Batman: Arkham Origins Announced

WB Montreal bring us an all new instalment in the award-winning video game franchise this Autumn!
WB Games have today announced the development of Batman: Arkham Origins for release later this year. Set years before the events of 2009's hit Arkham Asylum and 2011's sensational Arkham City, this third instalment in the franchise focuses on the Dark Knight in his early years without simply being an origins stories, instead looking at some of Batman's earliest encounters with his greatest foes.

The narrative opens with eight infamous assassins, including famed DC foe Deathstroke (recently seen in the CW Green Arrow TV drama Arrow) dispatched to Gotham City on Christmas Eve to kill the greatest bounty of them all- the Caped Crusader himself. We don't quite know what the title Arkham Origins means yet with the Asylum yet to be properly installed by this point, but we do know that there will be a totally open-world Gotham City for players to roam in their quest to stop Batman's ultimate foes, and this time around it won't be the citizen-less wasteland that either the Asylum or the cordoned-off Arkham City were in the past.

An interesting twist is that the game will not be developed by Rocksteady Games. Instead, Warner Brothers' newly created Montreal video game studio will develop this instalment, with it being predicted that Rocksteady are working on a next-gen Batman game to continue the series on after the events of Arkham City. Will this mean that an annualised format will be struck up for the franchise from now on to capitalise on the massive success of the Arkham franchise, a la Call Of Duty and Assassin's Creed? It's certainly not unheard of these days, and it'll be exciting to see how the situation develops in the next few weeks.

There's even going to be a spin-off edition for portable consoles. Titled Batman: Arkham Origins Blackgate, this new entry will take place after the events of the main Arkham Origins storyline and feature new and innovative gameplay from the minds behind the Metroid Prime trilogy, Armature Games, who are crafting a 2.5-D Metroid-style game featuring the infamous rival to Arkham Asylum, the sinister Blackgate Facility. It's the May GameInformer issue providing us with all of these details, so prepare for lots more later this month.

Batman: Arkham Origins will retail for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC and Nintendo WiiU and Batman: Arkham Origins Blackgate for PlayStation Vita and Nintendo 3DS on October 25th.