The Problem With Arkham Origin's Traversal

Written by @SplinterChalk Get 20% when buying G Fuel: https://www.gfuel.com/THATBOYAQUA My main channel @ThatBoyAqua Happy Monday everyone. If there’s one thing the Arkham games never particularly focused on, it would be traversal. Up until Arkham Knight, traversal was nothing more than a way to get from point A to point B. There wasn’t much expression, much dynamism, much thought. You hit the grapple button, glid around a bit, got where you needed to go, and that was it. The worst offender of this has to be Arkham Origins, but not for the reason you may think. It isn’t Origins’ simple mechanics that let it down. Arkham City proved that these simple mechanics can be more than effective in the right environment. When it comes to Arkham Origins’ traversal, the main thing letting the player down is the world design. More specifically, New Gotham’s lack of verticality and open space. As crammed together and claustrophobic as Arkham City may feel at times, an underrated aspect of the map is just how much space there is to glide around. Now, this doesn’t really make much sense if you just look at the map itself. I mean, these buildings are really close together and the streets follow very windy and narrow paths. This is there the second part of the equation comes in though, that being verticality. All of this may look very congested and hard to navigate, but when you look at the varying heights of buildings, you start to see what I mean by it being quite open. Having a lot of high points surrounded by lower points with varying levels in between makes it so that navigating over buildings is no issue. A grapnel boost off of this ledge on its own will barely get you over the building, but a grapnel boost to the slightly higher building to the right allows you to glide over with no problem. This is how Arkham City approached traversal and kept gliding continuous. The grapnel boost may seem like the only trick the game has, but the grapnel boost wouldn’t work without this verticality. Higher buildings, vantage points, water towers, beams, guard towers, smoke stacks, billboards; it’s safe to say that you will never be struggling to find a grapple point. When we look at New Gotham, the area of the map exclusive to Origins, we see a lot of the design principals of Arkham City abandoned. Buildings are largely similar in height and therefore you’re not provided nearly as many opportunities to grapple in between glides. Origins does have a bit of an answer for this question, those being objects placed around the world specifically to help you traverse. Take this road by the Royal Hotel for example. The buildings on either side can be grappled onto, but they’re so tall that doing that is very impractical. Pair that with their immense length and lack of variable height going down the road, grappling onto them wouldn’t do you much good anyways. So, Warner Bros Montreal placed some grapple points lower on the buildings along the road, with flagpoles extended out and pipes stretching between the two buildings. This is an imperfect solution though and the problem is threefold. Problem one: it just hurts the believability of the world. Arkham has never had particularly believable maps. I mean, look at Arkham Knight and tell me you can genuinely imagine people living and working in this tiny, cramped trio of islands. But having a massive pipe stretching between buildings every twenty feet makes an unconvincing game world even less convincing. Problem two: it allows for almost zero player freedom or expression. If you want to get down this road, there is one, maybe two ways to do it. You’ll be grappling off the same exact grapple points every time regardless of which direction you’re going. Arkham City’s somewhat chaotic design helped to provide the player with choice. Choice on what grapple point to launch from, which direction to start your glide in, when to dive bomb such that you can avoid objects in the environment. Arkham Origins has no such element of meaningful choice. If the player always feels like they’re just running in a straight line, hitting buttons they’re told to hit and having no meaningful choices or interactions other than what is expected of them, what fun is there to have with traversal? I as the player am not actually doing anything. I’m not making choices, I’m not expressing myself, I’m not immersing myself in the world or character. All I’m doing is holding A and tapping RB every now and then.