Gotham Knights Preview: The City, Its Villains, and Much More First

ign.com:

As part of our visit to Warner Bros. Games Montreal, we got to see a lot of Gotham Knights being played, but we weren’t able to go hands-on with the game ourselves. That makes a traditional preview a little difficult - without having had a controller in our hands, it’s hard to say how combat, working through missions, or making gear choices feels.

With that in mind this preview will be a little more structural - with the help of the game’s developers, we’ll walk you through how the game is put together, revealing brand new information about the open world, how supervillains fold into the fabric of the wider game, the game’s neat approach to a day-night cycle, and more.

As we’ve spoken about previously this month, Gotham Knights’ world is aiming to feel like a real city, with centuries of history behind it. Part and parcel with that is how truly open it is - the developers ensured that almost the entirety of their Gotham is open from the very beginning, with each of its five boroughs offering different traversal opportunities, different threats, different activities, and different characters.

But the team also wanted to create the sense of a city reacting to the presence of new vigilantes hitting the streets. Partly, that comes in how villains can physically change the city (more on that later), but it primarily comes down to something we haven’t seen much in gaming takes on Gotham - regular citizens. While the streets aren’t packed, Gotham’s regular folk certainly outnumber its criminals here - but they don’t necessarily see you as much better in the opening stages.

“I would say we start off the game in a pretty cold version of Gotham,” says game director Geoff Ellenor. “The police don't like you, the citizens don't like you