FIRST DETAILS - Batman: Arkham Origins

This month's issue of Game Informer has been first to release the details on the upcoming Batman: Arkham Origins, the next sequel prequel in the line of the Arkham series of games. This article will enlighten you guys on everything that Game Informer has confirmed and what else has been confirmed over the last few weeks since this announcement.

Let's start things off with Game Informer's cover reveal trailer where they discuss some of the details of this game:

I trust in WB Montreal to continue to impress me and my fellow gamers as they take on the massive responsibility of continuing the Arkhamverse with this title. That being said, I still say there's room for improvement in this series. FYI I plan on updating that article with more suggestions as I continue to cook them up.

Also, if you want to find out more information than that found here, be sure to pick up the latest issue of Game Informer and check out their featurette on the game on their site.

The Story

Damn, right... That's DEATHSTROKE!
About F'N time he appeared in these games.

The events of Arkham Origins are set several years before Batman: Arkham Asylum, in the middle of winter in fictional Gotham City. Batman is an experienced crime-fighter, but has not yet become the veteran superhero portrayed in Arkham Asylum and Arkham City, having battled with criminal foes such as gangsters and robbers, but on a snowy Christmas Eve he is confronted with far more dangerous enemies: super villains tasked with killing Batman. The sadistic and brutal Black Mask has placed a bounty on the superhero, which attracts the attention of the best assassins and super-villains in the world, and Batman must discover why the villain harbors a deep hatred for him. Black Mask is the most powerful man in the city, possessing vast wealth and resources, and controls Gotham's criminal underworld, having eliminated his opposition and begun consolidating his power. His mask conceals his identity, allowing him to operate publicly as Roman Sionis, head of Janus Cosmetics. Black Mask's henchmen help instigate a rise in crime and gang activity in the city. A much younger Captain James Gordon and the Gotham City Police Department are wary of the new superhero in their midst, and are not his allies with corrupt cops actively working against him. Arkham Origins will feature the debut of the assassin Deathstroke, Alberto Falcone, and the return of the Penguin and Batman's butler Alfred Pennyworth from Arkham City.

Old Gotham, the segment of Gotham City which will become the Arkham City prison, is not yet walled off or ravaged by flood, and contains slums, lower buildings, a large shopping mall, and docks where Penguin's ship The Final Offer is stationed. Across the bridge from Old Gotham is New Gotham, the more modern metropolitan area of the city filled with towering skyscrapers.

A more detailed look at the creative process of crafting Origins' narrative, look no further than here.

The Nemesis of Arkham Origins 

Few comic and game fans had trouble recognizing characters like the Joker and the Riddler in previous Arkham games. These are villains long established in the popular Batman mythology of films, cartoons, and comics. Arkham Origins pushes a lesser-known rogue into the limelight, but serious Batman comic fans will be the first to tell you that Black Mask is an exciting choice. Who is Black Mask, and what is his role in the upcoming game? Here’s your primer, both for understanding Black Mask in the wider Batman fiction, as well as how he fits into the Arkhamverse. 

Black Mask has a long and sordid history within the Batman comics; the moniker has even applied to two separate individuals over the years. The Black Mask presented in Arkham Origins is the original character, an evil, sadistic individual by the name of Roman Sionis. In the original comic fiction, Sionis showed up as Black Mask in 1985. Sionis was the son of a wealthy socialite couple in Gotham, much like Bruce Wayne. Unlike Wayne, Sionis’ parents were angry, treacherous, and controlling, and they passed some of their worst traits onto their son. Sionis would end up murdering his parents, later donning an ebony mask fashioned from his father’s casket – symbolizing his new identity – while simultaneously taking over as head of his father’s business, Janus Cosmetics. 

Black Mask remained a fixture of the Batman comics in the coming years. In one of the more striking and memorable moments of the history between the characters, Black Mask returns to his family home to wipe out any traces of his old life as Roman Sionis. As he sets a fire in his old bedroom, Batman’s attempts to save him from the fire send the villain tumbling into the flames, where his black mask is permanently scorched onto his face. Over the years, Black Mask establishes himself as one of the most ruthless and outright evil Batman rogues, disfiguring faces, torturing and murdering those close to his enemies, and for a time, leading the forces of organized crime in Gotham. In a final brutal conflict, Catwoman ends up killing Sionis, setting the stage for a new character to take up the mantle of Black Mask. 

