You know what I think is unwarranted? A lot of the jaded mellow-ness aimed towards this series. Not trying to be an asshole. You can have your opinion but I just don't understand where some of this is coming from?

There are a number of folks who talk about this series like it's the new Call of Duty. We've gotten these games roughly bi-annually and there's only 4 of them. What's with the "oh, here's another batman game" kind of attitude? This series has gone on since 2009 and seemingly just "ended." Origins was a bit of a cash-in and there were a couple mobile spinoffs but yeah I can't really wrap my head around this one. Even in the quick look they were like "remember batman? it's another batman game"

I just really don't see how this is akin to stuff like call of duty or assassin's creed and the attitude towards Batman Arkham seems to be the exact same as it is towards those games.

.......or I'm just crazy and there's not as much of that as I think? Like I said, if you don't like the games, that's perfectly fine but I don't get this specific "oh, another one" kind of talk. Am I the only one puzzled by this?

Hm, I dunno. I kinda feel like that's just the GB crew (mostly Jeff, as the others all seemed to really like this one). But I spend almost zero time on forums and such these days, so I dunno!

There are just so many games that use the same basic combat mechanics that they are all starting to blur together.

Also, there are four Arkham games and outside of a new gadget or gimmick and the size of the playable area,they aren't all that different from each other.

I got sick of these games after City, so I guess different people have different tolerance levels for how much of the same thing they keep buying.

a lot of the talk has been about the botched port which, given all the botched high profile releases in recent memory has been especially criticized. also, i think people get pretty tired after 3. ppl were down on gears judgment as well as god of war ascension. even the response to uncharted 4 has been pretty tepid all things considering. i've felt the same about assassin's for much longer and call of duty has had a lot more life because it became such a cultural touchstone and the multiplayer natural of it. this is my impression.

i thought the first one was well done of course but became formulaic by the end and i bought city on sale but havent touched it.

For a lot of people, two games is too many and three is an outrage.

I'm not jaded toward them. I've beaten and liked all four (even origins). But I also don't know how willing I am to hop into another of these, Knight for me sorta closed the book on the Arkham series but in a good way.

There aren't that many Batman games but there are a hell of a lot of games with very similar mechanics and set ups. It is what it is. I think it's very fair to be bored or at least fatigued of that. Doesn't mean anything about the quality of Batman games, and certainly this is a situation where you damn yourself, but, yeah.

I love Arkham Knight so far, but the truth is I am burned out on this combat. I'm just not excited to play like I used to. I turned that corner somewhere in Shadow of Mordor.

I don't think you're wrong for noticing this or calling it out but I think it's more a genre fatigue than series fatigue, and imo it definitely hasn't reached CoD fatigue. Assassin's fatigue is tied to the same genre fatigue as Batman suffers from I think.

Fatigue.

@frostyryan: For me, and I wouldn't describe my feelings towards the franchise as jaded, it's the lack of innovation we really saw in that first game. With high water mark as high as Asylum it's been tough for Rocksteady to get back there. City rubbed me the wrong way and I only barely finished it and Origins was just a cheap cash in on City (same map, same villains) and was buggy as hell.

So when Arkham Knight came along I was hoping to see the franchise evolve to fit the larger world but we got more of the same game. The Batman games are far from terrible and AK seems like a great addition. I'm just sad to see Rocksteady unable to make significant changes (and I totally understand why, sequels that change too much scare off customers and worry publishers) to the formula.

Really the Batman franchise is indicitive of the pattern we see in COD or AC, refined or repeating mechanics is bigger open worlds or with different gadgets but nothing truly new. Same game better coat of paint. Sequels aren't free to evolve and change as we'd hope they would. No big evolution like we saw in the early AC or COD days when gameplay was allowed to refine.

I might be jaded but really, despite enjoying these games, I'm disappointed. I know we could get something more out of Rocksteady. Iterating on the same ideas over and over isn't helpful for anyone.

It's just a fourth game in a series that has never been as good as the first. It keeps adding more stuff but never anything incredibly interesting and the things it adds don't get refined enough with each update.

For me, my issue is that the series worked so much better as an Metroid game than the generic open world game it's been since City. Arkham Asylum is one of the best games ever made, and I'm not sure than any of the sequels have even been in my top ten for the year.

Ya, I don't get it either. I like these games still, and I like the combat. It's either this or mashing buttons. I don't really understand how you could be tired of it, but like double dragon style games for decades and never complained about it after 7 games (I think), but with Batman's rhythmic combat system people are complaining they're tired of it already? I don't get it.

Nah, it's not just them or Jeff. On comment sections I peruse around the internet you'll see this type of comment fairly regularly. Like the OP, I find it odd and mind boggling.

