Arkham Shadow Director Teases Future Updates and Story Developments

Major story spoilers ahead for
Batman: Arkham Shadow
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Batman: Arkham Shadow has endless moving parts and each nook and cranny of its storytelling has golden nuggets to observe and participate in, especially concerning how certain characters or events relate to other Arkham games. Before launch, Batman: Arkham Shadow successfully obscured the fact that Bruce Wayne would wear a costume other than the Batsuit, and characters such as Dr. Harleen Quinzel, Dr. Jonathan Crane, and District Attorney Harvey Dent were focal points in pre-release marketing that hide Joe Chill in plain sight.

There are questions Batman: Arkham Shadow purposefully leaves unanswered, even if speculation and theories are rampant. Indeed, with Batman: Arkham Shadow having been released and its multifaceted story now out in the wild, Game Rant spoke with Camouflaj’s head of studio and game director Ryan Payton about some particularly spoiler-filled narrative beats as well as what additional content players can expect in the near future. The following interview was edited for brevity and clarity.

The Reasoning Behind Batman: Arkham Shadow’s Biggest Story Moments

Q: We should start with what I think was the boldest and most potentially polarizing decision made, which is Malone. I remember asking back at the preview event, “Are there any other POVs we see through other than Bruce’s?” You said no, it would just be Bruce Wayne, and you’re not lying—that’s technically true. Still, it’s so interesting because I’ve since started to compartmentalize Bruce, Batman, and Irving “Matches” Malone as three separate characters. I was wondering if that’s the idea you had in mind for the game.

Payton: The triumvirate of Batman, Bruce, and Matches. The idea early on was we wanted to play with the theme of identity. One of the things I think is most fascinating about Batman is, “Who’s the real, true character?” Is it Bruce Wayne or is it Batman?

We thought this would be a fun area to explore and, without revealing too much of the secret sauce, the game is called Arkham Shadow for a reason; it’s not so much about the technology of being able to see one’s own shadow or the other shadow-related elements in the game, it’s just exploring the idea of one’s shadow from a Jungian perspective. We thought that Matches would be a very interesting persona for Bruce to explore and be somebody different, and become a type of person that he typically looks down upon, especially early on in his career.

So much, I think, of a good character arc or a good hero’s journey is that the hero has to go into an area that they’re uncomfortable with and that they have to learn from other people that they may have had a lot of bias or prejudice against initially, and they come out the other side wiser and stronger. For us, in our game, Matches was the vehicle to do that.

Q: I wonder which came first, to have Bruce explore that side of him, or to have the game take place—I guess, roughly 90% is in Blackgate? Did one come first in the decision-making process?

Payton: Early on in the process of developing the concept for Batman: Arkham Shadow, working closely with Warner Bros. Interactive and DC, we approached them with this idea that, from a game structure perspective, we wanted to be more inspired by Asylum than any of the other Arkham titles, and that was for a variety of reasons. One is because we love Asylum, and two is that if we looked at Rocksteady’s development process they started with a game that was smaller in scope and tighter, and we felt that was appropriate for us as our first foray into the Arkham franchise.

We looked at the timeline and where we felt like there was room in the Arkhamverse for us to explore interesting elements and immediately gravitated toward the early years of Batman after Arkham Origins. Given that Arkham Asylum hadn’t been built yet, and also just my personal interest in telling a story based in a prison—based on films and novels and other media that I’ve been interested in over the years—Blackgate Prison was something that very early on we knew we wanted to go deeper with in the game.

Thankfully, Warner Bros. and DC were really excited about that and thought that was a good idea. They loved the idea of structuring the game in a similar way to Arkham Asylum, and then came the question, so, how is the player getting into the prison and how are you exploring this—what I like to call “prison fantasy,” which I know is something of an oxymoron—but how would Batman be able to do this, and how would you tell this story?

It was actually Warner Bros. and DC that suggested we utilize “Matches” Malone as a character. As that’s such a huge decision, when I first received that idea, I remember where I was and how long I sat there at my desk just thinking through how this would work. I think it was a great idea and became one of the core elements of this game that we ended up developing over the next three, three-and-a-half years.

Q: I love that Batman: Arkham Shadow opens on you in that disguise, and you can look at your arms and you have the flame tattoos. You also don’t know what Bruce Wayne is supposed to look like, so looking in the mirror at that face—am I right in assuming that’s an actual mask he puts on?

Payton: Correct, yes, it’s a Mission Impossible-inspired mask that has some tech in it.

