Get used to this. You’ll be hearing it a lot, at least if the tournament I played is anything to go by. The development team at THQ have worked hard on making the commentary system sound natural. “You’re actually getting live broadcast feeds,” I was told by senior designer Wes Bunn. “The UFC gives us all their mic feeds and our sound team chop up every bit of commentary from every fight and incorporate it into the game. So when you hear a guy say ‘Oh, nice left head kick’, that came from a fight somewhere.”

Led by Antoine Peltier, the audio have actually done a great job, especially with the contextual commentary. Turn off the main VO and you’ll hear your coaches shouting at you to get your guard up or protect your head. Still, when certain submission positions like the Kimura are easier to get into than others, you’re bound to hear some lines repeated over and over (and over) again.

The team had to use a different approach for the new PRIDE mode in this game, since PRIDE matches no longer take place. “We’ve added a whole new commentary team with the PRIDE Fighting Championships so everything you have in the UFC had to be mirrored for PRIDE. We did that with Bas Rutten and Stephen Quadros who were two of the commentators at the time. It’s a little more WWE-ish – they’re making jokes, they’re talking about the sport and the history as opposed to technical descriptions of what’s going on in the cage.”

I also spoke to Bunn about the game’s controls. “One of the big pillars that we wanted to do for this game was accessibility. We kind of fell into a lull with [UFC Undisputed] 2010 after 2009 came out. We just assumed everybody knew how to play our game and what we found was that the new players who picked it up were getting lost and frustrated and didn’t understand how to do things. We went back to our roots with 3 and brought back more of the tutorial aspect so whenever you jump into a fight for the first time, you’re gonna get these pop-ups that come up and tell you how to play the game.”

The last fighting game I played was WWE ’12 and the contrast between controls for the two games is obvious. Where W’12 requires frequent and confusing shifts between the face buttons and the thumb sticks to pull off a single move, UFC3 splits control-sets into a number of different “modes”.

Loosely speaking, you focus on the face buttons for out-and-out combat and the thumb sticks for grappling and movement. You’ll have access to different types of punch, kick and motion (or “transition” in UFC parlance) depending on whether you’re standing, in a clinch or on the ground but the controls themselves remain consistent. With the help of the initial tutorial pop-ups, this separation makes the system much easier to learn and modifiers like the left stick, bumper and trigger add depth and variety for the more experienced fighter.

Exhibition matches are your quickplay option to fight as a professional UFC competitor like Anderson Silva and this is what’s available in the demo that came out this week. As a mixed martial arts competition, UFC is more brutal than its entertainment-focused contemporaries. There are two ways to win a match: tire out or beat your opponent to a bloody pulp until he can no longer intelligently defend himself; or hold him (and it’s always a him) in a submission pose until he “taps-out” and admits defeat. In Undisputed 3 you’ll find that fighters have noticeably different strengths and weaknesses. Swinging punches with a kickboxer will deplete your stamina faster than it should and trying to throw an experienced wrestler to the ground while playing as a boxer will get you on the wrong side of a submission. Knowing your individual fighter’s skills is key. This is where Career mode comes in.

Supposedly the mainstay of UFC Undisputed 3, the Career mode is where you design and train your own fighter to battle your way up the ranks. In focusing on accessibility for new players, it seems to me that the team have erred too far on the side of education. Creating the avatar for your new fighter is easy enough. The problem starts when you choose your fighter’s specialities.

Everything seems to require half a dozen button presses to either select something, learn about it or skip the annoying verbal history. Once you finally navigate through the maze of menus you’re forced into a sparring session to determine your level of skill in that particular discipline.

This is fine for the first couple of rounds of just mashing the punch/kick/grapple button until the sparring meter fills up. When 15 minutes later you’re still struggling through menus and tutorials, it’s very tempting to just put the controller down and walk away. Sure, you can skip the sparring matches (after sitting through the loading screen) but you won’t get the stats boost for your character. Given that there are 62 individual tutorials you can choose to play through from a separate menu, forcing this seems like an unnecessary hindrance for those who are experienced or want to just get on with it.

When you’re in the cage, this game can be great fun. Pounding away on your opponent as he lies dazed on the floor triggers an incredible endorphin rush of satisfaction. Even watching other people play is entertaining. Matches are brutal and quick and I guarantee that any spectators will let out a collective “Ooo” of anticipation when you successfully daze your opponent with a solid blow to the head. It’s what happens outside the cage that lets it down.

