Rocksteady’s latest Batman: Arkham Knight is the first game in the series to receive an ‘M’ for mature rating after Arkham Asylum and Arkham Origins both received ‘T’ for teen.
In an interview with IGN, Sefton Hill, founder of Rocksteady and game director for ‘Knight’, talked in detail about the game and its rating.
“As the end of the trilogy, we have every villain in Gotham working together to destroy Batman,” Hill said. Hill reinforced that the ‘M’ rating was not necessarily a goal for the team during development.
“We’re not including gratuitous blood or swearing,” he said. “We want to deliver a true end with no compromises, and it takes us to some dark places.”
Hill noted an ‘M’ rating could affect those able to buy the game, but in the end, the team focused on the story and gameplay they felt the series and fans deserved.
“I’m not blind to the fact that [the M rating] does mean some fans will miss out,” he said. “It would have been wrong to water down the game and deliver a story we didn’t believe in to keep the game “mass market” or enable it for more people. We feel that’s the wrong way to go about it. We said we love the story and we don’t want to jepoardize that.”
Hill revealed that early in game development, the team received an email from Warner Bros. addressing scenes they felt would cause “issues”.
“I was really freaked out because the solution was to lose the scenes,” Hill said. “But they were key scenes! We couldn’t lose them! I got the email. I’m freaked out. I thought this was going to destroy the game, everything I’m passionate about… I was building myself up for this big argument. I didn’t get much sleep.”
Hill implied the scenes are still included in the game after a phone call with the VP of production at DC Comics asked him “what he wanted to do.”
Batman: Arkham Knight comes to PS4, Xbox One, and PC on June 2 – It’s one of our most anticipated games of 2015.