Batman: Arkham Origins Catch-All

After 27 hours, I finally ran into a couple major bugs. They're more amusing than anything, but if they pop up in a different context, it could be a real problem.

First, I had the Man Who Could Not Be Killed. I finished a brawl against six opponents, but I only knocked out five of them. The last guy was alive but couldn't be touched and wouldn't attack. If I tried to get close to him, he backed away, and I couldn't hit him with any gadgets. I got the XP and the rating for the battle, but this one guy was still around. I ended up just leaving him and moving on.

Second, I had the Men Who Couldn't Be Seen. I accidentally triggered the Firefly mission while cruising around for Enigma datapacks. My waypoint was still set to one of the datapacks, so after the cutscene I went ahead and flew on over to the Steel Mill. In Detective Mode, I could see a bunch of guys walking around, but they were otherwise invisible. They did leave tracks in the snow (which, by the way, is a really nice touch). I wish I'd gotten a screenshot of Batman doing a takedown on empty air. I ended up reloading my last checkpoint and doing the Firefly stuff.

Edit: I did get a screenshot of the first guy:

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/DdluzB2.jpg)

Note that Batman isn't facing the guy and isn't in his battle posture.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

One thing I find both appealing and disheartening with this game is the amount of content in it. I'm something like 80% finished with the Enigma stuff, have three other Most Wanted missions to complete, have about half of the Dark Knight challenges finished, and have every single challenge room and campaign to complete, and I've already poured a good chunk of time into the game. It's great that there's so much to do, but it's discouraging to see that my save file is flagged at around 40% complete. :P

same here.

not to derail, but I wanted to bounce some ideas with you guys;
Both Batman Origins and at least Assassin's Creed 3 (and probably many more, but these are the two examples that come to mind) had lots and LOTS of optional content, which I got around to after I finished the main campaign.

How would you feel if the optional content played out differently if you finished it prior to the main campaign? Not in terms of extra XP or unlockable items, but rather a bit more story, alternative cut scenes. Just minor tweaks that could encourage replayability after the main campaign, or a small carrot to get to the optional content during the main campaign?

Would you feel cheated out of content?

I wrapped up the story last night. I hadn't realized that as soon as I started the Firefly sequence that I was locked into the ending path. That was a little frustrating, because I wanted to get all the collectibles first, but in retrospect I'm not sure it's possible to.

Overall, I enjoyed the game. It improves on Arkham Asylum in the same way that Arkham City did—by increasing your range of options for combat and traversal—but it improves on Arkham City by smoothing out the progression of those systems and providing you with opportunities and incentives to master skills before acquiring new ones. The combat training challenges, where you're asked to fulfill specific requirements instead of score chasing, and the Dark Knight challenges, which set specific goals for you unrelated to story progression, are both welcome additions. (But not without room for improvement. The Dark Knight challenges could stand to be planned a bit better as some of the lower challenges are significantly more difficult than the upper ones, and there are far too few opportunities to fulfill the predator challenges.)

The Arkham games all shine when they present you with an encapsulated problem and then give you a variety of tools to solve it. Whether that's a group of enemies of different types or a predator room, the systems available allow you to flow smoothly between different tactics and approaches, never locking you into a single option. Which is why the boss fights almost universally suck. With a few notable exceptions (Origin's Shiva, Copperhead, and Black Mask; City's Mr. Freeze) the boss fights here and in the other games toss out not only everything you know but everything that makes the mechanics interesting in favor of heavily cinematic sequences that all too often boil down to blindly following on-screen prompts. The last few hours of Origins ping-pongs between engaging fights and predator rooms that up the ante in challenging ways and boring, frustrating boss fights that kill the game's narrative momentum.

I understand why it happens. The designers here are hamstrung in some ways by the Batman license and its emphasis on super heroes and villains. The game's mechanics are built around Batman dominating groups of low-level thugs, but they don't translate well to the kind of mano-a-mano stand-offs you'd expect from a super hero and a super villain slugging it out. Making Firefly a regular baddie would make it all too easy to wipe the floor with him, undermining his status as a villain of note, but the fight they've designed for him here doesn't make good use of the systems the player has learned to that point and so has to rely heavily on in-the-moment tutorializing and quicktime events to get by. Most of the other boss fights go the same way.

