No, Batman: Arkham Knight’s Stories Aren’t Broken
I’d rather play as Catwoman than save her from the Riddler.
She’s far more interesting than somber frenemy Batman, who reprises his monophonic persona in Batman: Arkham Knight. But save her you must in Rocksteady’s latest Bat-brawler, one convoluted puzzle and/or extreme sports feat at a time.
Must, that is, if you’re not distracted by other diversions.
Since Arkham Knight is an open-world game, untethering you from conventional environmental constraints, you can opt out of the Catwoman side story altogether, letting her languish in the Riddler’s psychopathic clutches while you gallivant around the game’s astonishing free-roam envisaging of Gotham City. Want to cruise the freeways in the Batmobile and rubberneck? Glide from perch to perch as witless thugs banter over your Bat-scanner? Clamber along rain-slick rooftops counting shingles for kicks? Go ahead, Catwoman will wait.
On its surface, the Riddler subplot poses as urgent. Catwoman is in mortal peril, held hostage by a homicidal maniac. But for all the game cares, you can go spend hours staring at your Bat-navel. You’ll elicit random threats from the Riddler if you leave Catwoman to twist, but he’s all talk. She’ll just existentially dangle forever in algorithmic oblivion: Schrödinger’s Catwoman.
Open world games habitually bluff like this, which can cause some players to pronounce this facet of the game genre to be “broken.” Open worlds undercut narrative momentum, goes the argument, because no matter the threat, every cackling enemy’s machinations or tick-tocking doomsday plan is still, in the end, synced to your mercurial timetable. Player agency throttles plot suspense.
That feeling of disconnect is as old as the open-world genre itself. Penny Arcade picked up on it in a classic strip parodying the seminal 1999 gameShenmue: “I will avenge my father’s death… right after I play with this kitten! And drink this soda! And play with these toys!”
I sympathize with the mindset, but it’s just not how I experience games likeArkham Knight, or Assassin’s Creed, or The Elder Scrolls. I have no trouble compartmentalizing story beats in an open-world game, for instance, or juggling the simultaneous emotional trajectories of disjointed stories. I can concentrate on saving hostages from imminent death, veer off and do something utterly quotidian like collecting Riddler trophies for hours, then retrain my gaze on the hostage dilemma, all without expending a blip of mental energy worrying that the latter’s only a dilemma when I’m focused on it.
Open-world games don’t unfurl on objective timescales. That’s a strength, not a weakness—a liberating virtue the medium can facilitate, not a limitation it needs to rectify.
Gotham City in Arkham Knight is a giant choose-your-own carnival ride, a carousel of potential activities, a vast hall of “City on the Edge of Forever”-ish portals you can leap into or back out of, triggering new or in-waiting experiences. It’s supposed to be asymmetric.
It’s also not so different from the way other mediums have worked for centuries.
Think about a novel’s interface. I can devour a novel start to finish in one sitting, work through it in chunks over days, weeks, or months, or even skip around—even, with a flick of my fingers, “spoil” the ending. Books have implicit rules of engagement, but few enforcement mechanisms—and indeed, we violate their “rules” all the time. Is that ability to screw with a book’s tacit interface an intrinsic flaw of the design of the book? Of course not.
Games, likewise, allow us to dance around in space-time. Like any medium, they require a measure of suspended disbelief. All of the creative mediums do, in one form of another. If a designer wants to take away your ability to freely roam in an open-world game, it can do that, although I’d argue that the genre’s design sins occur more at that end of the spectrum.
We’ve all experienced those moments of having our leisurely exploration interrupted by little pop-up wildfires that must be tended to at that moment. These are supposed to make the game’s world feel more dynamic, but they’re generally just irritating: Remember leaping free as a bird collecting collectibles in Assassin’s Creed Revelations, only to have the game constantly drag you away from your fun to go play a lengthy tower-defense game to keep the Templars out of one of your outposts? Or one of Grand Theft Auto IV‘s relentless cellphone nags who’d send you on all those punishing, checkpoint-scant missions? Note that later sequels got rid of these, and for very good reason.
By the same token, you don’t have to ignore the Catwoman subplot in Arkham Knight. You can race from one plot point to the next without goofing around if that’s important to you. What else would you have the game do? Execute Catwoman if you refuse to save her on a fixed timetable? Who’s to say how time works in games (much less our minds) anyway?
It’s possible that games, way, way down the road might be more semantically aware and adaptive and dynamically reconfigurable enough to eliminate this disconnect. But if you’re still shackled by assumptions about how narrative momentum ought to work in the open-world genre today, I submit you’re barking up the wrong medium.
