Gotham Knights will take multiple playthroughs to see the whole story
Four characters, four viewpoints on every mission.
Each of Gotham Knights' four characters will take their own path through the story: If you want to see everything it'll take multiple playthroughs. Each character has their own perspective on the events any given mission, which while similar will contain unique content and subtle differences.
This comes via an interview with WB Games Montreal's game director Geoff Ellenor and cinematics director Wilson Mui in the latest issue of PLAY Magazine. (They also talk about Nightwing's butt, a vital subject to be sure.)
"We actually made four [stories], not just one!" said Mui. Ellenor followed up by saying that "You will not see all of it in a single playthrough. Just because there’s so much content that is unique to the hero’s perception of what’s going on and what’s happened."
As the cinematic director, Mui was certainly involved in making each mission distinct for each hero. "Structurally, we’re gonna have a very similar scene that overall falls in the flow for each character, but each character has their own version of that," he said. A character's version will differ because they move, speak, and act differently, and have their own history with different characters they meet.
"If you were to look and play Batgirl, you’re gonna get Batgirl’s version," said Mui, "but if you play Robin, you’re gonna get Robin’s version of that same scene. Some of them are very similar in how they do it, but they’re gonna have little subtle differences."
Gotham Knights is a cooperative action game set in the Batman universe, but with no Batman to be found—he's dead. That means the vigilante justice in Gotham gets doled out by his successors: A team of bat-family sidekicks made up of Batgirl, Nightwing, Red Hood, and Robin. It's definitely a story about side characters, and though we've seen Harley Quinn the developers have confirmed that neither Batman nor Joker will appear.
It's a novel approach for the open-world action games that WB has produced about Batman in the past. It's not a sequel to the Arkham games, but a kind of spiritual cousin, most notably because of that cooperative option and four separate playable characters. Those characters will all level up at the same rate, so you can freely move between them. Between that and the separate stories, this one's probably ripe for a New Game+ mode.
You can check out everything we know about Gotham Knights right here on PC Gamer.