Though little is known about the plot points at play in Batman: Arkham Origins, it’s clear that Warner Bros. Games Montreal has taken a lot of the original fiction into account and is eager to introduce him to gaming audiences that might not recognize him. “We realize that Black Mask is not necessarily as prominent in people’s minds as some other classic Batman villains, so we realize we also need to do work to explain why he’s really cool and make him felt in the game,” says creative director Eric Holmes. “It’s not something people bring a lot of baggage to when you see the Black Mask, so we have to do the work to make him scary.”


In the upcoming game, Roman Sionis is publicly the head of Janus Cosmetics, but secretly is the up and coming head of the Gotham mob. “Black Mask is new money. He’s rich. He’s very, very powerful. He’s made it,” explains Holmes. “He’s known for being brutal and sadistic. And particularly at this point in the Arkham franchise he has enormous resources. He is the number one gang leader in Gotham. And has easily the most power in the city.” He is slowly but surely taking out his competitors within the organized crime world, and as the game begins he’s solidifying his power in the city. In the Arkham universe, the masks that Black Mask and his cronies wear act as a shield for their far more public personas. No one knows that Roman Sionis is Black Mask, and Sionis is able to maintain power within the city by exploiting both identities. “Roman Sionis is suspected for a lot of things, but nothing’s pinned on him,” says Holmes. “The Janus Cosmetics company is his background. He inherited a family business related to cosmetic chemicals and ran it into the ground, and then turned it around into a huge criminal enterprise selling drugs. You see Sionis branding even in Arkham City. The steel mills are Sionis facilities. His money primarily comes from the drug trade.” Black Mask takes a perverse enjoyment from the pain he inflicts on the people of Gotham. “His thing is torture. That is what gets his rocks off,” Holmes continues. “And he’s really good at it.”

Black Mask stands out from the Dark Knight’s gallery of villains for his purely malicious sensibilities and attitude toward Batman. “The sadistic nature of Black Mask is a fun thing for us to play with – the lengths to which he’s willing to go to get what he wants,” says senior producer Ben Mattes. While Black Mask’s motivations may eventually reveal themselves to be even deeper, it’s clear from our early glimpse of the game that Batman’s death is high on his list of priorities.  Arkham Origins’ Black Mask carries a deep hatred for Batman, and that manifests as the central threat facing Batman in the game. Black Mask seeks out a cadre of the world’s best killers, and promises each a reward for bringing down Batman. “It’s basically Batman’s worst nightmare,” says narrative director Dooma Wendschuh. “We have eight of the best assassins in the world who’ve come together to Gotham City for one night, Christmas Eve of all nights, to kill the Bat.”

Black Mask may not as well known as Penguin or Mr. Freeze, but the dark tone of the character and his connections to the Gotham underworld fit perfectly with what we’ve seen of Batman: Arkham Origins. While the original comic version of the character has plenty of reasons to hate Batman, those details remain shrouded within the Arkham storyline. Why has Black Mask suddenly taken such an interest in the death of the Dark Knight? We’ll have to wait for the game’s release to find out for sure.


Want to know more about Black Mask? Here’s our recommended comics reading list: Batman #386, #485-486, #518, #688-697, and Detective Comics #553.

-- From Game Informer

Gameplay Details of Arkham Origins

Arkham Origins will feature similar gameplay to its predecessors. The Remote Claw is a new gadget which allows Batman to target two objects (reminiscent of the grappling hook in Just Cause 2) and pull them together allowing him to knock enemies together or hit them with objects. The game introduces a fast travel system, allowing Batman to remotely summon his plane, the Batwing, to transport him to other areas of the game world quicker than gliding or grappling can allow. Enemy tower installations prevent Batman summoning the craft in some areas and must be first disabled using various gadgets and abilities to make the Batwing available: the Batwing is not player controlled. Players can compare this concept to the tower takeover objectives in the Assassin's Creed series.

Arkham Origins offers side missions including: "Crime in Progress", where Batman can assist the Gotham City Police Department (GCPD) to improve his reputation by accomplishing tasks such as rescuing police officers from a gang or preventing an informant being thrown to his death; "Most Wanted" allows Batman to pursue villains outside of the main story. The Dark Knight system offers tasks of escalating difficulty that promote improvement in stealth and combat. Completing side missions is rewarded with experience points and upgrades to Batman's equipment. The game features an emphasis on Batman's detective skills: Batman can scan a crime scene using his detective vision to highlight points of interest and holograms act out theoretical scenarios of the crime that occurred. The crimes can be reviewed on the Batcomputer in the Batcave at will, allowing the player to view the scene from different angles, in slow motion or pause it while looking for clues to advance and solve the crime. Small and large crime scenes are spread out over Gotham City.