Could you give a list of these "so many games" you're talking about. I can count maybe 7 (including a game that isn't out yet) since 2009.

I am genuinely curious. I see people raise this complaint all the time, and I'm genuinely baffled.

This is probably the big thing for me. I love the game. Sincerely, parts of it are spectacular and on the whole it's a legitimate and worthy closing chapter to the Rocksteady Batman storyline. But I'm finding myself noticing key sequences--one after another, sometimes--that make me question why there just isn't more to differentiate this game from the two Arkham titles before it.

I haven't played Knight yet since I don't have anything that can play it but honestly I think if Origins wasn't a thing there wouldn't be nearly as many people acting "jaded" about this one. I think that game not being so hot/just generally seeming unnecessary coupled with how many other games copied the combat (which, for me at least, is the main draw of these games) are making this seem less "special".

So I've been playing the PS4 version and hell, this is the best Batman game to date. I loved Arkham Asylum but this is by far the best of the trilogy yet. Shame about the PC mess though, because it's one heck of well designed game. I love the way it's paced to, never feels like it's purposely forcing you down any storyline and the little details they add are wonderful.

Getting a real kick out of those team up moves you can perform in combat, plus the detective stuff as been great to. Rocksteady have done a splendid job.

@frostyryan said:

Even though Assassin's Creed and Call of Duty are annual franchises, they usually change things up quite a bit. Call of Duty is on a brand rotation, and AC regularly swaps out protagonists and locations. In contrast, the core Batman experience has changed very little from Asylum to Knight. You're doing the same moves against pretty much the same enemies with roughly the same cast of characters. Remember when Ubisoft put out three Ezio games back-to-back? That's more or less how some people feel about Batman. I'm digging Arkham Knight more than I expected, but I completely understand why some are weary of the formula.

I agree with you it seems silly.

I can only think that its because there have been alot of games that have stolen the combat from these games, the cynical side of me says its because people all of a sudden started banging on about how the games is misogynist so the idiot press jumped on that bandwagon.

This is the fourth one. There are also games like this out all the time now.

cant talk on behalf of others but i got kinda tired of the series already after the second game. its just blah. its boring and feels like nothing really happens and it feels like the same game over and over with very small changes, and it feels a lot like a lot of other games that has been done to death like assassins creed. that is what is causing the fatigue with me especially also combined with the game and controls feeling really clunky

I WOULD ALSO LIKE TO KNOW THIS.

I see this argument ALL the time and I don't get it. Shadow of Mordor did it, and the Amazing Spiderman movie games did it so poorly it might as well be something else. but other than that....what else did this? Seriously, am I just missing something?

@cornbredx: Assassin's creed 1 through 8, Batman 1 through 4, Shadow of Mordor, Remember Me, Sleeping Dogs, Ryse.

There are probably more but these are the ones that come to mind.

I feel I should add that when I said I was sick of these games, I was talking about the Arkham games and not games with this style of combat. A game is more than a combat system.

Rule of threes, by the third game, wrapped in the same three components (aesthetic, theme, and mechanics) people get bored. If you change one of those things you can potentially make things fresh again but risk losing the established market from the preceding games.

With the batman games, i stopped playing after "Arkham City" but enjoyed "Shadow of Mordor" which was mostly a change in theme.

As for GB being jaded, a few of the staff seem to have, seemingly, shallow interests in games, as the coverage seems to be mostly mainstream console focused...ya come for the entertainment not for the coverage.

I haven't noticed it, but the argument I don't really get is that Arkham Asylum is the best one because it was so innovative. If Arkham Knight came out first and Asylum was the most recent game would people still be saying Asylum is the best game? I doubt it. I've never liked the argument that because something was first it somehow makes it better. Taken as individual games it seems patently obvious the trilogy has only gotten better with each release.

@frostyryan: Ya, Sleeping Dogs does it too (more effectively than apparently the Spiderman game you mentioned, but I didn't play that one).

Ya, I mean, if there is actually a ton of these games I want to play them because I like the combat in these games haha

I have Sleeping Dogs and SoM in my backlog so far that I'm gonna get to eventually, but if there's more I actually do want to know. =P I'd probably play all of 'em (except Spiderman because there hasn't been a good Spiderman game since Spiderman 2 based off the second Spiderman movie from the early 2000s).

