T w e n t y S i d e d
Last week Chris and I went through the first two hours of Batman: Arkham Origins. You can watch the VOD here. Chris was playing, and I was running my mouth. It’s been a few years since I did this sort of thing, and it was a lot of fun.
You can also watch the show in the following embed, which I’ve placed below the fold because Twitch embeds insist on auto-playing:
EDIT: I figured out how to turn off autoplay, which should REALLY be off by default.
Back in 2013 I did a 5-part series on this game, which I hilariously called an “over-analysis”. Oh how far we’ve come.
I can’t believe how overstuffed this game is. Black Mask, Nigma, Joker, the assassins, and Bane, along with the entire hour-long Penguin detour, the Croc cameo, the side-plot with the police, and the drama between Batman and Alfred. Not to mention the boss fight against Deathstroke, which the game treats like a visit from the pope.
The writer jams in way too many plots, and then short-changes all of them further by having the Joker eat so much screen time. This game is nowhere near as bad as Rise of Skywalker, but it seems to be afflicted with the same panicked desperation. It doesn’t know what the audience wants, so it tries to give them a little of everything by lunging from one underbaked plot-point to the next.
Having said all that… I don’t dislike the game the way you might imagine from the previous two paragraphs. It has a few good moments, and I really enjoyed this snowy Gotham playground.
Chris emailed me this week, along with some further thoughts on the fight. I was going to write about it myself, but he perfectly covered everything I have to say about it:
At the start, he dodges all punches, dodges/leaps overhead, and cape stuns. He dodges/deflects Batarangs. The only move you can do is counter his attacks, or, it turns out, batclaw. The batclaw works over and over again until it doesn’t. Then he dodges that, too. It turns out, you can perform follow-up punches after some counters and after you batclaw him (when it works).
The obvious differentiation from Mr. Freeze is that all of Batman’s stealth abilities work at the start of Freeze’s fight. It is only as you progress that you have fewer tools at your disposal, and thus tests and encourages the player to make full use of Batman’s capabilities. Deathstroke starts out immediately able to avoid most of Batman’s moveset, and what works changes as the fight progresses. It doesn’t really test your powers of observation because his stance never changes to indicate when he’s vulnerable to what, and it still barely uses any of your tools or combat skills. It’s also really early in the game, so you don’t have a lot of tools or skills to use, period. It’s possible you can use the detonation gel, but I couldn’t recall the quickfire command to test it out.
Additionally, the quick-time portion of the fight where you have to button mash counter reflects a Deathstroke that is comically pounding away at Batman like a cartoon character rather than a skilled warrior.
So it’s not a very good fight in terms of game design, nor is it a very good display of Deathstroke’s supposed awesome skill. Like Boba Fett, his inclusion is loved simply because people love the character, regardless of whether he does anything in this game to earn that beloved reputation (which he doesn’t).
So… not an awesome fight.
Chris and I will be streaming again tonight at 7pm Eastern. This link should help you work out your local time if you’d like to catch the show.
Here is the link to Chris’ channel. Hope to see you there!
Overthinking Zombies
Let's ruin everyone's fun by listing all the ways in which zombies can't work, couldn't happen, and don't make sense.
Lost Laughs in Leisure Suit Larry
Why was this classic adventure game so funny in the 80's, and why did it stop being funny?
The Dumbest Cutscene
This is it. This is the dumbest cutscene ever created for a AAA game. It's so bad it's simultaneously hilarious and painful. This is "The Room" of video game cutscenes.
Autoblography
The story of me. If you're looking for a picture of what it was like growing up in the seventies, then this is for you.
Best. Plot Twist. Ever.
Few people remember BioWare's Jade Empire, but it had a unique setting and a really well-executed plot twist.
I watched the stream after it came out, and I really liked it! While I won’t be able to catch it live, I really hope this becomes a long-running series. Listening to you two over-analyze a game is a blast :D
Regarding the game itself, the only Arkham games I played were Asylum, City, and Knight. For what it’s worth, I liked Asylum the best, and thought that City was a bit overstuffed with villains. As a result, it felt kind of unfocused, and I gave up mid-way through the ninja-babes plotline. As for Arkham Knight…. the less said about it, the better :D
Still, it’s a very solid series of games, and one of the very few counter-based character action games where I actually enjoy the combat. I look forward to seeing the rest of Origins in your series.
