One of the most acclaimed video game series of last generation could be getting a remastering on Xbox One and PlayStation 4. A report on Eurogamer suggests the Batman Arkham HD Collection would be released in June on Xbox One and PS4, and will include both of Rocksteady’s first two entries in the series: Arkham Asylum and Arkham City.
Rocksteady finished up its work on the Arkham series with last year’s Arkham Knight, which introduced the Batmobile and the series’ largest open world.
In an interview with FENIX Bazaar editor Gaetano Prestia in 2015, Rocksteady producer Dax Ginn said the future was unknown for Rocksteady, but he hinted that they wouldn’t be working on Arkham any longer, which may suggest that another developer is working on this reported HD Collection.
“Well Batman made our studio,” he said. “He made our team. We’d done one game before Arkham Asylum when we weren’t a very big team at all. So to come to this point, eight years of obsessing about Batman, thinking about a world beyond that, it’s a big moment. The future is unknown. Whereas if you rewind to where we were at the end of Arkham City in 2011, we knew exactly what was happening next, because we were all really pumped for it because we knew the Batmobile was going to be a feature and that was really exciting. Creating the Arkham Knight as a character was a big thing. We’re all just a bit like, “I don’t know, I don’t know what we’ll do next year.” But whatever it is, it’ll be good. It’ll be good. It’ll be of a high quality”
While that certainly doesn’t disprove the report, it would seem counterproductive to Rocksteady’s intentions to move on from Batman and focus on something different. And of course there’s a long line of developers who have gone on to do exactly the opposite of what they say in interviews, although Rocksteady (among other Warner Bros Games studios) seems to have the creative flexibility to pass down this project to another studio.
