Our IGN First for August is WB Montreal’s highly anticipated Gotham Knights, an open-world action role-playing game set in a brand new Batman video game universe… in which Batman is dead. To kick off a month of new footage, interviews and news, we’re starting, fittingly, with the first 16 minutes of gameplay.
The footage (above) shows the first time you’ll take control of one of the knights, taking you through the basic controls and abilities for both combat and traversal. The game begins in the sparse surroundings of Gotham University, with the Knights following Batman’s last trail and searching for Dr. Kirk Langstrom (known to comic book fans as Batman). After finding out that he appears to have been killed before you arrived, you’ll have to investigate the crime scene and fight members of the Freaks gang who are ravaging the campus, emboldened by Batman’s death.
In the final game, you’ll be able to choose which superhero you want to play as in this section, but today we’re showing Batgirl’s version of the intro. Although the events in this section are the same for each knight, all four characters will have different dialogue and animations during this section.
Gotham Knights – Screenshots of the tutorial section
What’s interesting here is that even though this is the beginning of an RPG, none of the knights are meant to be weak – instead, all four have already mastered Batman’s crime-fighting style, and your progression through the game instead helps each person find their own their strengths beyond that (more on this development later this month).
“They’re already great early in the game,” explains creative director Patrick Redding. “It’s not a function of them being ineffective as crime fighters, quite the opposite. All of them have practically graduated from the Batman school of crime fighting. So when they start out, they’re the most similar, in the sense that they have a lot of these basic combat and stealth tools, and they move around in the world and use their grapple. And then really over the course of the game they completely veer off into their own flavor of what Gotham City’s Dark Knight should be.
What comes before this first gameplay section is much more of a mystery. WB Montreal has been extremely coy about the Gotham Knights prologue, refusing to say how and where Batman dies (and who is responsible). All we know is that his four protégés – Robin, Batgirl, Nightwing and Red Riding Hood – meet at his grave and decide to work together to solve the mystery that seems to have led to Batman’s death.
We’ll find out more when the game launches for PC, Xbox Series X/S, and PS5 on October 25. Before that, though, we’ll have all of August to show you new gameplay, in-depth information, and More ▼.
Joe Skrebels is IGN’s executive news editor. Follow him on Twitter. Do you have any advice for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please email newstips@ign.com.
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