Hey, that’s the section where *I* give up on Arkham City, too! Well, I beat it once – the first time – but every OTHER playthrough has stalled at the part with the mystic ninjas.
I get the impression that the Arkham games fell into the common trap of thinking that ‘sequels neeed to be bigger, better, more!’. Which, sure, I guess they do, but Asylum definitely has the best story because it’s simple, focused and straightforward.
In City, Batman bounces between villains and their plots in a disorienting, unfocussed way, going on a whistle-stop tour of various batman villains, for seemingly no other reason than ‘let’s put the Joker AND Penguin AND Two-Face AND Solomon Grundy AND Ras Al Ghul AND [insert other characters here] in the game, this time!’
Asylum is also my favorite, but I think one of the reasons is because Metroid and the original Resident Evil kind of define my ideal single-player games. Locking a player into a limited-scope location that requires learning the environment, finding all the keys to the different locks, and then replaying it only to further test your mastery of the location with new tricks and improved skill is my bread and butter. It’s why Castle Dimitrescu works so well in Resident Evil Village and why I’m already on my fourth playthrough of Metroid Dread.
So, Arkham Asylum works better for me because it’s closer to how those games operate by being a smaller world. However, you can also see the groundwork to expand into greater and greater open worlds since it’s still a sort of “hub” split up into several different buildings. So, the move to Arkham City was not surprising, and as far as a Batman game goes, it was sort of inevitable. After all, Batman is the hero of Gotham, right? At some point players are going to want to sour the city’s rooftops.
I can’t argue with any of your points about City, but it’s still my favorite of the series. Moving around the city feels so incredibly good. It’s the rare game where just getting to quest areas is every bit as entertaining, if not more so, as the quests themselves.
I agree with this gentlemen with the classic first name.
It’s a little hard for me to take Deathstroke seriously. For one thing, his full name is Deathstroke the Terminator, which is, as names go, several steps beyond trying too hard. He got his start in the comics as a Teen Titans villain, meaning that he’s supposed to be a credible threat to an entire team of superheroes, except he also sometimes loses solo fights to powerless vigilantes like Nightwing and Batman. I’m sure there’s a reasonable or what passes for reasonable in comics explanation for that, but it still seems weird to me.
In Arkham Origins, Deathstroke was the first big clue that I was not going to enjoy the boss fights. Even as a first-time Arkham player, I bumbled my way through the Killer Crock and Electrocutioner fights in one go. The Deathstroke fight took me several tries. I hated the quick-time events. I hated the fact that when the game finally deigned to allow me to fight him, I could only get a few punches in on Deathstroke before he became arbitrarily invincible again.
The boss fights were the most frustrating thing about Arkham Origins. It’s inexcusable for a game with a rich, complex combat system to put you in boss fights where the rich, complex combat system is essentially inapplicable. Deathstroke is basically anti-Batman. A fight against Deathstroke, therefore, should be one of those classic fight-against-a-guy-with-the-same-powers-as-you boss fights. Instead, it’s a joyless pattern-recognition exercise.
Incidentally, I want applaud Chris for the following:
Yes. Amen. Absolutely. Full marks plus bonus points for the extremely appropriate Boba Fett reference.
Why thank you!
Let me *partially* pushback. But most agree. Yes, Deathstroke is a big overdesigned, hence why Deadpool got made as a self-parody.
That said, he worked really well in his intended role as a foil for the Teen Titans. Those were younger characters, less powerful and less skilled than their adult counterparts, and he had a personal connection to the story. Additionally, DS by no means dominated their battles and had to use extensive trickery and every ounce of agility he could muster.
The problem is that Teen Titans not only doesn’t exist anymore, DC retconned things do much that it sort-of never did. Deathstroke is still a fan fave but has no real point except being Captain America, Mercenary Ninja edition.
He tends to just get chucked into various media as a filler bad guy with temporary plot relevance, as here.
Edit: Or that one time he casually defeated the Flash and Hreen Lantern alongside several other League heavies, which was… not well received.