I can't say much about the story because, outside of a few interesting sequences, it seemed to be the usual business of a Nolan-era Batman yelling self-importantly about Justice! while a murderous chaotic evil Joker provides a laugh track. I will say that between Copperhead, Bane, and the mercenaries, that Origins seemed downright frightened of South and Central Americans with their outrageous accents and words like "pandejos". Maybe it's because I live in a part of the country with a large Hispanic community, but the accents didn't seem exotic, and the characterizations felt overblown; if anything, I was surprised that I didn't hear more Hispanic voices over the radio or banter between the gangsters in Spanish. Still, it's an improvement over City's rape threats and omnipresent comments about Female Doggoes.

All-in-all, Origins is probably my favorite of the Arkham games released to this point. I really enjoyed playing it on the Wii U and look forward to seeing what both this team and Rocksteady come up with next.

Huh, the fight with Firefly was pretty much the last highlight of the game for me. While the QTE parts were, well, QTE's, it's hard to be anything but bored/indifferent to them any longer, everything else I actually found myself enjoying.

After that I just wasn't so into it, and the final fights were especially infuriating.

ccesarano wrote:

Huh, the fight with Firefly was pretty much the last highlight of the game for me. While the QTE parts were, well, QTE's, it's hard to be anything but bored/indifferent to them any longer, everything else I actually found myself enjoying.

I hated it. Even when there wasn't a QTE, I felt like I was just following directions. "Press ZR + ZR to quickuse a glue grenade!" Good job, sparky, now "Tap ZL to use a batarang!" Good job!

After that I just wasn't so into it, and the final fights were especially infuriating.

Of the last sequence, I liked:

Spoiler:

The brawls against mixed groups of thugs. The one with the two venom users, an enforcer, a shield guy, a guy with a stun baton, and a few armored guys was a really nice final test of your combat prowess.

The predator room with ten guys and hostages in the middle. Once again, a really nice test of your predator abilities with a nice bit of variety in your takedown opportunities.

I hated:

Spoiler:

Both fights against Bane. The one where he's running around like an Asylum Titan and the pseudo-stealth one where you have to steer him into the electric walls. They both changed the rules in a really obnoxious way.

I should note that I pretty much enjoyed any Predator sequence, but that holds true for any of the Arkham games.

I can definitely see what you mean about the Firefly fight, though. The prompts were provided in such a manner that it's as if the game was afraid you'd forget how you did it the first time, and needed to be told again and again.

They were also presented because if they hadn't have been, you wouldn't have had the slightest clue what to do. It's not like Firefly was a variation on any enemy type you'd encountered before.

I'm pretty much of the same opinion as ClockworkHouse. My thoughts on this issue (from an unpublished blog post):

The game plays largely the same as Arkham City, building on the foundations of Arkham Asylum. The developers have added in a fast travel system that I didn't tend to use very much because it's just so much fun moving around this world as Batman. The dive/grapple/launch mechanic is in this game as a base feature of the overworld movement and it works very fluidly - in fact I think that they might have increased the maximum angle of ascent after diving as it seems to me that you can get a bit higher than you could in City.

The combat is also slightly different: While, I think in general, the overall combat experience has been improved there are some bugs in the counter system that were not present in the previous games. Namely that during a double counter, the second assailant doesn't always get "locked in" to the manoeuvre and instead is free to hit you and disrupt your flow. Apart from this, none of the issues I had in City whereby Batman would refuse to "jump" to the next target and instead punch thin air in front of him were present. The developers appear to have made it so that enemies close the gap between themselves and the Batman in a shorter time so it's very easy to get surrounded. Some people are of the opinion that this makes the combat harder (especially when the indicators are disabled) and I sort of agree, though I think the combat is pretty much equal in difficulty to City.