UFC Undisputed 3 will be released on 17th February for Xbox 360 and PS3. The demo is available for download now.

I tested out preview of Grand Slam Tennis 2 using a standard PlayStation 3 and a Move controller. From the perspective of someone who wants to feel like they’re playing tennis, the Move controller wins hands-down. The game’s Total Racquet Control system made it easy to perform loads of different shots using either the right stick or tilting and twisting the Move controller. The game was fun to play until I increased the difficulty level to hard and then got absolutely hammered by the AI. Yep, back to the practice courts for me.

I questioned Singleton about the differences between the control methods. “It all depends on how you want to play the game. If you want to sit down and relax on your couch and have a very rewarding, intuitive experience with total racquet control on the right stick, then go for it. If you want to re-enact your childhood and literally perform tennis strokes live in your living room from a gesture standpoint then Move is where it is at.”

The game features commentary from legendary ex-tennis players John McEnroe and Pat Cash. Singleton said “We hire the talent to be the talent and do what they do best and that’s call matches live whether that’s in FIFA, Madden or in this case Grand Slam Tennis 2. So what we did was we set up live matches prerecorded and had them call matches as they would in real life, making sure that we get all the scenarios that we want to make it authentic and sound realistic.”

Lets hope that this approach overcomes the problem of in-game commentary quickly becoming repetitive and stale which has plagued every sports title I’ve played.

Grand Slam Tennis 2 is released on the 10th Feb 2012 for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

SPOILER WARNING: Even though Uncharted 2: Among Thieves came out in 2009, we appreciate that some people don’t want to read plot spoilers so stop reading now and enjoy the rest of The Average Gamer.

I asked Richmond if, as a studio, they found it hard killing off characters in the Uncharted games. He replied “I wish we hadn’t killed [Harry] Flynn. I loved Flynn. He’s one of my favourite characters in the series but sometimes people gotta go. Unfortunately.” Flynn was an old colleague of Drake’s, who betrayed him in the second game.

Richmond went on to say “Yeah, it’s tricky. Although it’s funny you should say that because Lazarevic [killed off in Uncharted: Drake's Fortune] who’s played by Graeme McTavish plays Cutter in this game. So they manage to come back to life in a different form. Robin [Atkin Downes] who played Novaro in the first game and Tenzin in the second game is Talbot in this game. So even though we kill them off they definitely come back.”

I called Uncharted 3 a technical and cinematic masterpiece in my review. Richmond admitted that “The cruise ship is the most technical thing we’ve ever done as a company. We have a procedurally generated ocean which means the computer is generating the waves dynamically every single time and that’s driving the animation of the cruise ship and then Drake’s animating on top of that, stumbling around and all kinds of stuff.”

Shipyard docks - One of the most stunning locations in Uncharted 3

Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception is out now on PlayStation 3.

He went on to say “This year, fans can expect greater gameplay depth, authentic commentaries, updated teams from the world’s top leagues, and new replay systems and stadium designs to make for a more powerful FIFA mobile experience.” When asked about real-life footballers playing the game he responded “We know that footballers, as well as athletes outside the sport are loyal FIFA fans. PLAY gives them another way to experience it.”

Unfortunately, FIFA 12 doesn’t support any multiplayer or cross-platform (e.g. PSP) gaming. Alexandru Ruse, EA Mobile Producer commented that “we wanted to make sure we get the football gameplay just right, and that we fit perfectly with the platform. So no multiplayer right now, not in the first release. We want the single-player to be 100% right first.” This is a bit of a shame given the number of people that play football games whilst travelling as you could have had some interesting matches with people playing against each other, especially on long train journeys.

When it came to optimising the game for the Xperia PLAY, Ruse said that “one of the things we spent the most time on was the controls. We went through a lot of iterations to make sure they fully exploit both the touchscreen, and the hardware PLAY controls.” Personally, I much prefer playing sports games with a joypad and buttons rather than just using touch screen controls. I find that when I’m poking the screen, particularly on a mobile I end up obscuring far too much of the action with my fingers.

When you download FIFA 12 from EA Sports or via the Get Games app on your Xperia PLAY it takes up a hefty 1.5Gb worth of space on your SD card so be prepared.

FIFA 12 is out now for the Xperia PLAY

Back in September I had the opportunity to talk to them. My first article from that interview focused on environmental storytelling in role-playing games. We also talked about a host of other subjects, including emotional engagement and the perils of social commentary when interpreted by mainstream media. BioWare’s worlds are famously inclusive, covering sexual preference, religion, gender roles and many other ‘serious’ themes. When asked if it was their intention to make games that provide social commentary, Ray Muzyka told us that they see it more as an essential factor when creating a game for a mature audience.