My favorite part about the original Teen Titans vs. Deathstroke series was when Beast Boy went rogue to go personally murder him in revenge. Deathstroke was kind of over the whole thing (even in comic, he was tired of repeatedly dealing with a bunch of teenagers), and said, “Sure, you want to cold-blooded murder me? Go ahead. I’ll just stand here.” When Beast Boy couldn’t do it, Deathstroke took him out for coffee to explain the birds and bees of being a darkhearted edgelord to convince him it was better not to be.
I figured it was something like that.
If you do the math, people who were watching Teen Titans in the early 2000s (IE me) would be right in this game’s target audience*. He was also on Arrow right about the time this game came out, and that was very well-received, though they were making the game and the show at the same time.
It’s interesting how Slade was this mysterious cipher in TT, and a main character with a detailed backstory in Arrow, and both were popular.
And frankly, “Slade” is a lot less tryhard than “Deathstroke”.
* This is also, I suspect, why Cyborg kept showing up in Justice League animated adaptations and the comic around that time. Especially if DC wanted a black hero on the team. Why not go with the biggest-name one they have?
Batman could totally take down the entire Teen Titans team.
Batman could take down God, the question of who would win in a superhero fight is usually resolved by asking who the writer/audience likes more.
Hey man, I can assure you that 9 out of 10 twelve-year-old boys think ‘Deathstroke the Terminator’ is a totally badass name!
To be fair, originally in the early 80s he was more or less just “The Terminator.” You can see why that quickly got downplayed and shifted around.
Makes me think of the joke from Strip Search. “Does the T. stand for… The?”
The thing about Arkham’s combat system is that it really needs a group to bring out its depth. It’s a game about managing threats, where each individual enemy is very simple – when they attack, you either dodge or counter – but the complexity comes from how you have to respond to multiple enemies at once and choose the best response each time.
That’s why the boss fights are generally either “human-sized villain and a bunch of friends,” so you can have a standard Arkham melee fight, or “superpowered villain with big AoEs that you have to evade until you make them vulnerable,” which similarly tests your ability to dodge and use gadgets under pressure. “Fight one human-sized opponent without superpowers” removes a lot of ways the game adds depth, because Batman really only has one way to respond to a human-sized enemy hitting him – the counter button. So when you introduce an enemy whose gimmick is “he’s a martial artist like you,” the lazy way to implement that is “he counterattacks like you do, and you have to counter him harder.”
Probably the way I’d do it is to give Deathstroke different stances where he’s vulnerable to different gadgets. Like, if he comes at you with his staff then you just counter him, if he keeps his distance you use batarangs, if he pulls out his gun you use the batclaw to grab it. That way it’s less of a linear path and more like the superpowered enemies where the goal is to use your gadgets to make them vulnerable. (Except I think that Deathstroke is pretty early in the game and you don’t have that many gadgets? Not sure what to do there.)
I think you’re on the right track. Deathstroke should appear near the end of the game, after the player has unlocked a wide variety of abilities and been exposed to all the enemy types. He should attack in a variety of ways (sword, staff, gun, grenades, and, yes, even kicks and punches) that require the player to respond in a variety of ways. I think that the important thing is he should attack like a normal human opponent because, general toughness and poorly-defined regeneration power aside, that’s what he is.
Fighting Deathstroke should be more like fighting Copperhead or Shiva–the two best non-Predator boss battles in the game, in my opinion–than fighting a monstrous boss like Bane or a flying boss like Firefly. When Deathstroke punches, the proper response is to counter. When he swings a sword, the proper response is to press whatever it is you normally press when somebody swings a sword at you. (It’s been a while. I forget what that is.) When he pulls a gun, you slide tackle him or hit him with a gadget. When he throws a grenade, you jump out of the way.
I think Deathstroke should also be able to counter Batman’s attacks. There are already non-boss enemies in the game that can do this to a certain extent. The thing that would make Deathstroke tough, besides the big, boss-sized helping of hit points and the aforementioned wide variety of attacks, would be the requirement that the player mix up his attacks. If the player does the same thing too often or too predictably, Deathstroke should begin to counter it. The idea should be to both test the player’s mastery of the game’s combat system and to give the player some idea of what games’ enemies presumably feel like when they have to fight Batman.
I think the point in the video where where you complained about “how the hell do the Penguin’s customer go into his casino” is actually when you get off the customer track. Notice how at that point you go through a door with a “Restricted are. Keep out!” sign.
