Gotham Knights Gets 10 New Minutes of Gameplay

In a new gameplay look, the developers at WB Montreal outline how Gotham Knights‘ open world works, along with how it scraps the old day/night cycle.

Fans are counting down the weeks until Gotham Knights, the latest open-world crime-fighting title from Arkham Origins developer WB Montreal, is released. While the game faced some delays back in 2021, Gotham Knights has recently moved up its release date, something that is almost unknown in the modern video game world, what with so many developers having to inform fans of the unfortunate decision to push a launch back. As the new release date for Gotham Knights looms, WB Games Montreal has been showing more and more of what fans can expect when they return to Gotham.

In a new 10-minute gameplay preview, Gotham Knights showed off its open world and how this version of Gotham will differ from the previous renditions fans have seen in the Arkham games. First, Game Director Geoff Ellenor discusses the way players will be able to explore almost all of Gotham Knights’ open world right from the beginning. It seems, from a quick look at the map, that Gotham is split up into five major districts, with most of those areas being explorable from near the start of the game.

Each open-world area will come with its own villains, activities, and characters for the player to interact with. Also, for anyone who wanted to see Gotham in daylight, they might be in for a bit of disappointment in Gotham Knights, as the game won’t have a traditional day/night cycle. Instead, when exploring the world, players will always be doing so at night, only seeing the sun when they return to the Belfry, which acts as the HQ for Nightwing, Robin, Red Hood, and Batgirl.

Rather than having a day/night cycle, Gotham Knights instead runs through a series of sequential nights, with new activities to do and crimes to fight occurring with the end of each day. These nights will also develop the stories of the villains in Gotham Knights, who give the player ongoing missions that they can engage with or completely leave alone should they wish. Each major villain will have their own Villain Night, which acts more as a cinematic mission where iconic nemeses of Batman enact their most dastardly schemes.

Of course, with Batman notably absent from Gotham Knights, many of the city’s villains will likely see an opportunity to go wild, creating as much chaos as they deem fit. However, according to WB Games Montreal, if the player manages to collect enough information on their quarry, they can take them down even during a Villain Night.

Gotham Knights is set to release on October 21, 2022, for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.