Arkham fans have lost it

 How about another joke, Murray?

What do you get when you treat a rabid fanbase with years worth of cold shoulder before turning around and slapping them with a product that gets wrong most everything they were most excited about? Well, then you get a situation like that which has inflicted the Arkham series subreddit, a group of passionate fans of the stellar Batman Arkham series, a game who's lasting legacy set a new standard for games of it's ilk and genre. (Hell, Marvel's Spiderman's combat is a huge homage on it's own.) However when 'Arkham Knight' came about promising an end to the series... well, it seems that the devs really did take that seriously. Although, their fans certainly weren't ready for them to just walk away like that, and with old passions being stirred since the announcement of the follow-up to the Arkham games, which has nothing to do Batman, and Gotham Knights, where you play every bat family member except for Batman; something was going to give.

To be fair with the fans, their desires aren't totally out of left field. Afterall, WB apparently had a Project Sabbath in development which was a concept for an Arkham Knight sequel before that got scrapped. (The apparent reason why is deviously ironic.) The main theme of the game was all about legacy and passing the torch, as such the apparent Death of Batman from Arkham Knight would had led to the ascension of Damian Wayne as Bruce's successor. Concept art reveals a new generation Poison Ivy, after Pamela sacrificed her life during Arkham Knight, and a new Black Mask because the old one has a bullet in his head thanks to the Red Hood DLC for Arkham Knight which is apparently canon now? (I thought they were just bad challenge maps, to be honest.) It was going to be set in an apocalyptic Gotham which has fallen since Scarecrow's takeover and Batman's retirement, and the team weren't going to just throw up their hands and do 'The Dark Knight Returns' like everyone else who tackles an 'old Batman' story ends up trying. Frankly, it sounded bloody brilliant; so of course it was cancelled because WB weren't sure that a Batman game without Bruce in the cowl would sell... wait... then why are the hell are we getting Gotham Knights in it's stead?

I don't hate Gotham Knights, I just think it looks like a game caught between a concept and a execution that aren't shaking hands together as well as the team wants. They want some loot-based action game, but they also want a co-op fighting experience on-par with Arkham of old. By trying to compromise they've given us a little bit of column A and a lot less of column B. Also, in comparison to Knight this game looks uglier than first Sin; why in hell does this need to be a current gen exclusive game? Setting that game up as Knight's successor is dooming it to ignominy in exchange for some early sales boosts from the implied association. (Even though the associated team is actually busy working on 'Suicide Squad Kills the Justice League'. God, that's a mouthful.) All of which is probably why the Arkham Reddit fans rejected that game entirely and decided to celebrate their own.

That is, their own Arkham game that they pretend exists, all so that they can extol it's fictional, and often-contradictory, virtues to one another; Morbius-style. To their eyes 2019 was the year that Arkham World was released, a best selling follow-up to Knight that featured a boss fight with the Mandalorian, an upcoming Guy Fieri DLC, the Batcopter and the Batwing for some reason, and several dozen sequels already. It was obviously the best Arkham game ever realised, yet it also simultaneously seem to exacerbate every annoyance-point that everyone had about the vanilla series, such as overuse of vehicle sections. (Which I found to be an overblown criticism anyway once I finally got around to playing Knight. But that's just me.) Of course, the denizens of the Subbreddit have accepted this change in direction for the Sub gratefully considering that for the past five or so years the Reddit seems to have consisted of nothing but 'Hey guys, Arkham Origins got a bad wrap' posts. (Which- yeah obviously it did but you're really preaching to the choir there, you know?)

Apparently this is all a big reference to the Titanfall reddit community who, apparently dissatisfied with the allegedly in-universe spin off success Apex Legends (I've yet to see one person who can point out the connections between those franchises in a significant, not surface level, fashion) had taken to convincing themselves that Titanfall 3 had released and that it was god tier. To be fair, however, theirs is a sadder story because Titanfall 2 was apparently a total masterpiece that was screwed by EA through godawful release windows that benefitted nobody. Their game probably did deserve a sequel, as opposed to Arkham Knight which finished the franchise, and Bruce's story, satisfactorily enough on it's own. We don't really need ourselves an encore right now. (Although, again, I would have welcomed one if it was a concept as cool as how the late Project Sabbath sounded. Damian Bat would have rocked.)

This break from reality does highlight the fact that nothing on the current, inexplicable, busy slate of DC games really carries on the legacy of Knight. Gotham Knights is just... like a Ubisoft-brand version of the franchise, and Suicide Squad feels like an entirely different style of game altogether. I know it's intentionally designed not to be, but it kind of feels like a multiplayer only romping title to the point where I, huge Arkham fan that I am, don't feel like the target demographic anymore. (On account of having no friends.) Now to be fair, Marvel has pretty much picked up that baton and run with it on their ongoing Spiderman series; but sometimes you just want to be a guy in a batsuit, you know? Preppy and positive Spiderman doesn't have the same weight as non-nonsense thug-disabling Bruce Wayne on a bad day. The series' could comfortably exist being active in the same market, is what I'm saying.

But at the end of the day we always have to make do with the hand dealt to us, or slip into a fantasy land where everything we wanted to have happened did and much more. (I support either route, to be honest. Go with whatever's most real to you.) Maybe somewhere down the line, after Gotham Knights comes out to 'whelm' us all, and WB are done with their exploration into other DC properties; maybe we can convince the team to roll on back to Arkham with the lessons they learned to give the old Bat one last go around. Maybe they can go back to that Damian Wayne concept and use it to give Damian something of a real send-up of his own to launch that character into the heavy hitter he's totally capable of being. And maybe we'll get an Injustice 3 one day... Oh god, now I'm slipping into fantasy land, aren't I?