Gametrailers

http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/c39xw5/batman--arkham-knight-gameplay-interview

play3-live

http://www.play3-live.com/news-ps4-batman-arkham-knight-nos-impressions-65578.html

Comics Blog

http://www.comicsblog.fr/19298-Batman__arkham_Knight_nos_premires_impressions

Metro preview

http://metro.co.uk/2014/03/27/batman-arkham-knight-rocksteady-interview-we-were-terrified-of-ending-up-with-a-driving-game-4679981/

Accompagné de l'interview avec Dax Ginn

NEW INTERVIEW WITH DAX GINN

As well as getting to watch 30 minutes of live gameplay footage from Batman: Arkham Knight we also got to speak to Rocksteady Studios’ brand marketing producer Dax Ginn. He’s been with the developer since the beginning and although he made it clear he wasn’t going to reveal any new characters or features he was able to talk in detail about the difficulties of adding the Batmobile to the Arkham series and why the game has so few civilians.

He also provided commentary for the demo and while talking about the games it was interesting to note he always referred to them as a trilogy, never once referencing last year’s Arkham Origins – which was not made by Rocksteady and was less well received compared to their first two titles.

But Arkham Knight is not just meant as a return to form but also to provide closure to the series and its storyline. And on top of that it’s one of the first major franchises to go next gen, with all the excitement and difficulties that entails…

GC: Well, I wish you’d managed to be a bit more enthusiastic about your own game [Ginn was the one doing all the shouting for the demo's live commentary].

DG: [laughs] Did I let you down?

GC: I’m a great fan of the first two games and also of Batman, or rather I should say The Animated Series.

DG: Right, so Kevin Conroy is meaningful to you.

GC: Kevin Conroy is Batman.

DG: Definitely.

GC: So I prepared some questions earlier and my first was going to be how will the Batmobile work without a large world to drive around in? But I guess the demo answered that already.

DG: [laugh] It’s about five times the size of the world we built for Arkham City, which makes it about 20 times bigger than what we had for Arkham Asylum.

GC: So when you say ‘city’ is the whole game world literally just the city streets? You don’t go off into the countryside or anything?

DG: No, it’s all an urban environment.

GC: So, the problem with the Batmobile is… it makes no sense. Why would a masked vigilante have a special car that makes it really obvious it’s him? Does Batman stop at traffic lights?

DG: [laughs]

GC: Clearly the reason he has it is because it’s cool. But in gameplay terms, after playing Arkham City, it still doesn’t seem necessary for moving around Gotham. Did you construct the story of Arkham Knight around the idea that you needed the streets to be more or less empty – or at least that it didn’t matter whatever you were running over?

DG: The fantasy of driving the Batmobile is, I think, of being unstoppable, of being a wrecking ball. So the evacuation of the city and Scarecrow’s chemical weapon threat is a narrative construct in order for us to achieve the gameplay objective that we’re driving towards. So really it was the decision to go for it with the Batmobile that drove a lot of technical and creative decisions.

GC: Is this using Unreal Engine 4?

DG: This is Unreal Engine 3, but with a load of bespoke code that we have written for lighting and physics and rendering…

GC: Because there was a lot of destructibility there but… I assume you’re not knocking down skyscrapers or anything. So what is the limit in terms of what you can drive through? A concrete wall seemed to be about as far as it went in the demo?

DG: If it looks like you should be able to smash through it you can. We wanted the players to instinctively have a sense of ‘That is somewhere I can go and that is somewhere where I can’t go’.

Batman: Arkham Knight - the actual Arkham Knight is an all-new foeBatman: Arkham Knight – the actual Arkham Knight is an all-new foe

GC: A lot of developers I talk to mention looking at other similar games to get their ideas, did you do that with Arkham Knight? You have no experience with driving games, but do you even feel this is a racing game when you’re in the Batmobile?

DG: Not really, no. The way that we have have coded the behaviour of the Batmobile, and thought about the Batmobile, is we used the same team that created Batman. So the core gameplay programmer that created Batman for Arkham Asylum and Arkham City, he’s the guy that’s working on the Batmobile. We didn’t want to just bring in a driving team because then we would’ve ended up with a Batman game that had a driving component; we wanted the two things to feel married.

We wanted that man and machine connection between the two of them. And actually we were terrified of ending up with a driving game, we wanted to make sure it felt like the Batmobile could’ve been there all along, in either Arkham Asylum or Arkham City, but we’ve only just now unveiled it.

GC: Were you not tempted to have a little grappling hook to catch lamp posts as you turn?

DG: [laughs]

GC: The previous games had skins for different incarnations of Batman, are you going to have that for the car as well? Because I know I’d pay for the 1989 Batmobile as DLC, probably a lot of the others too.