Besides all 4 Batman's and the games you mention I can think of the following

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood

Assassin's Creed: Revelations

Assassin's Creed III

Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag

Assassin's Creed III: Liberation

Sleeping Dogs

Captain America: Super Soldier

@zirilius: it's been so long since i played an assassin's creed game. I don't remember the combat being so close to batman arkham honestly

Several of the GB staff seem to dislike games, and if I were to make a (likely unfair) guess, I'd assume they're just being especially harsh on Arkham Knight because they can't play it on PC.
Personally, I think the combat has gotten a bit stale in the game, but the story is fantastic, and it's still quite visually impressive on consoles, even if it runs at 30 fps. I've enjoyed it far more than any of the previous ones.

So we got :

Every major Assassin's Creed game (20?)

Every major Arkham game (4)

Sleeping Dogs (1)

Shadow of Mordor (1)

Captain America: Super Solider (1)

Amazing Spider man (2)

Remember Me (1)

Ryse: Son of Rome (1)

I know there are more guys, come on lets build the list :D

It's not 1:1 but it had definitely evolved more to Batman combat by the end. I can't speak for Unity or Rogue as I haven't played those but 4 was very close to Batman.

Video added for reference

@frostyryan: It is similar in many ways. The broad strokes are there when you consider how the character faces enemies, how animations transition for multiple characters, how there is a dedicated counter button, etc. There's a rock-paper-scissors affect to these games that is the most "recurring" element (use dodge on enemy A, use stun attack on enemy B, never punch enemy C, etc so on).

To get to what @cornbredx mentioned though, I don't there's any actual value in analyzing a lot of this fatigue. Like cornbredx said, you could play Double Dragon games for years and not get bored. 2D Mario Games are another example. There are really a giant amount.

Either way I think it's impossible to look at this closely and say "how could these people be bored of this system?" the answer is WHO KNOWS. Just get that out of your mind, it goes no where. Never mind that all of us enjoy these games to different extents and in different ways, no doubt we will all be bored of them at different times, different ways, different reasons.

The reason you are hearing about this Batman Jade more is just that, as some have pointed out, there are a good number of similar games out there. I don't think we can say that being bored is ever right or wrong, but I do think sometimes you can help yourself in these scenarios. When I'm tired of something I just let it be for a while. Kind of like JRPGS or fighting games. I play them hard for a few months, then I need a few months off. Some franchises need years in between.

They're a bit of a known quantity at this point. Similar to Uncharted in some respect. There's been four main-series Uncharted games, and people simply might not be chomping at the bit for the new one. And I'm sure the state of the PC version of Arkham Knight hasn't helped spread positivity about game around the web. I've yet to play the game myself (waiting on that PC version) but I imagine I'll enjoy it but not want another Batman Arkham game after it's all said and done.

Sleeping Dogs and Mordor are the only two viable arguments on this list as far as I'm concerned. If you're counting every Assassin's Creed game, you might as well count any and all games with melee combat and a counter mechanic.

@spitznock: ?

But, they've almost the exact same?

We are talking about the combat system right? The one where you fight a group of enemies that form a circle around you, attack one at a time and you counter them with the Y button right? That's what I'm talking about.

Or have I had an aneurysm and forgot what AC is?

There are a lot of things working against this game. The PC port being busted certainly doesn't help frame the game positively in the minds of many to begin with. And yes, the fatigue is a factor. Not just of the four games or others which copied the combat, but of comic book stuff being whored out so damn much lately. Also, anytime something is successful for an extended period of time, there's always this faction of people who develop an attitude of "____ isn't as good as everyone thinks it is" just to prop themselves up some kind of "rebel" in about the lamest way possible. Much of that isn't fair and is a disservice to the game and series' quality, but it is what it is.

This isn't a new phenomenon. The CoD Modern Warfare games in their day were fucking excellent and nailed the "realistic" FPS far better than anyone before them. So everyone copied them, and then gamers on the whole turned on the CoD series and started internet crapping on it (after still buying it) because the series had a few subsequent games where they didn't change much, because they arguably shouldn't have. That's the problem with doing something really fucking well. You can't simply iterate on that. Innovative excellence apparently needs to happen every time. And then if they actually change up the formula, people bitch about how they ruined everything good about it.

@twazuk:Assassin's Creed games don't have the same combat mechanics, but interestingly here I see a pattern (you listed a few games that don't have the same combat mechanics as Arkham games; Remember Me is more like Devil May Cry with programmable combos for example).

I feel I should add that when I said I was sick of these games, I was talking about the Arkham games and not games with this style of combat. A game is more than a combat system.

That's fair, however I was only replying to your claim that there are "so many games that use the same basic combat mechanics" when there is, in fact, not. But I understand why you think that now when I see what you relate it to.

@zirilius same reply to you is above. You're confusing the Batman combat system with ACs mashy combat system- hitting X to parry doesn't make it like Batman. I understand how this could be confused, though. AC's combat has always been awful and simplistic at best. That's why I always thought they should stick to avoiding combat in those games, but people don't like stealth or actually assassinating people. That's another topic, though.

