down on the entirety of the game world and make decisions about where you want to go. &amp;quot;Having very clear landmarks and a very clear visual identity in each of those districts is a really important part of that.&amp;quot;  How well do you use that vast amount of space? Is it open from the start, or are you pointed to different areas at different times? &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s not completely open from the beginning, it opens itself up to you as you progress through the game. That&amp;#039;s a structure that we had in Arkham Asylum and Arkham City as well. It&amp;#039;s something that allows gamers to feel like they&amp;#039;re part of a living, breathing world, but not so overwhelmed by the sheer size and complexity of it. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s generally how we approach the design of our games.&amp;quot; How do you retain the density that you had in the previous games in this bigger world? &amp;quot;A lot of that&amp;#039;s done through narrative. Irrespective of where you&amp;#039;re going, what you&amp;#039;re doing and which direction you&amp;#039;re travelling in, there&amp;#039;s always narrative elements that are coming at you through the surveillance systems. &amp;quot;At no point do you ever feel like you&amp;#039;re alone in an empty world. There are systems that we&amp;#039;ve integrated into Arkham Knight; the rioted that you saw on the streets, there&amp;#039;s procedural riots that kick off, that the behavior of the thugs within those riots is completely emergent. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s always a fight to get into, and a story to be engaged with.&amp;quot;  You&amp;#039;re introducing your own original character, the Arkham Knight. What was the decision to introduce this character that you guys have made, when Batman already has so many villains already out there? &amp;quot;All of the supervillans that Batman has encountered previously, they all fulfill a very particular role. They all reflect some aspect of his personality. &amp;quot;Batman&amp;#039;s intellect is reflected by The Riddler. Batman&amp;#039;s fate and destiny is reflected by Two Face. There&amp;#039;s these connections between him and all of these. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s kind of like being at a stag do, in that there&amp;#039;s the groom-to-be \u2013 and all of his friends \u2013 are little bits of him. That&amp;#039;s the experience that I&amp;#039;ve had at stag dos. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s the way Batman is with all of these villains. They all reflect him in some interesting way, but with the Arkham Knight, we want to create a character that would physically reflect Batman, that there would be a connection with him in terms of combat expertise and prowess. We haven&amp;#039;t had that previously. &amp;quot;That was the functional beginning of Arkham Knight as a character, and working with the guys at DC on visual and aesthetic design, to create a look that is reflective of that function, that&amp;#039;s just been such an awesome process to collaborate with those guys in character creation, because we&amp;#039;ve never been able to do that.&amp;quot;  Obviously you did collaborate with DC with the Batmobile as well. How was that process, that back and forth? Were you free to do what you wanted? &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;ve got an amazing amount of trust and faith from both Warner and DC. We could go for a quite a long time developing ideas, scrapping things that didn&amp;#039;t feel right to us and going again. &amp;quot;But the driving force has always been, &amp;#039;what&amp;#039;s the gameplay experience?&amp;#039; The look of the Batmobile is really driven by, what&amp;#039;s it got to do in-game? When we ask that question to ourselves, what does it do in-game, it smashes through things, it&amp;#039;s unstoppable. &amp;quot;The power fantasy of driving the Batmobile is being this wrecking ball in Gotham City. So the size of the wheels, the position of the wheels, the profile of the cockpit, all of those things need to be reflective of the power fantasy of that. &amp;quot;The look of the Batmobile is designed so that its behaviour feels natural. Also, it&amp;#039;s designed in reference to the Batmobile of Arkham Asylum as well, so there&amp;#039;s features of [that] Batmobile that are evolved and brought into the Arkham Knight Batmobile, which I think is really cool.&amp;quot;  When it came to developing on new consoles, how did you find working on this next gen? &amp;quot;I think everyone on the team has a particular experience of that. The challenges are different from everyone, whether it&amp;#039;s the engine team, the animation team, or the character team. &amp;quot;So across the board the shared experience has been, you can really go crazy, but as a team, we need to be responsible in terms of the decisions that we make. You can&amp;#039;t go insane on everything. You go insane on everything, something&amp;#039;s going to break. We needed to make very clear decisions about where we&amp;#039;re going to go crazy, and where we are going to keep our heads. &amp;quot;We go crazy where it&amp;#039;s important to go crazy, like the Batmobile itself. The polygon count on the Batmobile is just off the chart, and the size of the city is massive, the detail in the city is the same as what we&amp;#039;ve done previously. That&amp;#039;s an immense amount of work, and an immense amount of horsepower to bring that all to life. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s been fantastic being able to really stretch your legs, but at the same time, even though we&amp;#039;ve still a young team, we&amp;#039;ve been very responsible in making decisions where it&amp;#039;s important and not losing our heads where we&amp;#039;ve need to keep them.&amp;quot;  Have you found being an early next-gen developer, with Arkham Knight set to launch on Xbox One and PS4 around a year of their release? &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s certainly a situation we&amp;#039;ve never been in before. We&amp;#039;ve never been part of the first raft of releases, so that&amp;#039;s pretty exciting. We get a chance to define what this generation stands for. &amp;quot;As the generation goes on, and as the debate matures, we&amp;#039;ll have more and more to talk about and compare with other games. Going out early, it&amp;#039;s a really exciting opportunity. Was it a difficult decision to decide to go only next gen? &amp;quot;No, because we wanted to do the Batmobile. That was the overarching decision, creatively from Rocksteady, is that this game is all about the Batmobile. &amp;quot;It sits right at the heart, it&amp;#039;s the epicentre, it&amp;#039;s everything. It&amp;#039;s the relationship between man and machine \u2013 boom, that&amp;#039;s the game. Once we made the decision, the next-gen commitment is the obvious next step.&amp;quot; Batman: Arkham Knight will be available this year on PS4, Xbox One and PC. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.digitalspy.com/gaming/interviews/a560659/batman-arkham-knight-interview-rocksteady-on-crafting-a-bigger-world/>