DG: It would be a fundamentally different shape at that point… but there’s no plans at the moment, no.

GC: In your preamble you were talking about the fantasy of being Batman, which I assume most red-bloodied males have had at some point in their life. But one of the power fantasises is saving innocent people; from muggings, bank heists and the like. But by having the city emptied of civilians you can’t really do that. Was that not a concern? That that was a really important thing that you still didn’t have in any of your games.

DG: Well, it’s something that we have done in the past. And something I agree is an important part of the fantasy of being a hero. So the evacuation does mean that the city has been taken over by gangs and thugs, but there are also innocent people left behind – whether they are police officers, like you saw in the demo, or just civilians from Gotham City. So we had elements of that in Arkham City as well, and I think it’s something we’ll continue to do…

GC: You certainly weren’t saving ordinary civilians going about their business in Arkham City, there were none. But is this something that needs the next next gen to work? Does having lots of civilians wandering around still require too much processing power?

DG: It would certainly be a fairly significant technical challenge, to build the level of detail we do into the architecture of the city and to have a living, breathing population. Yeah, that sounds pretty full-on.

GC: Both your previous games were well received but they are actually quite different, despite the similar mechanics. In fact many people prefer the more structured and focused nature of Asylum, so I wonder if Arkham Knight is an amalgam of the two styles or purely an evolution of City?

Dax Ginn - if nothing else he's got a really cool nameDax Ginn – if nothing else he’s got a really cool name

DG: I do think they’re two very different games, and when you say gamers prefer one or the other I can absolutely see why. I recently played Arkham Asylum again, and the kind of pressure cooker atmosphere is something that’s so unique to that game and going open world with Arkham City you loose the opportunity to really crank up the claustrophobia. But what you gain is a sense of freedom and an opportunity for exploration that you just don’t get in a game that’s structured in the way that Arkham Asylum was.

So Arkham Knight is certainly progressing along that trajectory, you can see it’s massively open world in that respect, but for us it’s still very important to tell a very classic Batman story. And the atmosphere that we had developed in Arkham Asylum, a lot of it was informed by the role of the Scarecrow as well. And Scarecrow wasn’t in City at all, so there really wasn’t the opportunity to explore a lot of the psychological elements that he brings; that are a big part of who Batman is and what makes Batman awesome.

So having Scarecrow back and as the centrepiece of the threat to Batman, I think fans of Arkham Asylum, they’re gonna get an opportunity to sort of explore Scarecrow again – which they didn’t in Arkham City.

GC: One of the few complaints that’s common to both games is that even though you had Paul Dini writing the script there still wasn’t much of a story. It was basically just an excuse to have Batman fight lots and lots of villains. Is that just an intractable problem of being an action video game, that the story is just a framework on which to hang the action rather than something that actually has a purpose in its own right?

DG: I think there’s always the spectre of the tragedy of his childhood that hangs over Batman all the time. And we had that moment in Crime Alley where you saw the death of his parents and where that was used to twist your perception of the moment.

But with a game world as big as Arkham Knight having… and no Batman experience is complete without a huge range of villains – but I think what gamers are going to find is that because the game world is just that much bigger, that there’s more room to breathe between those experiences. And Arkham City did feel claustrophobic in a way, in that there’s a lot coming at you all the time.

GC: You were talking about Batman’s detective skills but it’s very difficult to mix action gameplay with genuine puzzles. No developer wants to stop progress in an action game because you can’t figure out a logic puzzle, but then that means that the detective angle is always trivialised. Have you got a new approach to that in this game?

DG: Like all of the systems that we’ve developed over all three games I think the detective mode system sits alongside free flow combat and invisible predator as big chunks of gameplay style…

GC: But it’s more scene setting than actual gameplay though isn’t it? It’s more an elongated QTE sequence.

DG: Right, but in Arkham Knight you can… [seems to consider whether he can talk about something or not] There’s features that we haven’t really revealed yet… there’s more to talk about in the context of detective mode! [laughs]

GC: That’s all I’m really asking: is there a different approach? You don’t have to tell me what it is. That was something that Arkham Origins tried to focus on but you weren’t really doing anything, you were just following prompts and doing what the game told you to do. Is that an issue you feel you’ve solved with whatever it is you won’t tell me about?

DG: [laughs] It’s just so hard to get into any details on that at this stage… Let me just say we always evolve our systems.

GC: I mean it’s something I imagine you could just consider a write-off, that there’s no real way to do it in this type of game.

DG: Oh no, that was really the starting point for us with Arkham Asylum. It was, ‘How do we encourage people to be the World’s Greatest Detective?’ That was the birth of detective mode and the evolution of that has moved on.