I think the implication is that the normal casino entrance is locked off when you get there, so you need to go through the service tunnels (which are flooding, because Penguin’s ship was already breaking down when he bought it, which I think is mentioned in the mook chatter) instead.
I think the level design isn’t too bad at communicating that, actually. Like, there’s a clear distinction between the visitor area, with red carpets and big “For sale” signs and the bank-like shop setup; and the private areas, which are regular warship corridors.
But why is it on fire?
Also, that is absolutely a health and safety hazard! And none of those mooks are wearing any safety equipment! OSHA definitely won’t be happy!
And is it sinking or merely flooded and run aground?
I like Deathstroke better as Deadpool, once the creatives at Marvel got around to making him more than a straight rip of the former.
Arkham Origin had a lot of charm in some area, but what really bugged me was the immense downgrade in traversal. In the other Arkham, if a wall seemed climbable or a pit seemed jumpable, it was, and if it wasn’t you realized it was your fault. In Origin we’re back to any other platformer where the protagonist just uselessly jumps grinding against a wall without having the idea to spread their arm to catch the ledge. At least it made me appreciate the design of the other games even more.
I think a major mistake the game made was not having some better justification for why you are restricted to a small area and why every NPC you encounter in this open world is an automatically hostile mook.
City’s premise is ridiculous but works in a comic book kind of way and you can believe it in that regard that you are inside a walled off section of Gotham packed with violent criminals and you aren’t going to leave until its sorted.
Knight basically pulls it off too by essentially making the city an occupied warzone where the only people who haven’t fled are the Arkham Knight’s militia and whatever violent opportunists want to exploit the chaos.
Asylum is just restricted to the titular Arkham Asylum in the middle of a break out so that works as essentially the whole place is a prison.
Origins best justification is that there’s a blizzard warning. It doesn’t really explain very well why Batman can’t go out of bounds and why the city’s still so packed with violent criminals who’ll smash your head in.
Having just replayed Asylum and City, as least Batman is smarter in Origins. Not by much, but I forgot how stupid Batman is in City. Like, beyond dumb.
That was the thing that made me really hate City. Almost every single villain gets a sucker punch off on him when they first meet. It was so consistent that I made a drinking game out of it and started looking for the sucker punch moment in each scene. Some of them were trivial, some grew into a cancerous plot detour that swallowed half the game’s runtime. The cutscene incompetence was all the more frustrating for the fact that Asylum got it right and managed to make Batman actually competent when you’re not controlling him (which shouldn’t be a major point of praise, but somehow is given the state of the industry).
Re: The Avengers and souring you on Guardians of the Galaxy –
Recently The Avengers showed up on Game Pass. At first I thought this was a “precursor to becoming F2P” (and that may still be the case) but then I realized later that it may also have been to draw attention to Guardians of the Galaxy. But the effect it had on me was to remind me that those games were made by the same people, and I skipped GotG in part because of that.
Technically they aren’t. While Square Enix published both, Guardians of the Galaxy was Eidos Montreal, not Crystal Dynamics. Eidos Montreal is responsible for the two recent Deus Ex games and Shadow of the Tomb Raider.
Which, depending on your tastes, may not exactly make for the best case. Despite really liking the Tomb Raider reboot and Rise, I was not at all pleased with Shadow of the Tomb Raider. I haven’t really played either Deus Ex game, but I know the sequel had a lot of backlash.
I’m nearing the end of Guardians of the Galaxy, though, and I can, without a single doubt in my mind, say that this is a far better game than Avengers. I say that because this is a far better game than most recent major Western AAA games I’ve played, period. I’m consistently shocked at how much I’m enjoying this game. I never enjoy major AAA Western releases this much. I’m still waiting for the other shoe to drop.
I’m probably over-hyping the game, it’s still like, 8 out of 10 maybe, but considering how I feel about similarly hyped games like Horizon: Zero Dawn, Control, or Star Wars: Jedi: Fallen Order, that’s still high praise from me.
Ah, that’s good to hear. I’ll update to “maybe if it’s on sale”.
Horizon: Zero Dawn is great on the basis of its soundtrack alone. That it comes with a game is just gravy. Those drums…. So good.
Shamus, you should be able to put autoplay=off in the embed’s parameters so that the video doesn’t autoplay. I had to do that for my own website because, for whatever reason, Twitch doesn’t realize that most people don’t just want embedded videos to automatically start up when you load a page.
