That scrapped Arkham Knight sequel game looks FANTASTIC. I know I’m in the minority in liking Damian, but Terry McGinnis would not make sense in the Arkham-verse. Arkham Knight is my favorite game of the Rocksteady trilogy, but I was underwhelmed with the Jason Todd reveal, due to the fact that he was never even mentioned in the first three games.
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I don’t really agree with that. I’m pretty sure Joker talked about killing Robins in Asylum/City, not to mention that since there are so many other nods to previous Batman stories in the Arkhamverse, it would be weird if Death in the Family was the sole exception.
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Todd is definitely mentioned in the previous Arkham games, I think all of them but Origins. You just have to do all the side quests and riddle solving.
Also as far as I know there never was a scrapped Arkham game, it was always a DC property game not based on Batman, which is still in development
The only time I can ever remember Jason even being hinted at in Asylum or City was in a DLC challenge map for City. If you play as Robin, one of Joker’s lines at the start is something like, “Wait, didn’t I kill you already?” Outside of that, I’m pretty sure there’s nothing else, which would mean that Knight was the first time Jason was specifically mentioned in the Arkhamverse
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Right I remember that.
But Todd was mentioned for sure more than that, I did everything. And that dlc was hard to miss as it was sold attached to all new copies of the game, I would argue it counts. But there were definitely at least 4 mentions of him between City and Asylum.
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Where were those specifically? Between what I remember and what I just double checked by looking up, that one allusion in City seems to be all there is of Jason pre-Knight
in Arkham asylum there’s a torture portrait in joker’s cell. There are more hardcore Easter eggs and hard finds that I wandered upon. I haven’t played the games in forever but you could probably just Google around. I remember a riddle being answered with a reference to Todd
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Did not know there was Todd stuff in the other 2. Looks like I may have to give them a replay now.
Also did here about this game. It seemed interesting and definitely would have played it if it happened
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I can see why that could be interpreted as a Jason Todd easter egg, but I’d argue that it has less to do w/ him than Joker’s line in the City challenge map. You could just as easily interpret that as a reference to when Joker was the Red Hood. At the end of the day, even w/ these really small references, Rocksteady simply wrote themselves into a corner by not mentioning Jason by name in either of the previous 2 games. I objectively like Jason as the Knight, but from a storytelling perspective, it just forced them to make the reveal super obvious w/ the buildup
No, you really can’t because there’s a dead guy. At the bottom of the picture there is a guy would was beaten and stabbed while wearing the hood. It’s an obvious Todd reference. Joker doesn’t actually literally die wearing the hood, Jason does. It’s a mini-narrative. Honestly you have to look at the picture for a while to get anything out of it l so I see why you are jumping to conclusions.
wrote themselves into a corner…by not writing?
I’m not gonna say that you shouldn’t be able to interpret that as a reference to Jason, but that picture is abstract and messy enough that you really can’t say that there’s anything objectively obvious about it, which I’m sure was the point
It’s a figure of speech. I just meant that because they hadn’t explicitly established Jason as a part of the Arkhamverse before Knight, it made it that much harder to make Jason the Knight. You can’t assume that everyone playing knows about Jason Todd already, so they had to establish him as part of that universe to make the reveal work, but only had that one game to do it, which made it super obvious. I don’t think it was impossible for them to have made the reveal work in the game given the circumstances, it just kinda sucks that they didn’t have the foresight to establish him earlier and make for a smoother mystery
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Yeah I can agree that the story was super obvious for hardcore fans, but I think that there being a vengeful Robin who died because of Bruce is actually a pretty surprising plot twist to novice fans.
Part of the excitement is seeing the narrative unravel slowly, knowing that Jason gets captured and dies.
And the big surprise is ‘oh, he died because of Bruce’s bad decision making, oh and guess what, he’s back from the grave and he’s out for revenge on the Batman…and The Joker’. I remember it feeling very dramatic. I liked it a lot.
I think all stories need exposition and a twist should never come out of left field. So if he was mentioned more in prior games, but less in this Arkham Knight where he would be serving the role of primary villain, I feel like the surprise would have really thrown off a lot of people, not just amateur comic fans but also new players of the game series. I feel it is a trademark of good and accessible writing to make 1 Whole Story a microverse within itself-- I feel a sequel always needs to feature its own exposition. Cheap surprises are cheap.
I thought the mystery was “smooth.” And it’s not practical to plan ahead on a project which might not actually earn a sequel…mind the fact that the Arkhamverse to begin with (what the games are based on) is super Batman centric.
I would instead argue that Rocksteady focusing so much on Joker and Batman, thus telling such a concise story of only one specific point in time, actually prevented Rockstead from writing themselves into a hole (a place with too many boundaries to obey which restrains creativity).
Sidenote on the Arkham Art, looks legit. Maybe WBM just realized they should ‘stick with the Arkhamverse rather than reboot the franchise’ a few years back and so decided to go with The Court of Owls.
I wanted that Damian Wayne game. 
