Arkham Origins Producer Ben Mattes Talks


With only 15 days left on the countdown until Arkham Origins drops, it is time to really start getting psyched up for the game. I for one am super pumped (not as excited as for Pokemon, but 15 days until release vs 3 days until release is much different).

Moving past that, with the game so close producers are starting to talk about their choices when making the game. One thing that many people have been talking about are the choices of villains. The game will center around a young Batman and his fight against 8 hired guns who all want him dead. The Batman world has dozens of assassins to choose from, so the producers have had their pick of the litter. The Joker was basically a give in (I am interested to know the story of how they ‘met’ in this canon), Deadshot and Deathstroke also fit the mold nicely, but then there’s Bane the Penguin and a few others who aren’t typical assassins. Producer Ben Mattes spoke to OXM about his choices.

“Yeah, so there were three really key factors in making the final list… the DC universe is ripe with people who would kill for money, many of whom would call themselves assassins, many of whom, probably wouldn’t, or would never have been necessarily labelled “an assassin,” but who have very clearly assassinated and been paid for their assassinations. And so when we first started looking at this list, of potential candidates effectively, the three filtering criteria were a) are they cool? [laughs] You know, are they – do they belong in the Arkhamverse? Can we make them look grounded and gritty and believable and approachable and like they fit in the same universe. The second being, we wanted to make sure we had a diversity of appearances and abilities and sex and nationalities and dialogue and whatnot.”

It sounds like a very generic thing to say in my opinion, but there’s a lot of fact behind it. Are they cool enough for the game, and can they make it so no villain is the same. They’ve shown that they will take some liberties with the characters to make them and the game more interesting (see Copperhead). The choices they made are well thought out and, to use Mattes’ words, cool. I am excited to see where they go with this story.

Sources: OXM, Gamerant