“It’s not that social commentary isn’t valid in art. It can be very valid. And sometimes the artists on our team are making commentary but as a general concept, it’s more about making games that are relevant and using themes that translate well to create engagement. Emotional engagement comes from having a correlation with something, feeling a reaction to it, feeling immersed in it, feeling it’s compelling. The goal is of creating emotional engagement with our content. We see it as an art form and an outcome of art is that you feel emotional reactions.

“It can be challenging to create it in a way that’s not misinterpreted as social commentary or provocative for the sake of being provocative. When there are unfortunate coincidences in the real world that are similar to what you have in a game… it’s concerning.

Zeschuk added “It’s more inclusive as well when you have broader options. We always have the mainstream press ready to pounce.”

Some of you might remember the Fox news “scandal” from 2008 wherein the American mainstream news channel tried to portray Mass Effect as having graphic sex scenes. We talked about how the media landscape has changed and Zeschuk told us how he has done plenty of interviews where the reporter talks about how they’re not sure if “these games things” are going to catch on.

Muzyka said “That doesn’t occur as often now, not like 10 years ago”

“It still happens occasionally.” Zeschuk replied. “I did one of those two years ago and I was like “Are you crazy?” I think now maybe, finally, with the advent of Facebook gaming and hundreds of millions of people playing games on that platform… It’s not a question any more but it’s very interesting because, I think also they were trying to find the next great evil. what’s the thing we can demonise in media that’s actually the source of the downfall of our youth.”

“It was rock and roll in the 50s, classical music back in the 1800s”

“In the 20s it was billiards. Like you say, once they got to the marches in the classical music-”

“It was too vigorous. There was a controversy about that in popular music at the time. Some of the stuff Mozart did was seen as SCANDALOUS relative to the more traditional. It seems weird now to say it. But I think video games are becoming a more and more mainstream form of art and entertainment.”

If that’s the case, does this mean that we’ll be returning to the more “traditional” sex scenes of the original Mass Effect? I know I and a lot of other people found the Dragon Age 2 and Mass Effect 2 scenes extremely underwhelming.

“We don’t set out guidelines for our teams,” said Muzyka. “Our teams set out their own parameters for how they do it. Really it’s an artistic choice. We encourage choice, we encourage enabling choice. You can look at Mass Effect 3; we got feedback from our fans, they wanted more choice so we’re putting that in.” It wasn’t made explicit but he’s presumably referring to the addition of male homosexuality in the forthcoming Mass Effect game.

“We don’t try to have gratuitous content either. We try and show mature themes in a respectful way. We try and enable those mature themes. It’s up to each team to decide how they want to portray it and different artists have different ways they want to portray it.”

Richmond said “Jeremy Yates our lead animator is a surprising number of mocap moves for Drake because he’s almost the exact same size as Nolan [North]. So any time where Nolan either sick or might get hurt we’d chuck him [Yates] in the suit. So there are definitely moments where Jeremy is in the game.” I love the fact that Naughty Dog were prepared to risk their lead animator over Nolan when things got a bit hairy.

Richmond himself also found himself on the motion capture (mocap) stage. He said that “I played a bunch of the secondary roles on the mocap stage but not in the suit. I would just stand in like and someone would take my place. So if we needed like 8 guys, I’d be one of the 8 guys and someone would switch and become me but I’d be standing there and not in the game.”

As far as hidden items in the game, Richmond said “There are lots of textures that are in-jokes with the company. Like PSN IDs, last names or faces. All kinds of things. There’s lots of those.”

You can also read about Richmond discussing the recent Harrison Ford Uncharted 3 trailer here.

Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception is released on the 2nd Nov 2011 on PlayStation 3.

I spoke to Will Miller, systems designer on Reckoning about the levelling system, the jail and getting naked in Amalur.

Debbie Timmins: In a lot of RPGs these days you just use the skill to skill up. You guys have gone down the route of levelling up and then putting points into skills. Can you tell me more about the decision – did you think about going down the other route?

Will Miller: We wanted to make a lot of interesting choices for the player when they level up. The ability allocation part, where you’re deciding what kinds of combat skills you want? We took that from games that players are probably familiar with, like Diablo. It’s very familiar, presented in a familiar way but those choices unlock the “destinies” – the replacement in our game for classes. You can swap those out whenever you want to. They encourage you to try new kinds of builds that just would not work in other RPGs – multi-class and spread out your allocations over all three trees. That’s fine, you can do that in our game. It helps you play as that kind of build.