The boss battles, on the other hand, are a bit frustrating. Any boss battle that essentially uses the normal combat or movement mechanics as its core system is generally okay - though some of them, such as the encounters with Bane, are very difficult due to his ability to curve his charge towards your position which often means that you don't manage to successfully dodge his attack. The other boss battles that alter the rules of the game (combat and movement) really don't feel like they belong in the game at all and were very frustrating to me until I realised what the developers wanted me to do.

Those four assassin encounters were Deathstroke, Copperhead, Firefly and Electrocutioner. The wiki page states the following:

Each main story boss is designed to reinforce the players mastery over a specific game mechanic, such as Deathstroke whose battle focuses on countering attacks. The assassins selected for the game were chosen partly because each possesses abilities that could challenge these game mechanics. The boss fights took inspiration from Arkham City's battle against Mr. Freeze, which tasked players with exploring the full range of Batman's strategies and abilities to overcome the villain.

-
The problem with this is that the game doesn't follow proper design principles. We're talking about the Zelda design process here where the skill utilised in the dungeon is used to defeat the dungeon boss. That isn't the case in Arkham Origins in these fights and the developers do not correctly telegraph what players are supposed to do or worse, telegraph the incorrect action. This is in contrast to the Mr Freeze boss battle where normal gameplay mechanics were used to defeat him.

First off, Electrocutioner's encounter is very frustrating. The player is taught that Batman is stunned from coming into contact with "electricity". This is established through stun sticks and electrical barriers throughout the game world. So, when Electrocutioner activates his shock gloves, the player is instantly on the defensive and wondering how to get around him and attack from behind where the gloves can't stun them. Unfortunately, the triggers and learned behaviour from the world building ends up ruining a very powerful moment as the player is actually supposed to attack him head-on, knocking the assassin out in one punch.

Maybe not every player had the same experience as me - probably there are some players who enter every encounter with a direct attack - but I tried circling the Electrocutioner for a few minutes, trying to get the better position before I eventually attacked.

Deathstroke and Copperhead are similar but do not make quite the same mistake. Deathstroke eschews the combat mechanics to instead force a QTE style of gameplay onto the player. This isn't just countering and learning to use the counter properly because you can't counter all hits as this disrupts the flow of the sequence. In fact, one change to Origins' combat system that perhaps doesn't work so well is that multi-step attack counters have multiple attack animations that are not "real" attacks and attempting to counter these results in a failed counter move. There's no prior training for this when you encounter Deathstroke and, if I'm remembering correctly, there's nothing to differentiate between a normal attack and a "multi-step attack" that has multiple blows but only one counter is needed. Worse still, in his encounter, Deathstroke also has button mashing blocking events - so the whole encounter has three game play styles that are contrary to each other because during the parts where you can fight normally, you can also block on a one-to-one blow basis.

Copperhead's boss battle is less frustrating but, once again the desired mechanic isn't telegraphed to the player. We're constantly presented with large groups of enemies in Origins and the player learns how to fight them using the combat mechanics. However, attacking Copperhead's illusions is not effective. In fact winning the encounter is best achieved through purely countering attacks (with maybe the odd punch combo thrown in for good measure).

Doing I Am the Night mode and died on Firefly because I didn't know what f*cking button to press when you grapple on to him, what with it being over a year since I played the game I couldn't remember.

I am so mad right now.

Looks like I'm going to have to buy this on the 360, because I get a CTD every time I try to open the vent shaft with the memory card in the first radio tower (Coventry tower). I load it back up, scan the body, recreate the crime scene, scrub back and forth to see where the memory card went, and as soon as I try to open the shaft, or it prompts me to do so, "Arkham Origins has stopped working".

Anyone else have this bug? I've turned the graphics settings down to their lowest, even though my GTX 570 should handle everything cranked up at the highest resolution. Still crashes. I'm only 30 minutes in, so I might just try restarting, but this is a pain in the ass, and I can't find anyone else with the same bug.

EDIT: Uninstalling/reinstalling appears to have fixed it.

Just finished the main story. ONWARDS TO 100%!

Pertaining to the Riddler quest:

Spoiler:

So not worth it.

