Though we stumble into another series of bitrate problems in this stream, the real technical difficulty is my own brain. My mind is one of digressions, and it is because I am easily distracted by the smallest threads. In regards to streaming, my thoughts can immediately be interrupted by trying to work out the problem immediately in front of me. Even when I’m trying to focus on finally making my point to Shamus regarding proportions of objects in the Arkham series level design, I am frequently tugging on every little thread that distracts from my attention within the game world.

I can only imagine how frustrating it is to be the person I’m trying to speak with in these circumstances, let alone the person having to watch and listen. Over a year later I’m listening to myself and all I can think is “get to the point already!”

It really is a curiosity to see what happens when a game with a specific art team and style is passed off to an entirely different team now tasked with recreating that style, but are instructed to do so on a schedule. As we can see with Gotham Knights, Warner Bros. Interactive Montreal pulled off a far more consistent, if less imaginative, world since they were allowed to define their interpretation of Gotham from the ground up. Here, however, they may not have had enough time to properly study and consult Rocksteady’s own concept art and approach to the world of Gotham, and as such we see objects in strange proportions that result in a world that never quite feels right.

Another item that we observed, and was quite baffling to confront, was the notion that cardboard cannot be broken without explosives. I had just played Arkham City earlier that year, and so I was used to punching through cardboard and thin wooden panels with ease. To find that such thin layers of wood were treated no differently than cement in Arkham Origins was baffling, not only forcing me to question the game’s logic within its franchise, but the logic within real world plausibility. Batman can snap femurs without breaking into a sweat, yet he can’t shove his fist through this wood? He has to lay down plastic explosives? Isn’t that a bit of overkill?

I don’t want to make accusations regarding the talent of the development team. There had to have been employees looking at this part of the level and thinking it doesn’t make sense. I can only imagine this was waved off by the lead designers because they were under a tight schedule with producers from Warner Bros. Interactive HQ breathing down their necks and they just needed to hit the next milestone. Unfortunately, the end result is a large population of players that now doubt the talent, intelligence, and capabilities of the developer. This is the sort of thing that prevents someone from eagerly purchasing or pre-ordering your next game at full price. This instead communicates that the next game by this studio is best purchased on sale, if at all.

Then again, one of our viewers had found documentation stating the game was finished a year early and the final year was spent on polish. Aside from technical prowess, nothing about this game feels like it got a spare three-hundred and sixty-five days polish. If that were the case then so many of these little details would not be a present problem. That is, unless the studio really isn’t that remarkable. An odd thing to say when every game that manages to release in a playable state is a miraculous accomplishment in its own right, but the inability to decipher the map, little issues in regards to plausibility in the world design, and the frustrations of combat encounters and other little frustrations suggest a game without polish.

Of course, Arkham Origins shipped with a multiplayer mode, so who knows how much polish went to the single player versus the competitive multiplayer.

The frustrating conclusion to this stream is a battle with Copperhead, loosely recycling concepts that were used in Al Ghul’s own fight in Arkham City. Unlike that battle, however, the fight with Copperhead is just as opaque as Deathstroke’s. You must pummel these illusory visions of the boss, their health bar going down seemingly at random. If the health bar went down only after you concluded a phase by beating down the lone Copperhead left, then the message would be clear: defeat all the illusions. That the health bar can instead lose a massive chunk in the middle of a phase leads the player to believe there’s a “real” Copperhead amidst the crowd, despite there being no hint to differentiate the targets.

Then there’s Copperhead’s speedy strike in the final phase that seemingly can only be avoided by dodging, meaning interrupting any offensive action against the illusions and typically losing one’s combo. Perhaps there’s some gadget that can be used to halt her charge, but I had no memory for all the shortcut commands to test such a thing out. Even then, the game’s auto-targeting has been so unreliable the entire game that I would not trust it to strike the correct manifestation of Copperhead.

The frustration will continue next week. In the meantime, be sure to check out what Shamus had to say on his blog regarding the cut-scenes.