Virtual reality has one advantage over traditional flat-screen video games: it allows you to become someone else. And if there's one character everyone's fantasized about being at one point or another, it's Batman.
The Batman: Arkham games took an incredible swing at the fantasy, to the point where developer Rocksteady created the template for superhero games with the series. But now, with Batman: Arkham Shadow -- the latest VR game from Camouflaj -- players can stretch the cowl over their face and be the Bat.
Shadow owes a lot to Rocksteady's original Batman games. Set in Blackgate Penitentiary, it's a tight, focused game that borrows from metroidvanias to capture the feeling of Arkham Asylum in virtual reality.
In a sense, the game's title is literal -- Rocksteady's first Batman game was such a behemoth that this VR title, when it was announced, was almost suffocated by its shadow.
"It was quite hard for many members of my team when we announced the game on May 1 last year," Camouflaj studio founder Ryan Payton explained. "At first, it was a lot of excitement to see that there were millions of views of our trailer for Arkham Shadow, and then a lot of concern, anxiety, and fear when a lot of the comments were negative. We understood. We were bringing back this franchise that had been dormant for a long time. People wanted a new update, but many of them believed that it should have been a flat screen game for console or PC, and we heard them and understood them 100%, but it still didn't make it feel better."
While people still hope for another traditional Batman game, things have turned around for Arkham Shadow since its launch. It just needs to be played to be understood.
For Camouflaj, carrying the cape was as daunting a prospect as it was exciting. If it were any Batman game, the team could have gone for something ultra simple, like an escape room scenario that leans into Batman's detective side, but Arkham games come with expectations. At the top of the list is Batman's brutal, free-flowing combat.
When Meta called Camouflaj and asked them to pitch this prequel game which follows Arkham Origins, Payton didn't even think it was possible to translate the combat into VR and have it feel intuitive and comfortable.
"I remember wrapping up the phone call, walking over to the design pit with one of our design directors, Ryan Darcey, and I told him about the phone call, and he just looked at me like I was crazy," Payton remembered. "He said, 'Of course we could bring the Arkham combat to VR.' I famously suggested, sarcastically, 'What are you gonna do? As Batman, you're just gonna left stick move over to an enemy and start punching at him, and then left stick over, and then move to another enemy in VR?' And he said, 'No, Ryan, Batman doesn't walk across the room. Batman punches across the room.' And that was the key to unlock the whole design for what ended up being, surprisingly, one of the easiest things for us to develop on Arkham Shadow."
It works brilliantly. In the traditional Arkham games, Batman's fists are magnetized to every criminal's face. No matter how far away they are, a press of the attack button sees him hurtle across the battlefield, cape unfurled, to acrobatically strike them. It works the same in VR, except instead of pressing buttons, players throw out their fists to perform strikes, or pull up their arms to block incoming attacks. The team took four years to polish it, but now it shines.
VR presents its own design challenges, of course. With Arkham Shadow, Camouflaj accidentally created a new kind of ludonarrative dissonance -- a term usually used to describe games where you play as a good guy but murder hundreds of people. Here, you're playing as the Batman, almost superhuman in his fitness. But you are the controller, and players tend to get tired when throwing hundreds of punches or shadowboxing for ten hours straight. That meant pacing was more important than ever, making sure to break up large fights with exploration or puzzle solving, and so was how many enemies the developers threw at you.
"In general, we have about 20 percent fewer enemies than Arkham Asylum did, in large part because of the cognitive load that players would need to have," Payton said. "Post launch, one of the biggest requests we got from users was that they wanted combat challenges where there is no time limit. Typically, on the flat screen games, you could watch people on YouTube go for hours sometimes, but with Arkham Shadow, it was funny and amazing to watch people just go all in on their fitness regimen by playing one hour of endless combat challenge and trying to rack up points. You could hear them huffing and puffing and talking about how much of a workout it was."
Camouflaj has a history as a stealth game developer. Payton himself worked alongside Hideo Kojima on Metal Gear Solid 4. The studio's first game was a camera-hacking stealth game called République, where you manipulated the electronics and camera systems to move unseen through a space. The team was ready for the challenge of bringing the Arkham games' gargoyle-squatting, grate-hiding, wall-peeking stealth into VR. Thanks to the foundations laid by Rocksteady, the team already had a built-in tool to make sure players had all the visual information they needed in the form of Detective Mode, a high-tech vision augment in Batman's visor that highlights enemies through walls.
"I remember reading at the time that Rocksteady was displeased with how much time some players were spending in Detective Mode in Arkham Asylum, and they were [making] changes to the game's design as the series went on to try to reduce the amount of time that players were using and spending in it," Payton explained. "And when it came time for us to work on Arkham Shadow, I had that in the back of my mind as well. I didn't want it to be a tool that was overused by players. Based on [metrics], it seems like they've been using a fairly good mix of the real vision and Detective Vision, which is a relief."
It's impressive how well everything from the Arkham games translates over into Shadow and makes you feel like you're the Caped Crusader, even if you're fatigued. Thankfully, it's easy to put that into the back of your mind when you look down and see the gloves, the arm spikes and the gadgets tucked in your belt. VR is a medium that lets you embody a character unlike anything else. It would have been enough for Camouflaj to leave it at that. But a mid-game twist turns the whole thing on its head, forcing Batman (and you) to see things from a different perspective.
"I'm very theme-focused," Payton explained. "So very early on, I wanted to tell a story where Batman learned empathy, and that's what I approached Warner Bros. with. Thankfully, they were really excited about that. I was inspired by playing all the previous Arkham titles as homework to get up to speed, and one thing I was taken aback by was the lack of empathy from the early years Batman depicted in Arkham Origins -- I thought he, out of all the characters, had the most room for growth. That's one of the reasons why we called Roger Craig Smith to reprise his role as the younger Batman and tell a story where Batman and Bruce Wayne were forced to become somebody they detested only hours prior. In this world that we're living in right now, I thought it was really important to try to tell the story that leaned into the immersive nature of VR, where you become this person who has to take on a different perspective. We can maybe all learn from that, myself included."