Unfortunately now it seems you have the unfortunate issue of it layering an embed on top of another embed. I tried to run Inspect in Chrome and unfortunately I have no clue why it looks like that.
Clearly, Twitch needs to work on making its embeds as painless as YouTube has managed.
Another fun thing: after the video finishes, it has a countdown to when it will start autoplaying the next video.
And I do mean will; there’s no button to disable it or stop the timer. You’re getting another video or you’re closing the page.
I was listening more than watching, but I tuned in for 2:10:35, in which Batman grabs a metal pipe out of his enemy’s hand, slams it down across his knee, and utterly fails to break the pipe, only to toss it aside and play it off. Like, damn, man, that must have been both painful and embarrassing.
He does break it. It’s only a split second, but you can see the two pieces separate.
It’s easy to miss, though, since it’s only visible for like half a second at the very bottom corner of the screen, and the pieces stay in a straight line as they separate, rather than tumbling at angles like you’d expect..
God, how I hate the Deathstroke fight. I hate it with a passion, and I hate it even more because so many people literally call it “one of the best boss fights in videogame history”. I mean… WHY? Are they all watching someone play it but not playing it themselves? Are they all just remembering the FMV fight that was used to promote the game? The actual fight has no player agency. You can’t do what you want in the fight. You can’t try different strategies or approaches. You can only do what you’re told and when you’re told. It makes Batman look like a useless buffoon.
Some people claim this makes Deathstroke look like a badass, but I have to put a hard disagree on that. The fact that you win the fight by mindless repetition of the exact same set of attacks makes him look like a complete and utter moron, since he fails to adapt to the exact same moves you’ve been pulling on him since the start.
Imagine a guy shows up to fight you with a set of power armor covering every part of his body except his crotch. So you kick him in the nuts half a dozen times until he falls because every single time he completely and utterly refuses to use one of his hands to cover this exposed area. Do you consider him a worthy opponent or a bumbling, blistering idiot?
Reminds me of a friend that sent me a Reddit link daring others to name anyone that has “voiced more iconic characters than her” just to get me frothing. In most of Ashley’s roles I feel like she’s milquetoast, and in all other roles she’s either annoying or doing an expert job portraying a character I strongly dislike. I’ve learned that this sort of hyperbolic love of something is just part of the Internet.
It’s a shame though, because it feels like Deathstroke should have maybe been the last bounty hunter you fought. Tease him up a bit, have Batman notice someone watching his fights with the other hunters so that, by the end, you have a full suite of moves and Deathstroke is able to do more. He’s observed Batman, learned his fighting style, but also learned his “weaknesses”. This is so early on that it’s like… really? This is it? This is what you’re doing with this character?
Ah well. Maybe he’ll show up in Gotham Knights and now we can simply RPG damage him to death.
I know what you mean but its hard to do that since you are essentially describing what the game does with Bane. And Bane has the advantage of being a far more Batman-specific enemy than Deathstroke.
I’m must be in the wrong parts of the internet, because I’ve never seen anyone claim this was even a good bossfight, much less one of the best of all time.
Not saying you’re wrong, it’s just… it’s such a bad bossfight that this idea feels surreal. It’s like hearing a story from a parallel universe.
I remember hating this bossfight so much. I had to look up a guide because the way it works is so counter intuitive to the way the Arkham games play. And once I knew how it worked it went 180 from being so frustrating it almost made me quit the whole game, to so basic & rote that it wasn’t even a fight at all, just a time wasting paint-by-numbers button sequence. It’s like Deathstroke himself was just the QTE ending cuscene for the actual bossfight: the devs.
Alas, I’m going to be working during all these streams, but I’m glad to have the VOD’s at least.
I just watched the second stream, and it was a blast!
I’ve made some annotations for it:
00:04:08 – The stream starts
00:14:37 – Shamus’ audio is fixed
I’m posting them here, so that I can copy-paste them in next week’s stream article. Sorry for muddling this thread with unrelated info for next week, but my online note-taking app is already cluttered enough as it is :D
Youtube upload, please. Unless this is one of those VODs Twitch doesn’t delete?
These VODs are highlights and therefore do not get deleted.
