Footage of Scrapped Batman Game That Turned Into Shadow of Mordor Emerges

gamerant.com:

A string of videos have surfaced online that show glimpses of a canceled Batman game, which was later transformed into 2014's Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor. The available footage shows some combat gameplay as well as traversal mechanics that would have appeared in the scrapped Batman title.

Warner Bros Games has released several games set in the Batman lore in the past 15 years or so, including the highly successful Arkham series from developer Rocksteady. But, there were seemingly some more such titles under the wraps that eventually didn't see the light of day. And, one such project was developer Monolith Productions' take on the Dark Knight, which was shelved and later turned into the highly acclaimed LOTR game Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor.

A recent, trending Twitter thread from user @Dageekydude has got the conversation about Monolith Productions' canceled Batman game, codenamed «Project Apollo,» going again. The posts, which have been compiled from a variety of sources including developer portfolios, reveal key aspects such as traversal, combat, use of gadgets, detective mode, minigames, and more. As can be seen in the footage, the binned Batman game has an easily noticeable Nolanverse influence with the Caped Crusader even donning a suit identical to that shown in The Dark Knight movie.

The tweet thread showed that the open world game would have featured a mix of gliding and using Batman's grappling hook to traverse a grim-looking Gotham City. Players were also intended to be able to navigate the city in a Batmobile inspired by The Dark Knight's Tumbler. A few clips also revealed that the game had a bunch of Arkham-esque gameplay features, such as combat and gadget skill trees, combat moves like the Glide Attack, and minigames like the one that requires the player to tune audio frequencies. Further, Project Apollo was expected to incorporate Shadow of Mordor's Nemesis System which allowed enemy AI to learn and improve based on past encounters with the