Batman was stoked he got to do the moody superhero thing alone

Dedicated single-player experiences have become a rarity this generation, but Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkham City represents one of the few remaining beacons. That wasn’t always the case, however, as game director Sefton Hill has revealed that the studio did consider adding a multiplayer component to the superhero adventure for a while, but eventually opted against it.

He said in an interview with Official PlayStation Magazine:

We did look at multiplayer early on and we looked at what it could actually bring to the table. We tried some ideas out but it always felt like it was just there as a requirement. If we did multiplayer then we wouldn’t have been able to deliver the quality of game that people wanted – that we wanted. We would end up delivering two watered down products.

You see games where you feel like they bolted the multiplayer on, but if they had taken that effort and put it into the single player, they would have had a better game instead of having a multiplayer that people don’t play.

We’re really thankful to Warner on that. At a time when a lot of publishers said you have to have multiplayer, they backed our ideas for single player.

Thank heavens for that — we're not even sure how multiplayer in Arkham City would work!

[source computerandvideogames.com]