Nonetheless, this is getting a surprising number of views so I’m considering putting it up on YouTube after all. Problem is, my channel has been silent for over a year and I’m not sure how current subscribers would take to a sudden change in content type. I am considering it, though.
Also, I download each VOD as backup in the event Twitch does go on deleting it, so I can upload to YouTube should such a thing occur.
You know, honestly, I’m surprised at the negativity towards the plot, I’d say that generally speaking Origins has a much tighter and overall well written story than City or Knight, which have much greater issues with the sloppiness and conflicting directions of the various characters.
I don’t find the assassins too much of a bugbear because I saw it as a simple enough way to justify having a bunch of powerful enemies for the player to confront at various points in story. In the same way that a game like Metal Gear will have a colorful cast of bosses where on an individual level they often don’t have too much screentime and could probably be written out fairly easily if you wanted, but they have a big setpiece showdown along with some cutscenes then you move onto the next one, its really all you need and its a formula that works. I have major gripes with City for feeling like they were crudely jamming in major characters in the Batman universe because they knew they’d offer a good boss fight, but did not do a good job writing the plot around that so you have strange things like Ra’s Al Ghul just sort of having out underneath Gotham city, or Mister Freeze suddenly trying to kill you for very badly justified reasons, or Clayface randomly having been impersonating the Joker with little explanation for why he’s doing that.
In Origins its simpler, Deathstroke and Copperhead and the rest are here because they’ve hired to kill Batman, it doesn’t require a bunch of contortions in the plot to justify this in the way the other games do, you have straightforward and easily understandable reasons why this is going on, so you regularly confront colorful, comic book bad guys in a boss line up in a way that makes reasonable amount of sense in the plot and hews to kind of pacing that works best for most games. I don’t think somebody like Firefly needed to be anything more in the game than what they present him as, I didn’t really perceive the overall assassin plot as some missed opportunity, except maybe for Deadshot who should have had a more bombastic fight instead of the side show they pawn him off into. I dunno it just seemed reasonable and efficient for what I would want if I want to see a batman game justify its boss fights. Of course there’s a lot to critique in the actual fights themselves mechanically, personally I don’t see why people rave over the Deathstroke fight that much, but overall I think Origins had a much better grasp in making a satisfying boss fight than the other games in the series using the mechanics they have with the notable exception of Mister Freeze in City. Just generally speaking when I play something involving a character like Batman, especially if its a big open world game like this I’d kind of expect that they work in a large amount of Batman’s rogue’s gallery and I’ve always enjoyed confronting the various bad guys in either side content or the main story, and I think that Origins has a better justification than most.
As for the Joker twist, well, I was replaying the Arkham series not too long ago and I find myself wondering if, in a hypothetical world where there was no other Arkham games and maybe the Joker wasn’t so overexposed in general, how well it would have gone down. I think its actually a pretty good Joker story in the sense that it introduces him with a twist (his impersonation of Black Mask), establishes a relationship with Batman and develops it quickly. I don’t think it really works in conflict with the Assassin’s plot since the Assassins were just hired by him so for most of the game they act as a boss squad he’s hired, and like I said in the previous paragraphs that seems reasonable enough for the kind of game this is. For me personally, I don’t care that much about Black Mask, I can see the argument for people who were probably hoping for something other than the Joker and maybe were excited for a lesser known villain to get the spotlight but generally what I’ve seen of Black Mask makes him seem bland, it was almost a better use for his character to end up being a red herring before revealing a more intense villain. Maybe Two-Face could have worked better in a villain role for an origin story like this than Black Mask, and in my opinion the Arkhamverse’s interpretation of Two-Face is one of their least engaging characters.
The only other thing is Bane, he ends up sharing the villain role with Joker. I don’t find I mind this overall but I suppose I can understand better why people find that to be an overstuffed element of the plot. Still, I think this is a far better version of Bane than any other I can think outside the comics, and in the game there’s a significant advantage over Arkham City where, unlike the Joker and Dr Strange plots in that game, the Joker and Bane plots come together better since at least Bane is in the employ of the Joker.
Agreed. Origins has the best plot out of all the Arkham games.
It’s a story with a clear beginning, middle and end. The only problem is that the beginning starts three hours into the game, with some filler in-between. The whole game would have been way, way tighter if Penguin’s ship had been cut, or relegated to side content.
