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Rocksteady Game Director, Sefton Hill lays out the structure of Batman: Arkham City

By on March 18, 2011
The European community manager of Rocksteady Studios, SarahMay, was kind enough to ask Rocksteady’s Game Director, Sefton Hill, about the game’s structure and play time and posted his answer in Rocksteady’s forum. According to Sefton, although Batman: Arkham City was designed to be story driven, it still remains an open world game. The storyline lasts 12-15 hours and if you want to complete the side-quests, it will take you around 25-30 hours. Now that’s great for an action-adventure game, no? You can read Sefton’s full statement after the jump!
Hi all,
SarahMay has asked me to put down a few words about the game’s structure  and play time as there are a lot of questions out there about this.
Batman: Arkham City’s story mode was designed to be story driven while  remaining open world as we felt there was a really interesting space in  between the two types of play. There is a main storyline (don’t worry –  no spoilers here!) which will take around 12-15 hours to complete, but  this is less than half of the game.
In addition to this there are the new Arkham City Missions. These tell  the story of what happens when Gotham’s most notorious super villains  are locked up together. These run concurrently to the main story and can  be tackled whenever you find them in the city streets. Some of my  favourite moments are in these missions, including tracking down a  deranged serial killer, solving a murder mystery, forming an alliance  with a one-time villain and confronting the Riddler as he attempts to  prove once and for all he is better than Batman.
We’ve probably spent as much time creating the Arkham City Missions, and  bringing the world to life, as we have on the main storyline and I  think the choice of what to solve and where to go at any time gives the  game a unique feeling.

Then of course there are the riddles and secrets to solve. We’ve had  great fun adding these to streets of Arkham City. Our goal was always to  create the most interesting and richly detailed open world game ever,  and these make it rewarding to explore every square inch of the city.  And Riddler has definitely raised his game this time. It won’t just be a  simple case of finding the secrets. Nearly every secret requires you to  use your gadgets in inventive and interesting ways.
Completing all of these will take around another 12-15 hours of play bringing the story mode time up to around 25-30 hours.
All that and I haven’t even got on to the new, upgraded challenge mode…
We’re currently all working like crazy to polish Arkham City as much as possible and I can’t wait until you all get to play it.
Speak to you soon,
Sefton

About David Scarpitta

I am a critical guy, and love to review and give my professional opinion on just about anything. Though have a love for tech/gaming and music alongside the cinema. You can catch me consulting and developing the net any day of the week.