Spring-Loaded
Member
They weren't afraid of me.
The Arkham series is great. That's nothing special though. There are plenty of great, fun game and game series out there. What is most notable is how Rocksteady's developers have condensed decades worth of Batman actions spanning various mediums into a couple of video games, made them available to players and refined so many of them to be right. It's hard for a given Batman fan to look at the basic gameplay of these games (or even at specific aspects of it) and find it to be wrong. Gadgets, attacks, traversal, animations from a physical perspective, Rocksteady is doing about as good a job as anyone could've when adapting this character to a video game. Still so much room for improvement, yet it's the most comprehensive video game adaptation of the character.
The problem with this adaptation lies beyond the physical. Striking fear into criminals is often a core element of the character. Below, I'm going to repurpose a post I've made here before, explaining what I unsatisfied with in the existing Batman Arkham games and what could be done differently, conceptually. Strictly from a physical perspective, these give the player the ability to control Batman. However, that semblance of control falters when enemies don't (or aren't able to) act appropriately afraid.
The fear effect in Batman: Arkham Asylum and Arkham City is too cosmetic. Enemies only sound scared, or animate differently functionally, they are the same as they were when merely alert, that is, until they are at the third stage of fear: terrified. At that point, they still animate differently (shaking) with a new pool of dialogue, but in this stage, they'll recoil for a bit if you appear before them suddenly. They'll more constantly look around and randomly fire in the direction of environmental noises which can be used to the player's advantage.
That's it though. It has no consequences beyond making enemies cower for a few moments when surprising them. This fear only occurs in the stealth/predator segments.
In big open brawls, even the very last enemy will rush at you, running over the dozens of broken bodies of his comrades, just to throw a slow punch at you. Compared to player abilities feeling true to the character, striking fear is underdeveloped and unexplored.
Enemies' abilities should start out good, their lethality according to their skill level e.g. random goons have decent aim/OK hand-to-hand, spec ops guys have great aim/good fighting skills (a departure from all enemies being functionally the same in apst games). Those abilities should degrade as morale drops. The player getting hurt would increase enemy morale, but taking them out effortlessly should lower it. At their most terrified, they shouldn't be able to land any shots. They could surrender and give up information. There should be ways for an enemy or two to successfully escape the player so that scared/clever ones can get away. This would give the player opportunity to chase them down and do what they want with them.
Not all of the results of low morale could be good for the player. Fear could make an enemy harder to sneak up on (depending on their skill) or make them resort to taking hostages (in turn, making them more antsy which could lead to hostages getting killed). Have enemies who successfully escape Batman come return later to antagonize the player similar to Lords of Shadow's nemesis system. They could raise in rank and get more weapons/supplies because they convinced their bosses they outsmarted Batman, or because they escaped with some kind of objective (e.g. stolen goods).
I say all this to give an idea of how engaging a fleshed out fear system could be in this series, certainly more so than with the system as it is.