Instead it should be Blackgate -> GCPD -> Murder scene -> Go to the bank for the Joker reveal. As it is, you just a get a ton of filler.
I like how they establish the Riddler’s character in this game. I felt like they good job of thinking backward from his characterization in the other Arkham games to show what he was like before his narcissistic obsession with Batman made him into a cartoon villain. And in showing just the spark that started that trash fire, rather than having his entire descent happen on-screen in one night.
I liked the batsuit. Or more precisely: this batsuit is basically exactly the batsuit I had wanted to see years earlier when Batman Begins came out. I remember being very disappointed when the first promo pics of the “Begins” batsuit dropped, and it was just another one-piece rubber suit, barely different from the Burton-Schumacher ones. At the time I remember wanting to see something I described to my friends as “like a full body version of the vest Wesley Snipes had in ‘Blade'”. The “Origins” batsuit was so EXACTLY that that it felt uncanny, even though by the time this game came out my preferences had moved on.
The one in the new Pattinson movie is… sort of along those lines too, but not nearly to the “reading my mind” degree that the “Origins” suit was. And I’m even more moved on from that aesthetic now than I was when Origins came out, so I don’t like it. It feels like an attempt to outdo Nolan at being “gritty and realistic” (or maybe an attempt to follow the Netfix Daredevil costume, despite how poorly received that was), and I thought we were done with that style for the time being.
Pattinson himself doesn’t feel right to me still. Too young looking (despite his real age) and slight of build. The shots of him with the cowl off with floppy black hair and racoon paint around his eyes make a fantastic case for him as Nightwing or Terry McGinnis though, IMO.
The justification I’ve read for the weird suit design progression in the Arkham games’ timeline is that young Batman (Origins) went heavy on the armor because he was just starting out and wanted as much protection as he could get. Then later, after he’d had more experience and knew what he actually needed (and what he could get away with), he dropped the heavy armor in favor of the athletic suit seen in Asylum and City (not spandex, but some kind of high-tech layered system that’s still tougher than regular clothes) so he could be less weighed down and more mobile. Later still (Knight), his tech improved to where he was able to make much lighter weight armor (with some powered enhancement to help), and thus get the best of both worlds.
I do remember the visual atmosphere in “Origins” being so relentlessly grey that it actually gave me SAD while playing it. The way I got through was by finding a mod that reskinned the batsuit as the Burton/Keaton “Returns” suit, which turned out to be PERFECT for the look of the city in this game (it REALLY looks/feels like “Returns” Gotham, and wearing the suit makes everything click into place). I highly recommend trying it.
Oh my god, Robert Pattinson as Terry McGinnis would have been amazing.
They could have cast Michael Keaton as Old Bruce too.
Watching the second ep/VOD right now, and I have to really recommend looking into what was going on with Shamus’s audio.
Someone told you early on that turning the gain down had made it better, and you guys took that to mean was fixed, but it wasn’t. It was only very slightly less bad: Shamus’s audio was peaking/blowing out really harshly throughout the whole stream. I had to turn the stream audio volume way down because it was hurting my ears (not loud, just really harsh). Give the VOD a watch, and you’ll hear how it sounds on our end.
Dunno where the problem was, but it’s worth investigating.
I plan on revisiting this in the future. I’m actually wondering how much of it is a Discord thing, as nearly everyone I have on Discord has gain up. However, it could just be that most folks have the mics turned up too high, or that they gotta adjust the system volume separate from Discord volume, etc. I’m lucky in that my mic has a gain dial right there.
What also doesn’t help is that none of my monitoring tools work, so I can’t compare how I sound next to them in my own headphones. I end up relying on what OBS is telling me the volume levels are on the peak meter, and even if I’m regularly maxing that red peak meter, it doesn’t necessarily mean I’m louder than my cohorts are. I might finally grab the Wave Link software so that I can separate all the audio sources, keeping Discord’s volume separate from game volume and so on (though I usually need to turn game volume down anyway so I can hear my companions), but it seems to be a problem with many layers. We’ll try to get things fixed before next stream. Sorry for the inconvenience.
What really sold Freeze as a credible villain is that he is posed as Batman’s tactical equal. Batman has a bunch of gadgets for offense and mobility? Freeze has a bunch of gadgets for defense and area denial. Both can use the same gadget in different ways (freeze gun and batarangs) to accomplish different tasks.