Batman: Arkham Trilogy is a mostly commendable package of one of gaming’s best trilogies ever on Nintendo Switch. While the detail-heavy open-world of Arkham Knight can suffer on the handheld, the brilliance of Arkham Asylum and Arkham City shine through on Nintendo’s handheld-that-could.
As Untold Games CEO told us recently, there’s a “lot of life” left in the Nintendo Switch, but some games will always prove tricky to port. As it turns out, the Batman Arkham Trilogy was one of those tough projects, not simply due to the intensity of Arkham Knight, but because the engine they ran on was never available for the Nintendo Switch.
As fans will know, all of the Arkham games were created in Unreal Engine 3 with Knight being one of the last games released on the engine. Rocksteady’s last game, Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League was created with Unreal Engine 4, and the industry has largely moved onto Unreal Engine 5.
“The honest answer is that any platform is challenging if it isn’t considered from the beginning of development,” Co-Founder and CEO of Arkham Trilogy porting studio Untold Games Elisa Di Lorenzo told us. Unreal Engine 3 never had an official build designed for Nintendo Switch 2 as the industry had largely moved on by 2017, and that led to a number of issues.
“Some challenges are not uncommon in porting when a game was built on an engine that predates the target platform and no longer has active support,” the CEO explained. “It’s a good example of why porting is a more complex discipline than it might appear from the outside, and why deep engine knowledge is at the core of what we do”.
Batman: Arkham Knight’s Nintendo Switch port was the weak point of the Arkham Trilogy. As a game that pushed Unreal Engine 3 to its breaking point, the game also saw major performance issues on PC when it launched in 2015. The game’s scope itself may not actually be too big for Switch, but combined with being built on an engine that was never designed for the handheld, it resulted in a number of issues.
Unfortunately, the Batman Arkham franchise has been largely dormant on console and PC since the release of Arkham Knight. Gotham Knights wasn’t part of the Arkhamverse, Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League was a major failure, and the brilliant Batman: Arkham Shadow was a VR exclusive that won’t be getting a sequel.
With that said, funnily enough, Rocksteady did recently help to design the brand-new LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, which feels more like an Arkham game than expected. As DC looks to expand its line of video games, including tie-ins with the ongoing DCU movies, we will hopefully see more of the Caped Crusader in the future.
As for Untold Games, the studio is currently working on its own early access survival game, City 20. Currently available on PC, the game will see years of additional updates as the developers work on player-requested features and improvements.