In our non-combat skills, it’s just another interesting choice you get to make when your level up. So it all feeds back into the moment-to-moment gameplay and also the long-term gameplay.

When it comes to the destinies do you not worry that it would be very easy for a player to just break their build?

WM: Break the game?

Well, break themselves.

WM: So we let you pick whatever abilities you want. We encourage you to, if you see something that’s cool on that tree, take it. Regardless. If you’re a mage and you see a might ability that you want, just go for it coz it’s cool, it’s there. As you do that, the game looks at the combinations of things you’ve unlocked and rewards you destinies to fit those combinations; to fill in the gaps that you may create by multiclassing in a certain way.

For example, one of the biggest mistakes new RPG players make is they’ll evenly allocate all of their skill points, right? And that totally nerfs your character late in the game ’cause you don’t unlock any of the high-level ablities. It’s awful.

In our game, that’s totally fine. If you do that, you unlock the jack-of-all-trades destiny tree. you can apply that to your character. What’s cool about that specific one is that yes, there are a finite number of ability points so you’re not gonna be able to unlock the top tier abilities in all three trees but… we cut your equip requirements in half. So if you’re one of the players who likes to run way ahead in the game and get all this loot, if you didn’t have that destiny you couldn’t use the loot ’cause it’s way out of your level range. But if you have that destiny equipped, you can use pretty much whatever loot you find.

We also buff physical damage, magic damage, mana regen and all the stuff to make that build work. So we spent a lot of time playing with different combinations of abilities, figuring out what buffs to give you to make pretty much whatever decision that you make in the levelling system work for you.

We also let you swap those destinies out whenever you want to and if you really bork yourself and you find yourself playing a mage and saying “Well, I don’t really like the way the mage plays” or “I wanna try a fighter”, you can go to a fate-weaver and totally re-spec your character. It costs some money, right? And it costs a bit more every time to to do it. Not a prohibitive amount, so you can totally wipe the slate clean in the game without starting over.

The jail’s quite fun.

WM: Oh, you went to the jail? [big smile] That’s a system that I wrote from the ground up a while ago. It’s seen a lot of iteration and the jail experience I think is brief. Did you sneak out?

No, I was rubbish!

WM: Haha, okay.

I’m too impatient. ‘Cause there’s nothing to hide behind.

WM: Yeah, some of them are harder than others, certainly. It gets easier when you invest in the stealth non-combat skills. To negotiate the jail correctly you have to watch the guards for a little while – pick up on where they go and what frequencies they leave the area. There’s lots of rewards. You can even pull a lever and release all the other prisoners. The guards will chase them, letting you get out. There’s certainly a crime system in the game that punishes you if you start killing people.

[Minor hidden achievement spoiler coming here - skip down past the next picture if you don't want to know]

Factions – that’s what I was thinking of as well. Does that have any… okay, I’ve been wandering around the game naked.

WM: I saw that. That’s… interesting. An interesting way to play.

Hey! I got an achievement.

WM: Yes! You got the streaker achievement! Excellent. I’m so glad you did ’cause you’re probably the only person outside the studio that’s ever been rewarded that. That’s great. That was my idea. [laughs]

Wa-hey! Playing nekkid. But the thing is… nobody seems to react to that. I’m just wandering around in my bra and underwear. I’m going to the inn.

WM: We would love to change the game for you based on the fact that you had clothes or not – it’s an edge case that up to this point only you have discovered. We did things like we decided to localise ALL the audio in the game. So every line of dialogue is localised into several languages and it has voice-over so to change the game substantially based on whether you wear your clothes or not would be a pretty difficult undertaking if we were to do that for a lot of these edge cases. But I thought that was really interesting that you did that. Funny.

I’m glad you got my achievement. It’s one of the only hidden achievements in the game, actually.

[Edit: in a tweet after this was published, Miller attributed the Streaker achievement to Sean Bean (@Notthatseanbean) No more spoilers from here]

I was leading on to factions – I met the dude in the pub who’s with the WarSworn. I presume that’s faction-based.

WM: Yes

Will characters start reacting to you on the basis of factions as well?

WM: The faction itself will certainly start to respond differently if you engage. if you start the faction quests they’ll being to open up to you, because you can encounter the characters within the factions without actually being in the faction quest.

