Batman Arkham Origins Blew Me Away

[Danbo Jambo]

Arkham City was the stuff that made the series great. I just don't feel Arkham Asylum was particularly good. It was way too...artificial.
Oh, now I'm in the lava world. Next is the ice world. Then Bowser's castle. It was very video gamey and forced.

Arkham City was more like an actual microcosm of Batman's world, where everything is within a part of Gotham, and the vague boundaries are determined by being the turf of one villain or another. Nothing went full crazy theme until you battled your way into the heart of each villain's lair.

I very much hope Arkham Knight is the entirety of Gotham with lots of regular Gotham and civilians, and then the territories of the villains where they actually want to be - not just locked inside the weird little Arkham City portion.
Make Batman really use his investigative skills to figure out where to go and who to talk to.
Arkham Asylum was lazy. You just walked into the next hallway to go to the sky world and fight the next Koopaling.

I wouldn't say a game being linear and based around a tight, plot driven core is lazy. Remember, Asylum was the starting point for everything else to evolve, it would have been a big ask for the devs to create something like City off the bat to start with (excuse the co-incidental pun).

It's a bit like saying "flipping heck, here's a baddie, here's a goodie, there's a herione, goodie defeats baddie........the original Star Wars is another bland sci-fi flick"

 

[Darth Rosenberg]

When you actually isolate the game itself as a stand alone game to play, and play it like I did - not paying attention to any of the promotion and not expecting anything in particular - it's a brilliant stand alone game.

You could say the same about Dark Souls 2: 'great game in its own right - why would anyone ever dare question it!'. But it's a needless rehash with less polish and thought compared to what came before.

I'm not a Batman fan in the slightest (apart from maybe Nolan/Bale/Zimmer/Pfister's version), and so it took me a while to bother checking out Asylum. I enjoyed it enough to want to play City, and that became one of my most admired games of last gen, in terms of sheer polish, focus, and precision mechanics (the challenge rooms elevated its combat to something akin to score attack genius).

Origins? I ignored, and will always do so. Not the same dev, so I have no reason to trust 'em. Couldn't give a stuff about half-arsed prequel timelines - especially given how City had the guts to make certain plot events stick (ergo winding back the clock felt pathetically conservative and not at all interesting). Add to that the other points raised by people who sat through it (re starting gear, waste of origin potential, more bugs, etc), and I think it deserves all the criticism it got, and then some.

Can a prequel cash-in by a lesser dev be good 'in its own right', removed out of all context that may otherwise cast it in a less favourable light? Sure, why not. But Asylum and City deserved better, and more. Hopefully, Rocksteady and Arkham Knight will do the IP justice.

 

[Danbo Jambo]

You could say the same about Dark Souls 2: 'great game in its own right - why would anyone ever dare question it!'. But it's a needless rehash with less polish and thought compared to what came before.

I'm not a Batman fan in the slightest (apart from maybe Nolan/Bale/Zimmer/Pfister's version), and so it took me a while to bother checking out Asylum. I enjoyed it enough to want to play City, and that became one of my most admired games of last gen, in terms of sheer polish, focus, and precision mechanics (the challenge rooms elevated its combat to something akin to score attack genius).

Origins? I ignored, and will always do so. Not the same dev, so I have no reason to trust 'em. Couldn't give a stuff about half-arsed prequel timelines - especially given how City had the guts to make certain plot events stick (ergo winding back the clock felt pathetically conservative and not at all interesting). Add to that the other points raised by people who sat through it (re starting gear, waste of origin potential, more bugs, etc), and I think it deserves all the criticism it got, and then some.

Can a prequel cash-in by a lesser dev be good 'in its own right', removed out of all context that may otherwise cast it in a less favourable light? Sure, why not. But Asylum and City deserved better, and more. Hopefully, Rocksteady and Arkham Knight will do the IP justice.

That's fair enough, but I'd say you're talking yourself out of a good experience, based on little moree than speculation. Personally I think, at the price it's now available at, it's worth a punt. I had very similar thoughts, and because of other sequals hung fire playing, but I was still open to trying it and glad that I did.

But each to their own.

 

[asdfen]

if by "Batman Arkham Origins Blew Me Away" you meant how horrible the game was than yes it blew me away too.

I am guessing you have rcently acquiere the game and patched it before playing it and luckly didnt exprience any game breaking bugs while playng it on your hardware like I have. I had to restart the game from mid point/end point multiple tims before I was able to complete it without issue and even sparing all that the game was the worse than its predcsors.