Things are gaining momentum for WB Games Montreal’s Gotham Knights ahead of its October 25 release. This weekend, the studio debuted a new Batgirl trailer at San Diego Comic-Con, showcasing Barbara’s armored suit and special abilities, including a transforming weapon that switches effortlessly between a police baton and a set on nunchucks.
Batgirl, along with her Bat siblings Nightwing, Robin, and Redhood, have a history with the Gotham Knights’ main antagonist, the Court of Owls, a shadowy cabal of Gotham’s wealthy elite. The introduction of Court in 2011’s Batman #2 by Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo recontextualized everything we know about the history of Gotham City and the Bat family, whose lives, it turns out, have been influenced and manipulated by Court all along. .
While the Court of Owls has played a role outside of the comics, in both the live-action series Gotham and the DC Animated Universe movie Batman vs. Robin, Gotham Knights will expand the Court’s knowledge beyond any previous adaptation. In a roundtable at Comic-Con, I asked Gotham Knight’s creative director Patrick Redding about working with Scott Snyder to develop their own Court of Owls story without Batman himself to fall back on. Redding says that shortly after DC and Warner Brothers approved the Gotham Knights concept, he had the opportunity to sit down with Snyder to discuss his vision for the Court.
“I got to spend a day with him, gave him the first pitch beforehand, guided him through what we had in mind, gave him the overarching backbone of the storyline,” explains Redding. “It was fantastic. If you’ve ever watched Scott’s YouTube channel, you know he has no problem diving deep into storytelling or aspects of a particular world for 90 minutes, so to see him as having someone that we can bounce ideas off even for a single session was actually really powerful, helped us see and really understand the implications of killing Batman than anyone I’ve talked to outside of the team. “
Expanding the knowledge of the Court of Owls was necessary to tell the story of Gotham Knights, and while Redding and his team were determined to honor what Snyder and Capullo had originally created, they knew they had to take the concept much further. when customizing the villains for a game. Fortunately, Snyder was able to offer his perspective and some guidance.
“I think he felt there was a lot of room to play with this as an idea. Yes, we’re bringing certain iconic elements of his story to life. You will definitely recognize those elements when you see them. But at the same time, he understood , as someone who plays games, we should adapt certain ideas. How do claws work? Is there more than one type of claw? When he and Greg [Capullo] were working on the storyline, which could be handled in a more mysterious, shadowy way, with some sort of scope for how that unfolds over the course of the Talon’s history. For us, we had to solidify it in clear, clear buckets so that we could build it, so we could make it work and weigh it against the capabilities of our players. So I think it was super important to make sure we had a dialogue with Scott about that early on. It gave us an idea of the space we had to play with.”
Snyder also appeared on the Gotham Knights panel later in the day, reiterating that Gotham Knights took the Bat-Family and the Court of Owls in new and exciting directions. For Snyder, the Court of Owls partially represented the legacy of the Caped Crusader and the intimidation he felt to take on such a monolithic character as a new Batman writer. In Gotham Knights, it’s Bruce’s kids who have to take on that challenge. “We’re bigger than even your mentor,” Snyder said, mimicking the court. “Why do you think you can stop us?”
Gotham Knights is set to release October 25 on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. To learn more about Gotham Knights, check out our interview with Christopher Sean, who plays Nightwing in the game. He had surprisingly much to say about the size of Nightwing’s cheeks.
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