Batman: Arkham Knight

None of the assassins are particularly meaningful or important other than Bane (which is actually something that bothered me a bit about the game), with quite a few of them having no real presence in the game beyond the one time they're actually fought.

Swapping them around, thus, would be mostly about the level of challenge they represent than their presence in the plot - in that case Copperhead would be revamped slightly to have the same tutorial elements Deathstroke does, whereas Deathstroke would be ramped up a bit due to coming later in the plot and would be more of an outright test of all the player's ablities (which, admittedly, ended up being more or less Shiva's thing anyway)

I don't think that would really fix anything. Copperhead is the game's resident Mind Screw boss, and the Deathstroke fight is way too early in the game for that to be as effective as Scarecrow and Mad Hatter were in the previous two games.

The best solution would be to have Deathstroke escape your first fight with him and have another one nearer the end of the game. Possibly working in opposition to the Joker and Bane. Trying to finish the job he was hired for, even once Joker flips the script.

It's not meant to "fix" anything. But I agree with your second point.

Again, I was super surprised when it turned out the one fight we did have with him was the only fight with him in the game. It just... didn't feel that way during the fight itself.

edited 1st Mar '15 5:16:10 PM by KnownUnknown

I thought the idea was to fix the pacing by changing the order of assassins so that Deathstroke is the Climax Boss he's meant to be.

not related to the conversation at hand, but i found a funny comment on You Tube in regards to Scarecrow's speech in the "Gotham is Mine" trailer.

Does the Justice League even exist in the Arkhamverse?

Do non-Batfamily superheroes even exist in the Arkhamverse?

But... But then who do Captain Boomerang and Killer Frost fight when they're not in Gotham for the Suicide Squad?

Plus ambient chatter between criminals in Arkham City will reference "That Freak in Metropolis".

It's moreso that Batman attracts characters from different series, a good number of the enemies across the games are not Batman-specific. Solomon Grundy originated as an Alan Scott Green Lantern enemy and has moved on to be a wider DC enemy and Deathstroke is similar, against the Teen Titans. Deadshot is technically a Batman enemy, but like Ras Al Ghul is popular to migrate to the greater DCU.

edited 2nd Mar '15 2:25:14 PM by KJMackley

Which Justice League members would be able to deal with a large-scale chemical weapon like Scarecrow's though?

I imagine Superman would be able to, assuming the Fear Gas doesn't have to be laced with Kryptonite or something. But who else?

Green Lantern, maybe?

It's pretty interesting that DC is pushing Deathstroke as, essentially, the Anti-Batman in adaptations these days.

Red Tornado!

Nah Superman would be just as vulnerable to fear gas as anyone.

He is. He's been hit by the stuff and has suffered its effect.

As much as I hate Arrow, I do think they built up Deathstroke pretty well

edited 5th Mar '15 3:58:14 PM by stevebat

Ah yeah, Red Tornado could disperse that gas pretty easily.

I imagine Robotman wouldn't be affected either. Or the Metal Men.

Firestorm should be able to just reconfigurate the fear gas' molecules into something harmless. Flash might just run around the gas and compact it into a vortex through the atmosphere and into space before it even could affect him. That's the kind of insane crap the Flash is used to do.

edited 6th Mar '15 7:21:43 PM by NapoleonDeCheese

Robotman... that's an interesting question. He probably would ultimately be able to be affected by something that could manipulate emotions like that, since he has a normal human brain, but since he doesn't breathe normally it's possible Fear Gas wouldn't effect him - and even so it's unlikely that his mechanical lungs or whatever don't have filters for that sort of thing anyway.

Though an asshole enormous asshole, Niles Caulder is thorough.

edited 6th Mar '15 8:07:24 PM by KnownUnknown

Here we have the complete description of the ESRB rating:

So, looks like the rating indeed hinges largely on the overall escalation of violence; I assume the "shoot unarmed characters" part refers to the Harley Quinn and/or Red Hood DLC.

edited 7th Mar '15 12:22:01 PM by TAPETRVE

DLC is rated separately from the base game. That doesn't exclude the possibility that Harley is playable in the story anyway.

Looking at previews again, I'm getting less and less surprised at the M-rating. The first two games circumnavigated the issue of graphic violence almost entirely, and while it was done well for the most part, in some moments it felt very clumsy and almost sanitised, especially when characters were shot dead or otherwise killed on-screen. Looking at the Ace Chemicals foreman Batman saves in last year's E3 material, who has his face all bruised and cut up, I feel like they're generally going for a less restrained approach.

Gobshite? Is that some kind of foreign slang or something? o_o

"Gobshite" is a British thing. Irish, more precisely, but also made its way into UK slang. Means blowhard or smartass. You'll hear it from the Penguin.

edited 8th Mar '15 2:28:06 PM by TAPETRVE

Cinematic TV Spot for Batman: Arkham Knight.