We’ve been hard on the six-month downloadable content roll-out for Batman Arkham Knight, because, so far, it just hasn’t been that good. The newest morsel, released yesterday, isn’t much of an improvement, but this month does bring promise of a potential turnaround.
Yesterday’s addition was a $US1.99, 76.2MB bundle of extra battle maps called the Crime Fighter Challenge Pack 1:
It’s OK, I guess. I captured footage of the start of each of the six challenge missions here so you can get a sense of what’s being offered:
If it looks like more of the same, well, it is. Arkham Knight already has more than a dozen challenge maps and the areas these new ones are set in don’t appear to be new. The novelty here is that some of these challenges are designed for you to play as Robin, Nightwing or Catwoman. You get what you pay for, and maybe for $US2 you can’t expect much more.
You might have expected a game as polished and as long-in-development as Arkham Knight — a game developed with clear Game of the Year aspirations — to have something great in its DLC offering. Not yet. But maybe that’s coming soon.
Publisher Warner Bros. has indicated that September will see the release of two more pieces of DLC for Arkham Knight, a new Batmobile skin + racing tracks…
… and an adventure for Nightwing called GCPD lockdown.
The latter may tell the tale of the game’s six-month DLC plan, for good or ill. GCPD Lockdown ould be as thin and ultimately dissatisfying as the Arkham Knight side adventures already released for the game, the ones that let you play as the Harley Quinn, Red Hood and Batgirl, and all of which one of our in-house Arkham experts played and panned for being dull. On the other hand, it’s the first major piece of DLC for the game that will have been made by Rocksteady, the studio behind the base game. The other DLC adventures were made by WB Montreal, a studio that has produced some good stuff, but just not good DLC for this game.
Beyond the Nightwing DLC, Arkham Knight is supposed to eventually get something called The Season of Infamy, a villain-centric expansion that could make this six-month-DLC-$US40-Season-Pass program all worth it, or could just give us a better phrase with which to describe this entire six month endeavour. Hoping for the former.
Comments
16 responses to “Batman Arkham Knight DLC Still At A Drip-Feed, Still Needs Something Great”
It’s weird. I played Knight incessantly for the first week or so, yet haven’t finished the main campaign. I’m right near the end – but haven’t completed the side quests or (even close to) obtained all the Riddler trophies.
I got it into my head that I wanted to 100% it before starting that last mission, as I did with City, and don’t want to leave that behind.
I may never finish it.
This one isn’t anywhere near as painful to 100% as City was. They went way overboard with the Riddler stuff in Arkham City. They have cut it down to something more manageable in Arkham Knight.
The most annoying part for me was revealing all of the locations on the map by tracking down the informants.
Fuxking racetracks. That’s the last thing this game needs.
And still no major update for all it’s glitches
I didn’t notice any real major glitches on the PS4, aside from one moment where I somehow got stuck in an endless falling animation in between a fence and another object, but I was able to break out of that by tethering onto another building.
PS4 and Xbox versions didn’t suffer from the same glitches as PC 🙂
All i want is to run around the city as the alternate characters. Batman is great, but i want to do some Robin or Nightwing shenanigans that aren’t limited to single encounters.
So it’s as crappy as the dlc for the previous games. Glad I didn’t shell out for it this time.
If you’re expecting anything more than the Batgirl one, you’ll be disappointed, it’ll probably be somewhere between the Batgirl DLC and the earlier two (which were both pre-order bonus packs).
Regardless, the Batgirl dlc was fine, it was only played and panned because the ‘Kotaku experts’ expected a full new game experience as a $10-$15 dlc
Actually i think its been poo pooed because many fans were hoping to play the scenario (is it killing joke? I cant remember sorry) where bat girl loses to joker and gets crippled, becoming oracle. It wouldnt have been hard to end the dlc that way n it would have done so much to win over bat fans. Little bits of detail like that go along way. Oh and it was pretty fkn boring and generic as missions go too.
A pretty good case against Season Passes…
I might be nitpicking, but the whole blue forcefield barrier around the AR challenges makes it feel tacky. I had so much fun with the AC challenge maps, but it’s not as fun with these AR challenges. Locations perhaps? I don’t know. Probably just me I guess.
Any news on the PC version’s “August” patch?
Actually.. found the answer on US Kotaku.. lol
http://kotaku.com/arkham-knight-pc-patch-briefly-appears-and-early-repor-1728346453
have they included any actually challenge maps like City/Origins have yet? Or still just those lame tiny and forcefield ones in game? This is the first Arkham game I have not touched at all since finishing the game because they miss this core feature
Playing this game for weeks now. Don’t wanna finish it so quick.
Riddler trophies is a love and hate thing.
I just hope they would make a Bruce Wayne playable who can interact with his girlfriends and play as Bruce Wayne in a more investigative game mode. Although beating up enemies is good, but it’s pretty repetitive sometimes. Make him roam around and drink, party, hang out with Selena. ETC…..