In any part of the game we don’t want to close off content based on your choices. We want the game to react to you differently based on the kinds of choices you make but we never want to say “because you did this faction line you can’t do this faction line.” There are no mutually exclusive quests. There’s certainly times where you have a lot of different ways to solve a problem; or multiple problems – pick which one to solve. Certain characters will treat you differently if you make different choices.

At the end of faction quests you get these things called twists of fate which are like perks. Permanent buffs that stay with you for the entirety of the game. Depending on HOW you play the faction quest, who you piss off or who you cater to, will result in a different twist of fate. They’re all GOOD. They’re just different.

Can you tell me about the persuasion mechanic?

WM: There are opportunities for you to persuade, as I’m sure you’ve seen. In the tutorial you persuade the gnome to give you more potions if you try that. It’s a skill check. It mainly factors into a lot of the faction quests; a lot of the side quests have persuasion parts so it’ll branch depending on whether or not you can persuade somebody. Or you’ll get different kinds of loot or you’ll get the loot in a different way. Easier to persuade the guy rather than having to steal it or kill him. Also in crime of course, you can bribe the guards if your persuasion is high enough. It depends on the level that you’re in. Usually they’re harder to persuade in higher level areas.

So you’ve gone for area-based levelling?

WM: I’ll give you a peek under the hood. The way this works is that the game is partitioned into regions, not necessarily corresponding to the geography but mainly divvied up by how we wanted to pace the player in terms of the difficulty. Each region has a level range, 10-15, 15-18 what have you. When the player first enters one of those regions, we clamp all of the region’s NPCs to the level of the player, provided he’s within the range.

So if you go too high and you’re a level 20 character and you go to a level 5-10 area, we clamp it at 10. And if you’re too low, we clamp at the low value. So if you’re one of the players who tries to run way ahead of the game rying to get the “sweet loots” further away from where you’re supposed to be, you’ll quickly run into regions that clamp at much higher levels than you are.

They will be difficult to negotiate but we also think that it’s really cool to have a challenging area. You go into an area the first time and it really whales on you. You level up a little bit and get to come back and beat down. That’s really cathartic, that’s satisfying so we wanted to keep that. Enemies don’t level with you always – when you encounter them the first time, that’s the level they’re gonna be at for the rest of the game but we intelligently decide what that level is.

Thanks for your time.

I’ll have a full preview of the game up next week. Go catch us on Facebook or Twitter to find out when it goes live.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning will be out in February 2012.

He said “I have. It blew my mind. Yesterday we were in Italy and one of the guys from Sony had loaded it up on his phone and we watched the 6 minute one. I was very skeptical. I don’t think he playing it. This is like Harrison Ford, he’s like 70 years old right? But then as I was watching it, it was like, he’s actually playing the game, hitting the buttons. He’s actually into it enough that he’s having a hard time talking at the same time. That made me think he’s actually playing cause they are asking him questions and he’s looking at the game doing stuff and like trying to respond at the same time just like you would if you were actually playing. That was really cool. I was like ‘wow, Harrison Ford’. Just that fact he’s playing the game.”

There a spoiler in the video, if you watch and listen carefully. Richmond explains “There’s this moment at the end where he’s playing the cargo plane sequence and you fall out of the plane. You hear him go ‘Oh, I’m dead.’ He says that, like ‘I’m dead.’ They don’t show what happens as we haven’t ever shown that because we don’t want to spoil it for the players but you can hear what happens. Then just see this big smile on his face, it’s totally genuine and my heart melted. I was like ‘OMG, Indiana Jones is smiling looking at Uncharted’. Amy [Hennig] wrote me and said ‘Dude, this is the best thing ever.’ It’s so flattering to see something like that and see a guy like that be enthralled by something we did is really, really nice.”

You’ll see more from this interview later on this week, where Richmond talks about the things that Naughty Dog have hidden in the game for players to discover.

Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception is released on the 2nd Nov on PlayStation 3.

Prey was a first-person shooter in which you controlled a character called Domasi “Tommy” Tawodi around an alien spacecraft in search of his abducted girlfriend and grandfather. The game featured tons of reality-bending portals, huge amounts of violence, guns, gore and some really clever set pieces. Prey was a surprisingly good game given how long it had been stuck in development. Rhinehart was the project lead and said that “it was fun to work on it and a huge learning experience because Prey came out in 2006 and started in 2001 and it was really a long project.”

