The next Batman game doesn’t have Batman in it. Or so we’re told. Gotham Knights iscoming in 2021, publisher Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment announced Saturday at DC Fandome. The reveal concludes a year of teases and insinuations about when the next game was coming and what, or who, it would involve.
Gotham Knights is coming to PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X next year, and will be playable solo or in co-op, Warner Bros. said in a news release.
In Gotham Knights, Bruce Wayne has supposedly perished in a massive explosion. In a message to his surviving comrades, he tells them how to carry on in his absence. The trailer revealed Red Hood, Batgirl, Nightwing, and Robin (aka the Bat Family) as the cast of four playable characters. Gotham Knights will be a co-op game set in an open-world Gotham City.
At the end of Gotham Knights’ reveal trailer verified that the game’s antagonists will be the Court of Owls, a generations-long conspiracy of Gotham City’s wealthiest families. Batman writer Scott Snyder and artist Greg Capullo created the Court in 2011.
“You’re not trying to become the new Batman, you’re trying to become your own badass superhero,” said Fleur Marty, a senior producer with WB Games Montreal.
The studio provided a seven-minute look at Gotham Knights’ gameplay, in which the heroes take on Mr. Freeze.
WB Games Montreal made 2013’s Batman: Arkham Origins. It received generally positive reviews, but nowhere near the acclaim given to the three Batman: Arkham games by Rocksteady Studios from 2009 to 2015.
Rocksteady is at work on a Suicide Squad adaptation, which will be formally revealed later today.