Batman: Arkham Knight - the ultimate Batman game?Batman: Arkham Knight – the ultimate Batman game?

GC: Will there be daylight sequences in Arkham Knight?

DG: It’s always dark, and raining, and wet in Gotham City.

GC: Well, at least it’s not snowing again.

DG: [laughs] Yeah, right. Batman just looks so awesome in the dark, but in daytime… it just feels like that’s not his natural habit.

GC: No, but it is Bruce Wayne’s.

DG: …

GC: And so just finally the other big element of the game, as you suggested, is the combat. Which has a different problem in that it was pretty much perfect in the first two games. But that means you have a real risk of repetition this time around – especially as every man and his dog has been ripping off your combat for the last five years. What has changed this time round? The only obvious way to go is to make it more complicated and demand more skill of the player, but I’m pretty sure you don’t want to turn it into Bayonetta or something…

DG: The core design principles of the free flow combat system have remained, but adding new moves like the weapon steal and the environmental counters and throw counters… they’re obviously new moves but they’re designed with the objective in mind to make players feel more powerful, feel more in control. Because the threat is only escalating from the supervillains that you’re facing and the way in which they are banding together to take down Batman.

GC: Why do you feel the system works so well for Batman, but not when it’s copied in other games?

DG: Talking to Tim Hanagan, our lead combat programmer, that’s the beauty of it. It looks simple on the surface but what he’s done is incredibly complex, so the timing of his implementation is very, very precise. And the way in which he has constructed the movement of enemies, and the way in which enemies behave towards Batman – there’s eight years of development that’s gone into that. I think in order to feel right it needs to be implemented very specifically.

GC: I also think it needs to be Batman, like dealing with that size of a crowd makes much more sense in a comic book setting.

DG: And the more I fight the more enjoyable I find it, even though I’m incredibly familiar with the combat it never bores more.

GC: Yeah, compared to something like Assassin’s Creed… I’m bored by the second fight. I’m just not using any skill to beat these guys.

DG: [laughs]

[At this point we're being ushered out of the door by the PR guy]

GC: So, err.. you’re obviously not going to confirm or deny any of the big villains. But is Killer Moth or Crazy Quilt in this one?

DG: [laughs]

GC: If you don’t answer that I’m going to assume they’ve not been ruled out.

DG: I can’t…

GC: So what you’re saying is there’s still a chance?

DG: [laughs]

GC: Don’t worry, that’s great. Thanks for your time.

DG: Thank you.

Jeuxvideo24 preview

http://www.jeuxvideo24.com/news-xone-preview---batman-arkham-knight_45167.html

Les Impressions de Gamergen

http://www.gamergen.com/actualites/batman-arkham-knight-rocksteady-warner-bros-preview-impressions-zoom-apercu-198292-1

OMFG

Au fait maintenant que l'on voit mieux l'Arkham Knight, on voit qu'il a un lien avec les soldats en tenue militaire rouge car ils ont le même symbole Arkham sur l'épaule, donc c'est leur chef logiquement

D'autres previews

http://www.polygon.com/2014/3/27/5551328/batman-arkham-knight-preview-batmobile

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-03-27-batman-arkham-knight-preview

http://kotaku.com/a-very-excited-man-tells-us-all-about-batman-arkham-kn-1552582785?utm_campaign=Socialflow_Kotaku_Twitter&utm_source=Kotaku_Twitter&utm_medium=Socialflow

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2014/03/27/arkham-knight-building-the-ultimate-batmobile-on-ps4/

Une preview en vidéo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=LmdsMuJ8sRM

Ces previews m'inquiètent un peu quand même. L'ensemble des journalistes se posent des questions sur la qualité du titre... Fais chier...

Qualité graphique à cause de l'aliasing et du framerate ?

Preview JVFR

http://www.jeuxvideo.fr/jeux/batman-arkham-knight/preview-test-batman-arkham-knight.html

Intéressant toutes ces news, super classe AK

Ces previews m'inquiète un peu aussi , mais bon on a pas encor vue du gameplay

Apparemment la profondeur de champ et la Batmobile impressionnent le plus.

@pedro
normal j'ai envie de dire, ils y voient qu'un arkham city bis
et on peut pas les blâmer sur le peu qu'ils ont vue (le trailer + sequence batmobile)
de l'autre coté si ils n'ont pas vu grand chose, de grosse surprise sont en réserve

donc il est trop tot pour juger
de plus la date de sortie n'as tjrs pas été confirmer

Y'en a aussi qui se questionnent sur la réelle utilité de la Batmobile. Mais bon franchement je me fais pas de soucis, c'est qu'une première présentation, ils ont encore largement le temps de peaufiner tout ça.