Q: Would it be fair to say that for half of the game, you’re disguised as Malone and for half of the game you’re Batman? Or maybe a little more than half you’re playing as Batman?

Payton: It’s a lot more Batman, actually, but it also depends on how the player plays. We have graphs and pie charts per chapter of the game based on average playtimes for how long you’re playing as Batman and how long you’re playing as Matches. We had this concept that it was the “time until Batman” timer, and we felt like it was an internal clock from the player that started the moment you become “Matches” Malone.

I think, if we do our jobs right, players are intrigued and excited and appreciate a reprieve from the high-flying action, combat, and detective work as Batman, and they get to kind of breathe a little bit, and utilizing the immersive power of the Meta Quest 3 and just being in the space, in a prison—where not many have that experience in real life—and being able to explore and go deeper into the story. This is meant to be a refreshing element, but up to a point. That “time until Batman” timer is ticking, so we were really careful about not putting too much content into the Matches moments, especially for mainline content.

Now, that’s what I mean by if players want to spend more time as Matches they can because we wrote and recorded so much dialogue for different instances and states, not just per chapter but also within chapters. Based on who you talk to as the campaign progresses, you can go talk to NPCs and prisoners in the world, and their dialogue changes, so there’s a lot to mine there. But yeah, I think for the average player I’d say it’s probably 70% Batman and 30% Matches.

Batman: Arkham Shadow’s Inspired Approach to Popular Villains and Easter Eggs

Solitary confinement with Joker, Black Mask, and Firefly was interesting to see, but I love the treatment of it because none of it—at least I don’t think any of it is mandatory. You don’t even have to knock on the wall.

Payton: Correct. Completely optional.

Q: The level of restraint I imagine that must’ve taken to not just completely dive into that as fan service to have Joker here, even though he would be there in Blackgate, same as Black Mask and Firefly—I love that they weren’t ignored for the sake of highlighting characters who are lesser-known or Arkham Origins Casefile characters who are neat to see return. I think their treatment is interesting because it’s based on whether you’re interacting with them.

Payton: I think you picked up on one of my high-level styles of direction for this game in particular, which was—I know that the Arkham games appeal to a wide and broad audience. When I played Arkham Asylum back in 2009 and was blown away by it, I wasn’t blown away by all the different cameos and characters from the comic books who were showing up in all different corners of the game. I was just intrigued by the action; I’m a huge fan of Batman, the tension between him and Joker, and really just the mainline content was what appealed to me.

When I look at the films and why they’re so popular, I think a large part of what Matt Reeves and Christopher Nolan, in particular, did well was they made these Batman stories relatable, and they focus on characters—they’re going deep on a subset of characters, and not going broad with too many characters or cameos that satisfy the hardcore. If you look closely the hardcore fans are being served, but that’s optional. That’s part of the buffet they have in front of them.

So, yes, you’re right. It does require restraint to a degree from the team, especially my more hardcore colleagues, who are so excited about this content, but I think with every instance it was me putting that through my filter of, “This is there for people who want it, and they can experience it, and they’re going to love it.” If you don’t even know who Black Mask is or who Firefly is, that’s okay. You can still enjoy the meat of the story.

Q: That also translates to the treatment of some of the characters in the game who are more high-profile, at least later on in the franchise, like Quinzel, Crane, or even Harvey. I love the idea that you didn’t give Harvey a boss fight and I want to hear if there was a reason why the game didn’t end on one, but I don’t feel like it would’ve fit the same way that Carmine’s does or Bolton’s does, because you can still hang onto that sliver of Harvey being a good guy and a tragic character by the end. Was there ever a consideration of a Harvey boss fight once you learn he’s the Rat King?

Payton: A lot to unpack there. I want to touch on something you mentioned earlier, too. You could tell I was having a lot of fun pre-launch because I wanted to answer questions and I wanted to be helpful, but I also had to be really careful about what I said because I really wanted it to be a surprise.

I wanted the Matches moment to be a major surprise; the fact that the majority of the game takes place in Blackgate Prison, not in Gotham; the whole idea behind the Rat King, I had to be really careful about how I described it because I didn’t want players, and you, to feel like I was misleading, but I also didn’t want to spoil things. I didn’t want to take away the surprises.

That was actually quite fun to thread that needle, and now I’m in a different world where everybody’s played the game, and it’s fun to talk about behind the scenes. To answer your question about the character arcs, I didn’t feel like we had enough screen time to be able to properly and respectfully sow these characters, who are still early on in their long-term arcs within the Arkhamverse, and have them end up in a place where they’re more or less unchanged from how players experience them in Asylum, City, or Knight.

