Telltale Batman

batman

Telltale continues to do their own interpretations of popular IPs with the announcement of “Batman – A Telltale Games Series” back in December.  The teaser trailer that was released gave us only a glimpse of the tone we can expect from the series, and little on the story or characters involved. This got me thinking about what I wanted out of this game.

Telltale has a reputation for focusing on character development, emotions, and choices with consequences and impact on the story. Telltale is all about thoroughbatman exposition, conversation/interrogation, and detection. The combination of Telltale and Batman seems like a natural team that can create something great.

I hope that they avoid having any sort of origins with the death of Thomas and Martha Wayne. Everyone knows about Batman’s origins, even people who don’t read comics. It is a part of pop culture and would only slow down the story.

Something that we haven’t seen in great detail in either the recent movies or video games is a progression of the Bruce Wayne character. Being that Telltale is all about character interactions, development, and emotion, it’s an opportunity to build a solid Bruce Wayne.

batmanAnother big part of Batman and a defining characteristic is that he is known as the “world’s greatest detective”. There were some good uses of detective mechanics in the Rocksteady’s Arkham games but it never felt like a really important part of the experience. Telltale has shown a proclivity and capability for investigative aspects with their interpretation of another comic (Fables) in the Wolf Among Us. This has a lot of potential to take what they did in that game in scanning areas for clues, and conducting interrogations, but bringing it to another level.

This may be a bold stance, but The Joker is great – one of my favorite villains. Despite that I wouldn’t mind seeing some underrepresented Batman villains in the main antagonist role. It would be nice to explore some lesser known and underrated villains to break of the cycle of Scarecrow, Penguin, Joker, Mr. Freeze, etc. There is a reason they are so popular and perhaps they or other villains can have smaller moments along the episodic journey, but it should have a newer villain that propels the larger continuous arc throughout the entire series.

Although there are plenty of Batman stories to pick from I wouldn’t be opposed to a completely unique story. Telltale created their own story and cast of batmancharacters in the Game of Thrones adaptation and really took an interest in the material to understand how new ideas could weave into the established world. I think they could do the same for Batman.

The interesting thing they could do with an existing story is to tell it as it is but allow the player to follow it or derail it with their decisions. They can take a classic Batman story and give you the option to follow the standard outcome or discover what might have happened in that situation had a different choice been made.

At the end of the day, I have trust in Telltale to do the Batman story justice and I hope they do something that is not entirely conventional or a reiteration of recent ideas. If all else fails, I hope I can at least have a dialogue option to say, at least once: “I’M BATMAN”.

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