Gotham Knights Has to Nail the Loot Grind

Gotham Knights is shaping up in its final months before release, but only so much has still been shared. Gotham Knights’ marketing has almost exclusively leaned toward getting to know WB Games Montreal’s take on the Bat Family, as well as splicing in a bunch of gameplay now through individual character spotlights. Some fans are pleased with how Gotham Knights currently looks while others are not, but fans' shared concerns have been sound, such as how combat is paced and how crime scene puzzles are designed in Gotham Knights.

One other concern about Gotham Knights is that its moment-to-moment gameplay may be reduced to a loot grind, particularly in players’ open-world leisure or pursuit of new suit skins. Indeed, most open-world action-RPGs feel the need to populate their environments with filler content in order to occupy each area, where much of the game’s content can result in an unsatisfying bloat. If Gotham Knights does revolve around a loot grind in its open-world it may not necessarily be a detriment, but it will need to make its grind exceptionally engaging and rewarding if so.

Random Crimes in Gotham Knights Look Serviceable

Gotham Knights’ Nightwing and Red Hood gameplay walkthrough gave fans a look at two distinct criminal activities that players will come across in their patrols in Gotham City. One crime was an Illegal Hack, while the other was an Illegal Shipment.

The former tasks players with simply taking out a small group of enemies while they attempt to hack a remote device, though there are only about five enemies players need to contend with and the hacking percentage increases too slowly for there to be any sense of urgency. The latter tasks players with pursuing a vehicle, upending it upon contact, and fighting the enemies that scramble out from it.

These random crimes are cookie-cutter, mimicking the same random crimes that players can expect out of most open-world action games from DC or Marvel. But because of Gotham Knights’ combat and peculiar enemy AI, these crimes seem much more dogged or poorly paced. Having only a handful of enemies per random crime seems lackluster, but it may also be due to how spaced out they are and how tanky each enemy appears.

Neither of the previously revealed random crimes in Gotham Knights look difficult or interesting, and the worry is that the rest of the game’s other crimes and quests will look as mediocre as these. It is made clear that the Regulators and other faction gangs will be rampant in Gotham Knights, and whether they saturate the open-world with fun activities or a mindless loot grind is yet to be discerned.

Loot Seems Overabundant and Potentially Tacky in Gotham Knights

How Gotham Knights currently looks from an artistic or aesthetic perspective is completely impressionistic. It should also be noted that Game Director Geoff Ellenor has previously stated that players are able to customize how Gotham Knights’ UI and HUD look in-game, so how the game looks in certain gameplay presentations may not be how it looks for every player.

That said, Gotham Knights has been shown to feature massive and interpolative pick-ups in the environment that drop from defeated enemies. This is seen most prominently in gameplay for Gotham Knights’ Red Hood, where a blue pistol icon pick-up appears that is almost as large as Red Hood himself, as well as a bunch of tiny red magnifying glasses and other miscellaneous pick-up resources that fly over and absorb into the character when they are nearby.

Gotham Knights’ workbench menus have been glossed over without a particular deep-dive into how monotonous or arduous it will be to accumulate enough resources to craft anything. Once these resources, mods, and other items are described in full, it will be easier to make an impression on how this RPG design may play out for the duration of Gotham Knights’ quests.

But at the moment, the screen quickly fills with multiple pick-ups and the workbench’s crafting tab features a list of excessive materials that will hopefully not be tiresome to micromanage. Players who want certain gear, suits, colorways, and other craftables may be happy to indulge in these loot grinds, but Gotham Knights should not have to resort to tedious activities that players need to complete ad nauseam for their desired aesthetics.

Gotham Knights’ Loot Grind Needs to Be Met with Exceptional Quests

It is difficult at the moment to say how enthralling side quests will be in Gotham Knights since WB Games Montreal has only shared a look at fragmented parts of one in a pre-alpha build. This side quest was shown in the first official gameplay reveal for Gotham Knights, taking place “halfway through the Mr. Freeze storyline,” and may be altered drastically between when it was shown and when the game actually releases.

Mr. Freeze’s role in Gotham Knights contributes to villain crime subplots that feature supplementary antagonists, and it is likely that these villain crimes will be the most rewarding for fans of the mythology. Similarly, there may be other crimes or quests that do not involve villains that will also need to be exceptional and engaging in order to at least mask the idea that they are filler missions designed to be mundane loot grinds.

Further, certain quests will have a different base difficulty in relation to the player’s current level, as suggested by the game’s open-world menu, and this may also have an effect on how much the player earns from each quest. Because villain crimes actually involve the player pursuing and fighting super-villains, there is a considerable likelihood that they will be the most fun.

Besides the Court of Owls, no other big-name antagonists have been officially revealed yet besides the Penguin, who may only be in Gotham Knights in an expository role and not as an antagonist who players fight in his own villain crime storyline. But it is in these villain crimes that Gotham Knights hopefully introduces dynamic antagonists to make quests as entertaining as possible amidst its RPG progression.

Gotham Knights is scheduled to release on October 25 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.

MORE: Gotham Knights' Combat Has One Funny Benefit Over the Arkhamverse's Freeflow