Why Gotham Knights Created an Older, Wiser, More Dangerous Harley Quinn
This isn’t the Harley Quinn you know.
As Gotham Knights creative director Patrick Redding puts it: “She is coming not from a place of, ‘Oh, I’ve got to be zany. I'm your manic pixie.’ She doesn't need to be the manic pixie anymore. She has gotten to a point where she knows who she is. She has a very clear sense of what her identity is, and she's going to present herself in this much stronger, developed supervillain way.”
Gotham Knights’ Harley Quinn is a very interesting case study in how to adapt a beloved comic book character. Her look, her voice, and her brand of villainy are immediately recognisable – but her story, and her reason to be is fundamentally altered. It came out of a general philosophy for villains that guided Warner Bros. Games Montréal throughout the design process:
“All of the villains that we've included in Gotham Knights were chosen for a few reasons,” explains Redding. “One, we knew we wanted recognizable members of the rogues gallery, but we also wanted specific villains who had an interesting relationship with Batman, where once you took Batman out of the picture, it would cause that character to question, ‘Well, what's my function now? In a world where I don't have my main nemesis, what do I do next?’”
Where for the likes of Mr. Freeze, that questioning seems to have led him to, well, just commit more bombastic crime, the story behind Gotham Knights’ Harley is more personal, and more interesting. For a start, the team chose to depict an older, wiser Harley than we’ve ever seen in a game before, one no longer led by others’ whims.
“We really did make a conscious choice of allowing her to be a slightly older version of Harley Quinn than we've seen elsewhere, and that informed a lot of choices,” says
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