Batman: Arkham City - Rocksteady's Lessons

Batman: Arkham City was one of the most accomplished games of last year; tightly scripted, crammed with cool moments, memorable characters and invigorating gameplay. Now, almost four months after its launch, the development team, led by Sefton Hill, look back at the game and figure out how they took a much-loved action hero and turned him into a game that was universally admired.

Hill says the development process comes down to five factors which Rocksteady Games will use in its future work.

The Arkham Recipe

In Batman: Arkham City, players began the game in the thick of the action and progressed through the game by exploring, solving and picking up new skills. Hill explains, "We wanted to offer instant fun and accessibility. Players don't need to earn the right to enjoy the game. It's our job to entertain them from the beginning. It's so important to draw them in from the beginning." Batman's free-flowing combat in the game's earliest sequences was soon "complemented by deep core mechanics. To reflect the effort the player was putting in, we add rewards." He went on, "We also add complementary design, a series of mechanisms that complement each other but don't step on each other's toes." These included puzzles, story and environmental exploration. "They don't replace one another but each has its place. A lot of games have a multi-faceted design so making sure they all work together is really important." He adds that creating characters that are "authentic" to the world they inhabit is essential. Giving Batman a gun, for example, might sound like an idea that would give players something extra, but it would ruin the game and compromise Batman's character. "You have to celebrate and explore the limitations of the character and really embrace that."

Psychic Powers

Hill says there is no point in trying to guess what the public wants or trying to please everyone, even when dealing with a franchise that evokes so many passions and opinions as Batman. "Trying to impress people for the sake of it is a negative way to create. You are only tying yourself in knots. If you are constantly worried about what other people are thinking you'll just end up making safe choices. "The person who knows best what the audience wants is you. We are the target audience. Our offices are stuffed full of people who buy games. You have to make the game that you want to play, and then the passion and pride that you feel will also be felt by the player."

Constantly Re-evaluate

Like all games, Batman had some great ideas and some not-so-great ideas. Hill says that the team decided to focus their efforts on getting the most out of the best things that the game had to offer. "You always have stand-out ideas and then you have some that everyone on the team understands are behind the competition. It's natural to focus your efforts on these weaknesses, plus they are in the design document so the publisher is expecting them. But if you focus your energy on improving the weakest areas you just end up with an average game, an 8/10. "Our strategy was to focus on the things that people were really going to enjoy, even at the expense of the weaker areas, which we could then be ruthless about [eliminating]. Focus on your strength, not your weaknesses. The features you don't do are just as important as the features that you do. "When you've got a strong feature, make it better, don't just sit on it. When you have a feature that is 9/10, that is when you start to push further, not when you stop."

Smart Foundations

Games can be or do anything that their designers want them to do. But the rules have to be consistent from the outset, otherwise the experience is compromised and the player becomes confused. Hill explains, "Players will accept whatever rules the developer decides upon, as long as the rules are smart and fun and fair. When we approached the problem of creating an open world in Arkham City we decided from the outset to create what we called 'the world's smallest open world game'. We figured that by going smaller it enabled us to fill every square foot of the game with hand-crafted content. We created a rule that made sure we were going to have to concentrate all our efforts on the things that really mattered to us. See how Portal is set in a series of test labs. It allows them to focus on creating the best puzzles.

Rapid Prototyping

In game development ideas only carry a limited amount of value. After all, every dude and his dog has a game idea sketched out on the back of a notepad somewhere. The real value is in ideas that demonstrably work. "It's so easy to be fooled by presentation," says Hill. "So when we presented a new idea in Batman, we pulled it apart and we got it into the game as quickly as possible. Gameplay needs to be implemented fast in order to see what works and what needs to be binned. If you are not quick then you'll have fewer iterations to improve upon and you final ideas won't be as good." He argues that ideas have "a life-force, an energy of their own" but that delays in executing ideas sap that energy. "When problems arrive, as they always do, you need that energy to smash through. Slow iteration is a killer because you lose that buzz. The shorter the gap between idea and iteration, the better the game."