JUNE 24 (Reuters) — It’s won awards even before its release and now ‘Batman: Arkham Knight’ – the much-anticipated conclusion to the ‘Batman: Arkham’ game trilogy – is on sale.
The release was celebrated by its distributor Warner Bros Interactive Entertainment with an exhibition of Batman outfits designed by numerous celebrities and street artists, including director Noel Clarke, model Jodie Kidd and artists Zeus, Hayden Kays and Nancy Fouts.
They also offered press the opportunity to interview the games’ director Sefton Hill, who for the first time has utilized the capabilities of the next-gen consoles Playstation 4 and Xbox One.
However, the expanse of the game’s free-roaming city provided three years of work for Hill and his team.
“Every wall and texture and character and finger, hand – everything you see is been something designed by Rocksteady in the studio,” said Hill, adding “There’s no sets we can go to. Everything has been designed especially for this game so it’s an incredible challenge, it’s an incredible engineering challenge, it’s an incredible artistic challenge and I think the combination of all those things just make it such a fascinating industry to work in.”
The narrative of the game has been kept under wraps and Hill has even tried to persuade gamers on Twitter not to give away spoilers to the game.
“There are some great elements that we have just not promoted in any way, shape or form, so it’s a really exciting time to know that people will get to play it although it’s generally a slightly sad time because it’s the end of the trilogy for us but we can’t wait to see what everyone makes of it,” he said.
After winning the Best Action Game at game conference E3 in 2014 as well as Most Wanted award at the 2014 Golden Joystick Awards, the game postponed its release date from October 2014 to June 23, 2015.
“There’s a trend recently among a lot of big games that come out with a lot of bugs or technical issues and we wanted it to maintain that same overall level of quality that we set in the first two games and we were incredibly fortunate because Warner really backed that decision and said ‘look, we want to make sure it’s the send-off to this franchise that it really deserves to be’ so there was a delay but it’s definitely worth it so everybody gets to play it,” said Hill.
However, on Tuesday (June 23) the game’s PC version hit problems with players complaining about the frame rate.
Rocksteady and publisher Warner Bros Interactive Entertainment said the problem was being looked at.
“We’re aware that some users are reporting performance issues on PC,” Rocksteady tweeted. “We take this very seriously & we’re investigating.”
The game is the last in a series that began with “Batman: Arkham Asylum” in 2009 and was followed with “Batman: Arkham City” two years later.