Batman: Arkham Origins Blackgate will let players pick order of boss fights

While Batman is coming back to the consoles and PC in Arkham Origins, he will also be visiting handheld gaming system PlayStation Vita in Batman: Arkham Origins Blackgate. In an interview with Polygon , the game’s Director Mark Pacini told Polygon that it will be a relatively open-ended game. In fact, the simple decision of deciding which bosses to fight and which to ignore could vastly affect the last half hour of the game. This is undoubtedly an attempt to improve the game’s replayability.

Players can also decide which order to tackle bosses in. Since the game has a Metroidvania slant to it, the ability to choose boss fight orders could be easier or harder, depending on how much extra equipment Batman will have gathered by that point. “It’s more akin to how Mega Man used to do it,” Pacini said, “where if I get this item, then this boss is a lot easier.”

Metroidvania galore

To make sure that the game’s narrative doesn’t get lost in the chaos that will undoubtedly ensue when players are given the choice to pick the order of levels, Pacini has stated that the game will have a lot of “micro-stories” that will make the overall narrative make sense.

Through the game’s development, the developers were worried about both underscoping and overscoping it. “That was the thing we were trying to avoid specifically because it was on a handheld,” Pacini said. “We didn’t want to make it overly complex as well because we are missing two buttons that the console games have that we don’t. The challenge there was that we didn’t want to make the game overly complicated by forcing things into the game that didn’t necessarily need to be there.”

Batman: Arkham Origins Blackgate is set to be a PlayStation Vita-exclusive 2D sidescroller and will be hitting stores on October 25.