The Deadshot-in-the-bank level is pissing me off right now.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

The Deadshot-in-the-bank level is pissing me off right now.

Just silently take out whoever he's not aiming at. Or loudly. I pretty much just stayed in the grates. When you go to beat up Deadshot, 3 more guys will appear, so I'd save your smoke for him, then beat him down multiple times until the smoke wears out, since the other 3 can't see through it.

Alternatively, stay on the gargoyles, throw a remote batarang at the far wall, flip it around, then zoom it into the guys on the bridge to knock them off. They'll look at the direction it came from, which is opposite of where you are, and you can just hit the next one directly in the back, then switch to another gargoyle. Or just stay on the side ones and use the main axis of the bank for bataranging. They're not smart.

It's the damn hostage-taking part that's pissing me off.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

It's the damn hostage-taking part that's pissing me off.

Ahh, yeah. Disruptor works well, as does dropping down from the center bridge on the ladder side while he's facing the bank doors, then sneaking behind him for a silent takedown, which for some reason ignores his armor entirely.

But the disruptor doesn't work on Deadshot and he's always the one holding the hostage.

YOU'RE THE WORST BATMAN, BONUS!

Bonus_Eruptus wrote:

dropping down from the center bridge on the ladder side while he's facing the bank doors, then sneaking behind him for a silent takedown, which for some reason ignores his armor entirely.

This is how I beat him.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

But the disruptor doesn't work on Deadshot and he's always the one holding the hostage.

YOU'RE THE WORST BATMAN, BONUS!

I forgot, because I never needed it, because I'm the goddamn Batman.

Bonus_Eruptus wrote:
Quintin_Stone wrote:

But the disruptor doesn't work on Deadshot and he's always the one holding the hostage.

YOU'RE THE WORST BATMAN, BONUS!

I forgot, because I never needed it, because I'm the goddamn Batman.

Who exactly is the "Boy Wonder" in this scenario?

IMAGE(http://animalcosplay.com/image/2013/12/Superhero-cat-robin-n-batman.jpg)

cartoonin99 wrote:
Bonus_Eruptus wrote:
Quintin_Stone wrote:

But the disruptor doesn't work on Deadshot and he's always the one holding the hostage.

YOU'RE THE WORST BATMAN, BONUS!

I forgot, because I never needed it, because I'm the goddamn Batman.

Who exactly is the "Boy Wonder" in this scenario?

IMAGE(http://animalcosplay.com/image/2013/12/Superhero-cat-robin-n-batman.jpg)

I've got two dumb cats I now need to dress up.

ClockworkHouse wrote:
Bonus_Eruptus wrote:

dropping down from the center bridge on the ladder side while he's facing the bank doors, then sneaking behind him for a silent takedown, which for some reason ignores his armor entirely.

This is how I beat him.

Yeah. There is way tougher stuff than this if you want to 100% it.

Spoiler:

Hope you planned ahead!

Just started on this game and I'm really enjoying being out in a 'normal' city as Batman. I like the graphics over all and Batman's suit in particular (especially, for some reason, the fact that he's unshaven.) I'm glad I gave Arkham City another shot after stopping out of frustration a few months ago. I'm back into the Batman games in a big way.

Picked this up for 10 bucks awhile back during a Steam sale. I haven't started it yet, mainly because I'm holding out hope that the Nightfall pack will come to PC. I haven't read anything indicting that it will, but with so much new stuff coming out I can hold off for a bit longer.

It definitely has a different vibe to it than Arkham City, mainly stemming I think through it being done by a different studio.

Is the consensus that it's considerably harder than the previous two games? That's kind of the impression I got from friends who have played and finished them all.

I didn't find it harder. The combat is a bit more exacting, but not more difficult. I thought it was excellent.

Once you get the gloves combat item, it actually gets to be way easier... which begs the question of why Batman ever got rid of those.

Demosthenes wrote:

Once you get the gloves combat item, it actually gets to be way easier... which begs the question of why Batman ever got rid of those.

Batretcon.

He has them in Arkham City on the Wii U. No idea why he apparently felt the need to develop a set for Catwoman, as well, though.