For me, rather, it was more important that we explore the “why” behind the characters, and how each character is battling with one’s own shadow, quite frankly. I thought that was just more interesting, and we’re also saving a lot more space for if we’re ever given an opportunity to work on a sequel to Batman: Arkham Shadow, there’s a lot more room to explore, and also for other game teams out there, if Warner Bros. and DC decide they want other game teams to explore this area of the franchise and the Arkhamverse, there’s so much more to mine there.

To answer your question about Harvey Dent in particular, we did have talks, prototypes, and playables of various iterations of what would maybe be thought of as a Harvey Dent boss fight. None of them were the traditional ‘Batman beating up Harvey Dent’—his foster brother, somebody he cares for and loves.

We ended up obviously not shipping with a Harvey Dent boss fight at the end of the game for two reasons: one was actually from a scope perspective—we really just put in as much as we could with the amount of time and resources we had for this project; and two, because when you zoom out on the story and see where Batman is as a character at the beginning of Batman: Arkham Shadow and you see where he’s ending, I’m actually really proud of the fact that players confront the big bad guy at the end of the game and Batman doesn’t throw a punch.

He shows sympathy, and I think he shows that he’s willing to understand somebody that he might not agree with or who he’s very angry with. That doesn’t just apply to Harvey Dent, it also applies to the man who killed his parents, Joe Chill, standing right in front of him, and I thought that was really important the way that we communicated that, so that took precedence over having some sort of traditional, end-of-video-game boss fight to me.

Designing and Obfuscating Batman: Arkham Shadow’s Joe Chill

Q: Is there anything in Batman: Arkham Shadow that explains how Harvey learned about Joe and his involvement in Bruce’s parents’ deaths?

Payton: There are a few elements in the game that explain the backstory, but it is intentionally quite subtle because we didn’t want to tip our hand too much. There’s a voice message from Harvey Dent before the point of no return in which he says, “Hey, I’ve been looking into this thing, and I think I’ve found something really big, I need you to call me back, Bruce.”

That was one way of us kind of setting up the fact that Harvey’s been working on this project for a long time, and he finally found Joe Chill and he’s excited to tell Bruce about it. I have so many favorite elements of the game and the story, but one of my top 10, top 20, is myself and the writers coming up with this idea that Harvey Dent, in the purest form, is hunting the Rat King just as much as Batman is, and that investigation leads him to uncover the identity of somebody in the prison who isn’t who he says he is, or there’s more to the story, and it ends up being Joe Chill.

In the gameplay trailer, we have Joe Chill sitting right there in the group therapy scene. His model is based on his Arkham VR model. It’s not an original interpretation of what Joe Chill would look like, it’s just an aged-up character model. That one made me pretty nervous, but it was something I actually surprised the marketing group with that I wanted to push for and thankfully they accommodated.

It’s a little bit of a conundrum in terms of how you approach marketing your game and trying not to spoil things but also trying not to deceive, as well, and so we very purposefully followed the Metal Gear Solid 2 playbook up to a point. I’d be lying if I said MGS2 wasn’t a big inspiration for Arkham Shadow in the sense that we have this player swap, where all of our marketing materials did not say players would be playing as “Matches” Malone, and just like MGS2 we swapped in character models ahead of launch to not ruin the surprise.

Unlike MGS2, what we wanted to make sure we weren’t doing was promoting a game in which you then play it, and it’s 20% Snake and 80% Raiden. We wanted to make sure that players are still playing the vast majority of the time as Batman and we were just holding back the twist there.

We obviously decided to hide the identity of the Rat King so it was a big surprise at the end of the game, but with Joe Chill, outside of not saying what his last name is in the game, we made the decision to lean into respecting the player. If players notice there’s a character named Joe who has this troubled past, and he looks like this character from the Arkham VR character model feature, then that’s okay, and that doesn’t ruin the story.

But, for the longest time—I want to say for at least a year and a half if not two years—his name was going to be Frost. It was a nickname that the inmates gave him because it’s a play-off of Joe ‘Chill.’ It was clever and would obfuscate his identity even further, but we decided to trust and respect the player, that if they were in on it, then that’s okay.

I like that it’s more of a surprise for Bruce than it is necessarily for the player.

