Arkham Knight Delay Explained by Rocksteady

Ashley Allen / 10 years ago

arkham knight

With the plethora of broken games being released recently – DriveClub, Assassin’s Creed: Unity, and Halo: The Master Chief Collection spring to mind – it’s refreshing for a publisher to push back a release date to ensure their product is up to scratch, as frustrating as that may be (Grand Theft Auto V for PC is getting side-eyed so hard right now).

Arkham Knight is one such game, its release delayed to allow its developer, Rocksteady, enough to time to fulfil its vision. Sefton Hill, the game’s Director, told EDGE that had the release of Arkham Knight not been pushed back, they would have been forced to submit a shorter, more diluted version of the game:

The vision for the game just meant we weren’t going to get it finished to the standard we wanted in time. It’s as simple as that. We had to decide: is it a case of reducing the scope to try to get something out? Or do we delay the release in order to make sure we can achieve the vision? That’s the discussion we had with [Warner’s] senior management. Fortunately, after a lot of grovelling, we got the time, because those guys believed in the vision too.

The question was never whether it was good enough. It was whether we were going to get it done. I don’t want to sound arrogant, but we were very confident in that direction. We just didn’t have time to finish what we wanted to do. It’s fair to say that’s my fault: the reason we didn’t ship in 2014 is because of the game I wanted to make. It couldn’t be done in the time we had.