During the Summer Game Fest showcase on Friday, developer Camouflaj and publisher Oculus Studios debuted the official story trailer for Batman: Arkham Shadow. Revealed last month, Batman: Arkham Shadow is a new VR game developed exclusively for the Meta Quest.
As many predicted, it appears the Rat King will indeed serve as the game's main villain, although Camouflaj also revealed that players will experience "the origins of such iconic characters as The Scarecrow, Harley Quinn, and more."
The latest trailer doesn't reveal too much in terms of story spoilers, but does set a dark and brutal tone for the upcoming VR game, which Camouflaj will be a "full Arkham experience." The game's story is set roughly two years after the events of Batman: Arkham Origins.
It’s the Fourth of July, and Gotham City is under attack by a new threat: the mysterious Rat King and his cultish devotees. As widespread rioting engulfs the city, Batman races to prevent this so-called “Day of Wrath,” but it all goes wrong.
Experience Gotham City like never before in this immersive, full-length entry in the Arkham franchise.
Shortly after the story trailer's debut, IGN posted an article that provides more gameplay details for Batman: Arkham Shadow. Developed in Unity, Arkham Shadow will not be an open-world game like Arkham City or Arkham Knight, but instead draws inspiration from Arkham Asylum, Rocksteady's first Batan game, for its structure.
“Batman: Arkham Shadow is very much inspired by Arkham Asylum in terms of scope and scale in terms of also the structure of the game,” Payton told IGN. “It’s exploration, like you have in Asylum – which includes free-flow locomotion, so using the Grapnel gun to zip over onto things, and do the slide, go through vents. All those elements that you’d expect from an Arkham game; it's gonna be driven in in large part by the moment-to-moment combat."
Payton explained that when the team approached Warner Bros., they did so with a pitch to take all of the great gameplay and mechanics of Arkham Asylum and recreate it in virtual reality.
“[Our pitch to Warner Bros. was,] We're gonna take all of that and then we're gonna completely reimagine it for VR and make it work amazing for VR and actually have it feel like an evolution. So you still have that feeling of doing crowd control, but you're also getting interrupted with counters and you're making sure you're flowing into the counter and doing that. All in first-person, all in VR and making it feel that kind of bone-crushing Arkham combat. It's going to have boss battles just like all the other Arkham games have, [it'll have] investigations with Detective Mode. And we're also going to have big Arkham-like cinematics where you're going face-to-face in first-person as Batman with these kinds of hard-hitting moments. With these classic DC characters. So that was the pitch and that was almost four years ago, and here we are with the biggest game that Camouflaj has ever made, [and] longest game we've ever made. And Arkham Asylum is our North Star.”
Batman: Arkham Shadow is releasing exclusively on the Meta Quest 3 later this year. It's the first new game in the Batman Arkham series since 2016's Batman: Arkham VR, which was developed by Rocksteady Studios.