How WB Montreal made Gotham Knights' cutscenes work for four playable heroes

gamedeveloper.com:

In Warner Bros. Montreal’s Gotham Knights, DC characters Nightwing, Robin, Batgirl, and Red Hood are the leads of the whole game. Across the game, the quartet of Batman disciples are placed in equal prominence in its story, which is a marked departure from the more recent Batman titles. 

Since players can choose between the four characters to do any mission, its story has to accommodate for this fact, both in terms of gameplay and its narrative presentation. At 2023’s Game Developer’s Conference, WB Montreal’s cinematics directors Wilson Mui talked about the techniques and challenges that came with realizing the game’s core concept, and how that was reflected across the game’s two types of stories.

Mui explained that WB Montreal realized during pre-production that it had to manage content efficiently without also sacrificing quality or content scope. He and the game’s narrative director Ann Lemay agreed on a collaborative process with the writing team for all of the game’s cinematics. “It was important that our group was on the same page in terms of tone, gameplay, and narrative needs,” he said. “Translating the work into a visual scene with the writers helped us iterate on the best possible script for our storyboards and actors to work with.”

Part of the cinematic process involved working towards capturing "the perfect take," which he described as the “best technical, audio, and artistic performance, including body and facial data.” Shooting those perfect takes with each of the four leads lightened the load for film management and outsourcing needs. But before those particular takes took place, Mui brought up how the cinematics team would do an “ugly but functional” first pass to identify what was missing or not working