Rocksteady looked at Arkham City multiplay “early on”

By Johnny Cullen

Rocksteady initially looked at introducing multiplayer early in development of Batman: Arkham City, studio game director Sefton Hill has said.

Hill told OPM UK (via CVG) in an interview it would have ended up providing “two watered down products” if it had included a “bolted” multiplayer, adding it had the backing of Warner to do a single-player-only game.

“We’re really thankful to Warner on that. At a time when a lot of publishers said you have to have multiplayer, they backed our ideas for single player,” he said.

“We did look at multiplayer early on and we looked at what it could actually bring to the table. We tried some ideas out but it always felt like it was just there as a requirement. If we did multiplayer then we wouldn’t have been able to deliver the quality of game that people wanted – that we wanted. We would end up delivering two watered down products.”

He continued: “You see games where you feel like they bolted the multiplayer on, but if they had taken that effort and put it into the single player, they would have had a better game instead of having a multiplayer that people don’t play.”

There’s more in the interview at the link.