Batman: Arkham City is single player only!

[Taustin Powers]

Our thought process behind this was fairly simple: when we investigated adding multiplayer we asked, "If we use all of the energy that is required to create multiplayer and instead focus this on the single player, would that deliver a better overall game?"

With the game now coming to the final stages, I can honestly say it would not have been possible to deliver Arkham City the way we wanted to if we'd have added multiplayer.

So it might not be the fashionable choice, it might not get us an extra tick on the box, but we are convinced, and we hope that gamers will agree when they get to play the finished game, that we have made the right decision.

http://uk.ps3.ign.com/articles/114/1149377p2.html

Good to know there are still smart people out there - I applaud their decision!

 

[rezenclowd3]

Oh good. However I would not mind if they allowed 2 players on the same console for the challenges.

 

[alukado]

Yep , definitely a smart decision .

 

[Antares]

I am extremely happy with this. Especially, since I rarely play the multiplayer portion of games. Single player is where it's at.

 

[Liquorpuki]

I can't understand why they couldn't have done both

 

[MRU]

Delighted.

Regardless of claims of 'being able to deliver great single and multiplayer experiences'... most games when they do it dilutes one or the other.

What the heck does a game of this nature really need multiplayer for anyway? I'd rather they stick to their guns and deliver a fantastic and memorable single player game rather than split the development team and dilute the whole...

 

[Tonepoet]

I can't understand why they couldn't have done both

There could be a few reasons:

The first is that they don't want to have multiplayer because they'd have to tweak the game in some way so that it's challenging enough to be fun on multiplayer mode but not so challenging that 1 player mode is unbeatable. It's true that they could just try to design it solely around 1p, shoehorn in a Robin player anyway for goofing off purposes and technically not be much worse off for the wear but people would complain about a lack of polish in multiplayer mode and knock off points from the reviews for it. Fair enough since multiplayer functionality typically has to be advertised, so including a half-hearted multiplayer might dishonestly hype customers up for something that may or mayn't be all that great.

The second is that customizing the storyline for each and every individual character that can be in the group is difficult. If they want a 4 player game, that's either 4 characters that can't be included in any prerendered cutscene, four times the prerendered cutscenes or disconnection of the cutscenes from the game play, which ruins immersion. If you have a purely singleplayer game, you can do whatever you want with the characters in whichever order unless you want to go the multiple perspectives of the same story route a-la Sonic Adventure, which is still easier to pull off in single player mode to manage time line conflict.

Some of this could be avoided by having special a-la-cart multiplayer levels, like the Gamecube ports of the Sonic Adventure games. It's fun if there's not much more work to do but for an initial effort, why bother with something so disjointed from the rest of the game when you could make the game itself simply better with the time and resources spent doing this to the same or greater benefit? Commercial games work with limited schedules and budgets, so ultimately you have to decide where your resources are best spent and this is a rather in depth addition.

I could be overlooking something else since I'm not a game designer but hopefully this reasoning will provides some sufficiently satisfactory insight on the issue.