Find out more on the World of Arkham Origins.

My Thoughts 

I found it to be VERY ironic that I recently read this after seeing it on the new arrivals rack at my local comic book shop a few weeks prior to this game's announcement. Black Mask had a VERY brief appearance in the beginning of Arkham City that most players weren't aware of, but most will remember him being an exclusive boss at the end of one of the Riddler's Revenge DLC Challenge Rooms of the same name. 

If you get a chance to read this, pick it up. It's a great read on his origins and what he was up to over the course of the last two games' timelines.

I was hoping that he would have had a bigger role in these games and now he has the chance to shine. It's cool to see that the other mob bosses are getting represented here too, with Falcone already being confirmed, but I hope Rupert Thorne makes an appearance in this game as well. 

While we're on the subject of villains, here's my picks for this game to be included: Firefly, Man-Bat, and any of the members of the League of Assassins (Ra's al Ghul, Talia al Ghul, Lady Shiva, David Cain, Merlyn, White Ghost, etc.). Those are MUSTS for this game as it's a given that we are going to be treated with Bat's first encounters with The Joker, Two-Face, Penguin, The Riddler, and some of his other more popular rogues. 

What intrigues me the most of all about the announcements so far is that Deathstroke (better known to as Slade to fans of Cartoon Network's Teen Titans cartoon) is in the game. Sure, most comic book fans know him as DC's answer (or complete rip-off to) to Marvel's Deadpool, but the masses don't know that Deathstroke is one of the few villains that has beaten Batman on multiple occasions - clean - with his superior combat ability. The few times Bats has defeated him it's been with the help of the Justice League or others supporting him as back-up. I have a feeling that Deathstroke is going to have a key role in this game, especially if he's the assassin who ends up beating him for the bounty. 

On the other hand, we have something else to think about. We have Azreal's warning from Arkham City to consider here. Shame on you if you never completed this simple side-quest: "I bring a message: dark days are coming, Batman. The Prophecy is coming true, you are the warrior who will close the gates of Hell, you are the one who will save this day, and in doing so, events will occur that you cannot stop, from the ashes of Arkham the fires will rage and Gotham will burn, and you, you will burn too."

One could argue that he is referring to Ra's al Ghul's influence in Arkham City, as Ra's al Ghul is referred to as "demon from Hell" in different interpretations of his character and persona, but I don't want to look at it from a simple-minded perspective. It seems like there's more to it than that. Ra's isn't the type of villain like The Joker where (for the most part) his schemes are one flop and it's done and over. He has that A through Z mentality where he has multiple lengths to go about to obtain his means. Where Joker thinks about taking over one simple little city, Ra's always has global domination on his mind. Black Mask may be the figurehead of all of the villainy in Origins, but you can say the same about Hugo Strange in Arkham City before both Joker and Ra's were revealed to be the ultimate puppet masters behind that narrative. 

I don't necessarily believe that this game will entirely be a prequel, especially on the note that the Harley's Revenge DLC ended on (my full review here). I doubt Rocksteady would want to close the book on that chapter of the Arkhamverse just like that. The Joker's death really hit Batman harder than anyone could have imagined and from Oracle and Robin's descriptions during that DLC, we have no choice but to believe that it's going to affect his crime-fighting mentality later down the road. My prediction is that this game is a reflection of sorts, as Batman attempts to piece everything together from the past up to present day for the series can continue to move forward. With Paul Dini stepping down as a writer to the Arkhamverse, who knows what direction they will take next in this storyline at all. Also, keep in mind that he did NOT have anything to do with the Harley's Revenge DLC or any DLC for Arkham City, but has mentioned that if he sees anything Batman-related that peaks his interest he might jump on board again. 

Regardless, I hope this is going to continue the successful legacy of the Arkhamverse as the paramount of superhero-themed games, despite the fact that they are going for the cheap way of going about for a sequel and giving us a prequel instead of continuing the present day narrative. 

If you guys want to exchange ideas or discuss theories over this new game, feel free to post in the comments.