Really the importance of the Commissary is to establish and develop that connection between the player and Joe, so he’s not just a character in a cinematic you’re seeing from time to time. One of the things I’m also excited about adding—I don’t think it’s going to make it for this month, but most likely for next month—is we have additional dialogue options with Joe Chill that just gives you more excuses to build that connection with him, which I thought, Armin [Shimerman], the actor behind Joe Chill, just did a terrific job embodying that character.

Batman: Arkham Shadow Leaves Breadcrumbs for Players to Follow in Future Content Updates

Q: In the Pigsty, I made sure to pay close attention to the cork boards because in Batman: Arkham Origins —before that game came out I don’t think they had announced Joker was in the game, and I remember seeing the cork board in the Batcave with all the mentions of Red Hood and being like, “Okay, Red Hood, so Joker’s around here somewhere…?”

I was trying to look closely in Shadow, and there’s a Batman impersonator who’s running around. I was wondering if that’s not just a reference to Batman: The Imposter due to them having similar characters, or is there actually an impersonator in-game?

Payton: I’ll give you a better answer than just “no comment,” which is—one of my favorite things about post-launch is watching all of these different YouTube videos, reading all of these interesting articles, and also just various forum posts and Discord posts with people’s theories and questions about so many different elements of the game. I was hoping that players cared enough to want to ask those questions, but you just never know.

In retrospect, I shouldn’t be surprised that Arkham players are this detail-oriented, but it was a question in my mind throughout all of development and right up to the release was, “To what degree are people going to notice this stuff?” In fact, there are a lot of things that people haven’t noticed yet, which I’m really happy to see and hope it’s going to be this evergreen title where over time people are still uncovering things and piecing things together.

We should talk about some of the updates we’re doing because we’re actually adding additional content, sprinkled throughout the game, that we ran out of time to add into 1.0 that will also add more things for people to talk about and help them piece some of these mysteries together. But, specifically about what you saw on the cork board—and we have other references to that idea in other pockets of the game—I’ll say it’s not Batman, and there are reports about somebody who seems like they are Batman, who is performing crime-fighting activities throughout Gotham City.

What I’ve noticed is that, over the years, people continue to discover things in the previous Arkham titles as well, so I wanted players to have that same experience. I hope Arkham Shadow has that same sort of longevity.

Q: I don’t think it’s meant to be a withheld secret that the Rat who’s connected to Shrike in the projection room is Dick Grayson. Can we confirm that?

Payton: I can confirm that there’s a Rat in the projector room… I can confirm that Bruce Wayne had a minute to reflect on what happened with that Rat, and then asked Leslie to reach out to him, and that is a thread we placed into the game over the credits. I’ll give this one, I’ll give you this: while we’re not doing story DLC, we are adding more content to the game, and we will tie the bow more significantly before we’re all done developing and updating the game.

Q: Can you talk about what that looks like? Is that additional scenes interwoven into the base game?

Payton: For example, in the 1.1 that’s coming out, we have missing elements we didn’t add to the game, and with 1.2 we’re adding additional elements for you to talk to Joe about at the shop, which is really cool and I was sad we didn’t ship with that, so different story elements add just a little bit more texture here and there. As for how we’re going to provide more information about that specific Rat I don’t want to spoil that too much, but more content is coming that I think will satisfy some peoples’ curiosity about the identity of that character.

There are some continuity concerns relating to that projection room Rat, which we’re aware of, and debating whether or not we dive deeper into it in the various updates we have planned for the game. We’ve got the full team dedicated to Batman: Arkham Shadow for now and over the next several months. We actually don’t know when we’re going to be ramping the team off of the project, but we know at least through this month, December, and January, and we’re even talking about doing work in February on the game.

These are all free updates to the title based on the amazing response we’ve gotten from the community and the things we’ve been fixing, addressing, and adding—quality-of-life improvements the community has been asking for—and also just adding additional, free content to the game. The update that’s coming out has thousands of changes in it. I’m so eager to get that out there, and then the subsequent update, which is going to come out sometime in December, 1.2. That’s where we’ll be adding a lot more content to the game, including the character viewer, more challenge maps, and also we’re going to be adding localized voiceovers for all of the non-English languages.

The projection room Rat’s throughline won’t make it in time for December, but that’ll be one of those early 2025 updates. We’re not completely confirming it, but signs are looking pretty good that we’ll be able to add New Game Plus early next year. Perhaps another difficulty mode—“I am the Knight” mode from Origins is a highly requested feature from users that we’re actively looking into right now and trying to add sometime next year. We have these big buckets of updates that we’re looking at over the next several months.

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