The Mystery of Rocksteady's Batman: Arkham City Demo
Well, this Hugo Strange guy appears to be totally well-adjusted and normal.
When it comes to games that have been recently shown to the assembled press over the past few of weeks, two games are battling it out for the top topic of discussion: Battlefield 3 and Batman: Arkham City. BF3 was shown off at an event during the Game Developers Conference last week, and the Batman demo made its first appearance at a Microsoft event the week before that. I caught the demo there, and was pretty impressed... so much so that we went back to see the demo a second time during GDC (and shoot an interview that you'll see in a few days).
Along with that interview, you'll get a bit about the last bits of the GDC week demo, which weren't shown last week and I've apparently signed away my ability to talk to you about the new bits until Friday. But let's talk about one of the more interesting "old" bits. In the demo, Batman has an exchange with Catwoman. He's just saved her from Two-Face and he's about to save her again from Joker, who's rigged up a sniper rifle in a nearby bell tower. But between those two attempts on her life, there's time for a brief interrogation.
Batman asks about what the Joker's up to and what role Hugo Strange is playing in all of this. But he also asks about something--and this is the part that is presented as backwards audio in the demo--called "Protocol 10." Catwoman claims she's never heard of it, but speculates that Strange, as the guy that's in charge of Arkham City, has something big planned for Batman... and that maybe that's what this Protocol 10 is all about.
What's it mean? It means that Warner and Rocksteady still have plenty of things to reveal about the particulars of Arkham City. That shouldn't surprise you, but I have to admit that I was a little surprised by this weird little quirk in their demo... it's definitely the first time I've seen anything like this, and it made for a fun little game for me and my rudimentary audio editing skills. Of course, "Protocol 10" doesn't seem to turn up anything related to Batman online, and the Comic Vine team had nothing to add, either, so it's safe to assume that this is something new for the game and not something directly plucked from the books. So I suppose the mystery is still a mystery?
We'll have more with Rocksteady's Dax Ginn on Friday.
Along with that interview, you'll get a bit about the last bits of the GDC week demo, which weren't shown last week and I've apparently signed away my ability to talk to you about the new bits until Friday. But let's talk about one of the more interesting "old" bits. In the demo, Batman has an exchange with Catwoman. He's just saved her from Two-Face and he's about to save her again from Joker, who's rigged up a sniper rifle in a nearby bell tower. But between those two attempts on her life, there's time for a brief interrogation.
Batman asks about what the Joker's up to and what role Hugo Strange is playing in all of this. But he also asks about something--and this is the part that is presented as backwards audio in the demo--called "Protocol 10." Catwoman claims she's never heard of it, but speculates that Strange, as the guy that's in charge of Arkham City, has something big planned for Batman... and that maybe that's what this Protocol 10 is all about.
What's it mean? It means that Warner and Rocksteady still have plenty of things to reveal about the particulars of Arkham City. That shouldn't surprise you, but I have to admit that I was a little surprised by this weird little quirk in their demo... it's definitely the first time I've seen anything like this, and it made for a fun little game for me and my rudimentary audio editing skills. Of course, "Protocol 10" doesn't seem to turn up anything related to Batman online, and the Comic Vine team had nothing to add, either, so it's safe to assume that this is something new for the game and not something directly plucked from the books. So I suppose the mystery is still a mystery?
We'll have more with Rocksteady's Dax Ginn on Friday.
