Arkham Knight’s Batmobile Likely Marks the End of a Short Era

Posted by By our-little-miss-is-home December 24, 2024 3 Views 5 Min Read
Arkham Knight’s Batmobile Likely Marks the End of a Short Era

Batman’s vehicles have always been an iconic staple of the character and that’s no different in the Arkhamverse. Indeed, the Batwing has been around for the franchise’s entirety, while the Batmobile was first featured prominently in Batman: Arkham Asylum.

It wasn’t until Batman: Arkham Knight that the Batmobile actually became a vehicle players could drive. Besides hitching a ride on the Batwing for fast travel in Origins, Batman: Arkham Knight’s Batmobile would mark the only controllable vehicle in the Arkham games followed by the hovercrafts in Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. The Batmobile is wholly unique in just how robust and dynamic its features are, though, and was highly maligned despite being incredibly well-designed for the sequences it is playable in. Regardless, there is reason to believe the Batmobile will be the last controllable vehicle in an Arkham game.

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Batman: Arkham Knight’s Batmobile was Ahead of Its Time

Batman: Arkham Knight didn’t need a fully controllable Batmobile and yet it’s debatably all the better for it. The Batmobile has all the bells and whistles players could want from the Arkhamverse’s Batman with an elaborate Battle Mode, including a winch for powering generators or scaling buildings as well as an autocannon, micro-missiles, and an EMP.

Unfortunately, with such a significant majority of the playerbase declaring its discontent for the Batmobile, there’s a high unlikelihood that any studio tackling a future Arkham game would spend the same amount of time and resources designing one itself. But while anyone who disliked it would’ve obviously felt it overstayed its welcome, anyone who enjoyed Batmobile combat and gameplay might’ve appreciated Rocksteady for adding a completely unprecedented element to Batman: Arkham Knight with a wildly distinct signature.

Why Nothing Could Hope to Live Up to Batman: Arkham Knight’s Batmobile Nowadays

The Batmobile has an overwhelming emphasis in Batman: Arkham Knight with a decent chunk of mandatory and optional content revolving around it, but to be any less of a fixture in the game would’ve undoubtedly felt underwhelming and potentially superfluous. In fact, a Batmobile designed solely for traversal in Gotham City’s open-world streets would’ve been ludicrously redundant since Batman: Arkham Knight perfected grapnel-boosting and cape-gliding with remarkable speeds and distances flown.

The Batmobile isn’t a substitution of those staple features but rather an extension of them, allowing players to eject out of the car—“like a bullet from a rail gun,” as Lucius Fox boasts—or have it summoned to them. The only other viable street-level means of transportation would be a Batcycle, and even then it would need to be as versatile in both combat and environmental puzzles as Batman: Arkham Knight’s Batmobile if it wanted to stand on its own merits and not merely be a minor convenience in open-world traversal.

If cape-gliding is designed well, the Arkhamverse may never need an alternative means of traversal.

The only instance now where a driveable Batmobile may retain epic resonance is if it’s the first time Batman drives a Batmobile in-universe—a moment yet to be captured in-game. Otherwise, future Arkham games will probably continue to gloss over Batman’s vehicles for however long the franchise goes on as that’d be the only way to guarantee that they don’t divide their playerbase as Batman: Arkham Knight did. That’s not to say another controllable Batmobile would be inherently a bad idea, but it has a stigma that would be difficult to overcome while players may be happier to return to classic Batman gameplay alone.

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