MINOR SPOILERS POSSIBLEIt's not unusual for a major launch to receive some form of art book, strategy guide, or compendium, but Gotham Knights' is unusual in that it does all three and more. The Gotham Knights Collector's Compendium gives a close look at the art of Gotham City and so on, the concepts of various weapons and items, and a look at the early characters, while offering strategy for completing every mission in Gotham Knights. It throws in some lore on top of that and adds plenty of development insights to top it off.

Really, it's pretty clear that, for any major DC fan, Gotham Knights' Collector's Compendium is a must-buy. Even for those who have beaten the game, with the aforementioned strategy elements consuming much of the book, there is so much here that offers context to the game in unique ways. This Collector's Compendium is an all-in-one, and it's clear that it's all-in on the game, with its development insights perhaps being its stand-out feature.

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Gotham Knights Collector's Compendium on the Game's Origins, Batcave

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While the book is filled with Gotham Knights development content, perhaps the most interesting details come in for the game's pitch and design of the bat cave. There's plenty to be more learned, but these snippets really show how involved the development process can be. After all, it's pretty clear that beginning Gotham Knights by killing Batman is a bold choice and perhaps even a hard sell. To bring the wider team onboard, this Collector's Compendium reveals that creative director Patrick Redding and concept artist Manuel Vallelunga created a 12-page comic titled Code Black, focused on the battle between Batman and Ra's al Ghul as seen in the beginning of the game. It reveals that this was shown early in production as an internal pitch piece, to convince everyone this was the right choice.

The Collector's Compendium contains what seems like two pages of panels of this comic, and it goes on to share just how hard the development team worked on bringing this world of Batman to life (even if they killed him in the process). But it's not just in pitching the game, but the sheer amount of attention to detail in everything in the game is shown through these development insights. Anyone who has beaten the game knows they visit the Batcave a grand total of two times, but the art and insight shared in the book shows how much time and care WB Games Montreal put into creating this version of the Batcave.

Gotham Knights' Batcave features a ton of memorabilia from Batman's adventures, adjusted for the tone of the game but fit perfectly to their inspirations. The Batwing, T-Rex (from Dinosaur Island), Joker card (from the Clown Prince of Crime's lair), giant penny (acquired by Batman after a heist by Penny Plunderer gone wrong), and Riddler Question mark were all derived from past comic book depictions of the location, as well as cases Batman personally worked on. These choices were to give the short-lived Batcave in Gotham Knights a sense of history. The Concept art went as deep as showing how the Wayne Manor and Batcave were connected, including rooms that would never be shown in the game. The Batcomputer was designed to have this real sense of its use, including an Easter egg for the Justice League, and the Batmobile and Batwing were designed around some of the most recent comic book interpretations of these rides.

If the Batcave got this much attention, it shows just how deep development on every aspect of the game, including Gotham Knights' Belfry, was. These insights and many, many more make Gotham Knights Collector's Compendium more than a worthwhile perusal.

Gotham Knights Collector's Compendium and Goals of the Game

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Furthermore, it's not often that gamers are able to hear from developers and learn how they approach the game. This Collector's Compendium does just that, offering a section where various developers explain their goals for the game. As many know, game development is a strenuous process often requiring coordination between dozens, scores, or hundreds of people across a variety of departments, and these goals reflect how each department had to accomplish its task while staying in line with another. Although this is by no means comprehensive, here's a cursory glance at some of the big goals of Gotham Knights.

Creative Director Patrick Redding:

Our first priority, no question, was to make all four of the Knights aspirational, powerful, and distinct in how they play...

...If the heroes represent one pillar of the game, then another is the enemies they fight. Fighting crime in Gotham City can’t be like anywhere else. We need a particular class of adversary. We need villains who are distorted reflections of the ideals embodied by the hero: the wildcard, the monster, the mad scientist...

...Finally, there’s Gotham City itself. Gotham Knights is really about what happens when the status quo is disrupted...For players to really live that, we needed to drop them into an ecosystem where everyday Gothamites struggle to survive, and let them explore a Gotham City with distinct neighborhoods and lots of surprises...

Narrative Director Ann Lemay:

One of the main goals of the narrative team with this game, beyond supporting the gameplay pillars, was to really bring to life the ties of the Batman Family through the characters and their interactions with each other...

Cinematic Director Wilson Mui:

To keep our fans excited and engaged, it was clear to me early on that we needed Gotham Knights to hit several challenging goals with the cinematics: Create engaging and emotional storytelling via humanizing character moments, make our characters (including our villains!) dynamic and believable with evolving character arcs, respectfully sending off Batman in his last moments and segue into the continued stories of the Batman Family, and visually push our cinematic storytelling onscreen to make our mark.

Gotham Knights is available now on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X.

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