One of my favourite moments is the time you find yourself on the surface of a planet in a display case. When I mentioned this particular scene to Rhinehart he did reveal that “you don’t get shrunk in Prey 2 at all [laughs]. There is some crazy stuff that happens throughout the game. Some of it’s dark, some of it’s kinda of funny, some of it is grim.”

When Prey 2 was shown off for the first time at E3 2011 it surprised many people, including me, with its striking visuals and open world gameplay. This was a big change from the first game. Rhinehart commented that the game “really gave us an opportunity to explore other parts of the Prey universe and kind of gave us a blank cheque to go what type of things we want to do in a sequel and open up the world not only for this sequel but for future games as well in the Prey universe.”

In this second game you also get to play a new character. A US Marshall called Killian Samuels. Rhinehart commented that “in Prey 1 Tommy was the hunted, in Prey 2 you get to be the hunter. You get to explore both sides of it.” So I asked him if Tommy, the main protagonist of Prey had a major role to play in the sequel. Rhineheart responded with “I can say it’s not just a cameo. He doesn’t just show up once. He is integral throughout the storyline you do run into him multiple times throughout the game. Part of the mystery of the game is uncovering what Killian and Tommy were up to before the game starts off because there are kind of 2 entry points to the game. There is the initial entry point where Killian is abducted and then there is a second entry point when he wakes up on Exodus and uncovering what he’s been up to on Exodus for several years.”

Rhineheart also spoke about the overarching plot which he said is “about a protagonist who has unfortunate circumstances that he’s under at the beginning and the world is kind of dark and full of shades of grey. No one is truly innocent. There isn’t necessarily full good guys or full bad guys, everyone kind of out for themselves. It’s about the player trying to make his part of the world better. That the core story that we are telling. It’s been an interesting challenge to stay true to that.”

Even with a new lead character and open world gameplay Rhinehart said that Human Head Studios are “definitely trying to appeal to Prey 1 fans but we are also trying to appeal to shooter fans. We’ve kept the game very accessible, very easy to play, very fun, visceral and exciting.” Prey 2 features a new cover system, that is easy to use and as Rhineheart says “it’s interesting because if you want to play the stop and pop and hunker down behind cover and stay there you can. We’ve built in systems where it is more advantageous to take cover, kill a few guys, move to another piece of cover, pop up, kill a few more guys and move around the world feeling really powerful and agile.”

Human Head Studios may also be out to scare the crap out players that suffer from vertigo as Rhinehart mentioned that “we just knew that a vertical world would be awesome, getting up high and looking down from these dizzying heights.”

If you want to see the game in action then take a look at the gameplay demo that was shown at E3 and Gamescom this year. It’s very cool.

Prey 2 will be released in 2012 on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC.

In Batman: Arkham Asylum you were restricted to the confines of the Asylum buildings and grounds in a sequence pre-determined by the underlying plot but Wellock says that “a key difference that the fans will experience in Arkham City is that in the beginning they can go where they want. We think that freedom is something that is really rewarding, especially as Batman.”

Rocksteady have also expanded on almost every aspect of Batman: Arkham Asylum. Wellock told me that Arkham City features “side-missions with Mr Zsasz, Calendar Man and we’ve just announced Deadshot. The Riddler has over 400 Riddler trophies in this one and then the chance to physically strangle that guy yourself! I think in terms of gameplay difference it is giving players freedom to decide how they want the story to unfold a little bit. Not so much with moral choices, punch this guy, don’t punch this guy, more in a you dictate the speed which you play through the game and that’s how you can end up with 40 hours to 100% the game.”

In order to deliver 40 hours worth of gameplay and a free-roaming Gotham City, Rocksteady Studios had to make some significant changes to its personnel numbers after developing Arkham Asylum. According to Vincent “at the end of Arkham Asylum we were around 60 odd. When I started it was 30. I was actually number 30 and now we are at 105 people. The environment team has almost doubled. Almost every single aspect of the team has had at least one or two guys added to it.”

Only 105 people made Arkham City? Wow. I actually expected the number to be a lot higher since they were developing a huge living, breathing Gotham City to get lost in. Impressive.

Even though Rocksteady Studios have been working on Arkham City for 2.5 years and have been jetting their personnel around the world to show off the game there still is a huge amount of enthusiasm and pride for both the game and the company. Wellock said “I think I will look back on this next year and feel as long as I work at Rocksteady or work in the industry that I was part of something really special and really big. Being able to represent the company online and at events is a proudest I’ve been in my career.”

Batman: Arkham City is released on the 21st Oct 2011 for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and on PC in Nov 2011.