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Gotham Knights will not be a grindy games-as-service game, says WB Games Montreal

Recently, WB Games Montreal's creative director clarified a few details about Gotham Knights, including that the game would not be a level-gated games-as-service experience.

TJ Denzer

August 27, 2020 9:28 AM

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WB Games Montreal is set to take Batman universe video games in a pretty unique direction with Gotham Knights. Giving players a chance to explore an open-world city as one or several of the extended Bat Family sounds enticing, but it also sounds like a recipe for a co-op grind. Fortunately, Gotham Knights leads recently clarified that won’t be the case. Not only will the game not be games-as-service, but you can play solo and explore without fear of having to grind levels to reach an area of the city.

Gotham Knights Creative Director Patrick Redding and Senior Producer Fleur Marty spoke to various questions including the state of progression and exploration in the game in an interview with IGN on August 26, 2020. From the get-go, Fleur stressed that this won’t be an ongoing co-op experience in which content and events are added on the fly.

“This is very much not designed as a game-as-service,” Fleur told IGN. “There is an ability tree, which is different for each of the characters, and then there's gear that you craft - and so choices that you're going to be making - but that does not mean that this is a game-as-service.”

Redding would go on to further describe the design philosophies of Gotham Knights and the pitfalls the team is trying to avoid in designing a progressing co-op experience.

“It's true that, as you are getting more powerful in your progression, you're going to see a sliding scale in terms of not just the level of the enemies,” Redding explained. “But even some of the types of enemies that you're going to be coming up against. But it's not a grind, it's not a situation where you'll say, ‘Oh, God, I have to go grind this type of mission in order to level up to this, and then I can get this.’”

Redding and Fleur would go on to say that Gotham Knights could be played offline, as a solo experience, and one in which you don’t even have to change characters if you don’t want. With that in mind, it certainly seems like there will be plenty of fun in seeing how Robin, Nightwing, Red Hood, and Batgirl mesh in their combat and exploration.

Set to release sometime in 2021 on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One, stay tuned to Shacknews for all the latest details on what we can expect out of Gotham Knights. Don’t forget to check out the reveal of the game which appeared during the recent DC Fandome event as well.

TJ Denzer

Senior News Editor

TJ Denzer is a player and writer with a passion for games that has dominated a lifetime. He found his way to the Shacknews roster in late 2019 and has worked his way to Senior News Editor since. Between news coverage, he also aides notably in livestream projects like the indie game-focused Indie-licious, the Shacknews Stimulus Games, and the Shacknews Dump. You can reach him at tj.denzer@shacknews.com and also find him on Twitter @JohnnyChugs.