I don't know about the Captain America game, but that's a fair pull from what little I know about it. So, that's 8 now. Hardly "so many" or even "many" for that matter when we're talking about 6 years of the mechanic even existing. There is way more mashy brawlers over 20 years (almost 30) that no one seemed to have a problem with- or at least not at the level of complaining I see about it for Batman.

Simple. If it's great enough, and innovates people won't complain. Arkham Knight was a failure in many regards so I think the criticism is warranted. I wouldn't agree at all with your statement that its COD, AC level though...

It's partly due to it being the fourth one in a series where all of them have been extremely similar, with very familiar gadgets. Beyond that, it's mostly that a lot of other games have adapted this series' combat system, so the blame for fatigue can't just be laid on Batman.

That and 3 other games have been released that were unable to top Asylum.

@cornbredx: Sorry I didn't play Remember Me, I was just going off what I'd been told.

Maybe it's been too long since I played either an Assassin's Creed or an Arkham game, but I've always thought they were had very similar combat.

What makes them so different?

@frostyryan said:

That's because it isn't. The only game that even came close to matching the Arkham games' FreeFlow combat is Shadow of Mordor, and even that didn't live up to it.

I don't think Arkham Knight is perfect, but it's a damn good Batman game. Some people don't like how a series can be iterative, but to me these games were pretty much perfect from the jump, so there's not really much to mess with. The Batmobile seems to be the biggest division between people, but I was salivating at the possibility of driving that thing since it first showed up in Asylum so I might be a little biased.

Then you've got another possibility, which is that the people who like the Arkham games don't necessarily know anything about Batman. Not everyone who buys these games is a comic book fan and aren't exactly privy to metric fuckton of fan service, easter eggs, and shout outs hidden throughout Rocksteady's trilogy. The fact that Jeff looked up who the Arkham Knight was and went who the fuck is that? should tell you all you need to know about where they're coming from.

And for the record it's not a bad thing. Some people like comics and some people don't. I appreciate that Rocksteady has made their Batman games for the people who love Batman, while making it accessible enough for other people to jump on if they so desired. It's all too often the other way around, I find.

@twazuk: I would argue that only AC3, AC4 and ACU only have the similarities with the batman combat.

@twazuk: There is a rhythm to Batman Arkham games. If you just mash buttons you'll get hit, but if you find the rhythm (which gets really complicated in most recent iterations of the game because they add so many different ways to take down certain enemy types) you won't get hit. On top of that you have a multitude of moves to add to one combat "flow" that you can have like 10 or something different moves in one combo working in tandem.

AC you mash buttons and hit X to parry. In fact you can stand in one place in AC3 and do this forever because the enemies will keep respawning and you massacre thousands of people by just hitting X and then Y or whatever it was. I forget the exact buttons because AC3 sucks and I havent played it since. AC4 maybe refined this a little more, but it's still not a "rhythmic fluid" combat system. Even when you add a gun to the mix of stab parry it's maybe imitating it slightly, but it's not the same thing. And the gun has to be reloaded so it's not even something you can do at any time (not that this wholly matters, but when it comes to combat flow in the vein of Arkham games things like reloading wouldn't exist because of the "flow" you're going for- which AC is not).

I don't really remember any particular moment in AC (4 specifically as that's, maybe, the closest to your argument) where I could take on 20 guys without stopping. 4 was actually closest to going back to where you couldn't do that and they didn't want you to fight as many people at one time.

They (WB) have pushed three of these out in a relatively short space of time. There's diminishing returns plus a sense that maybe rocksteady didn't sign off from the series with the kind of bang they some people were expecting. They just made City again.

To make a Batman game after Arkham Asylum is barbaric.

If you don't bitch about sequels they take away your game journalism card :P

I guess for me, Asylum just felt...fresh at the time? It was awhile ago so maybe it's nostalgia for me. But I waited a long time to ever play City (only played it about a year ago) and it just felt like a chore. The gameplay, personally, only took two games in the series to get old. I can totally see why the series is beloved, but I also can relate with people who are tired of it.

They're good games, but they're also very color-by-numbers in some ways they shouldn't have to be. If they hadn't jumped onto the open world bandwagon it probably wouldn't be an issue. Me, I have a lot of tolerance for the games, except for Origins. I think the mechanics and the stories are both really good, but even so there are times when I sigh and say, "A city full of only rioters and tanks is really the best backdrop you could come up with for this?"

... Yeah, not sure. I liked Arkham Knight though. I wonder if Origins made people feel jaded (I also liked Origins, but not so much City honestly).

Justified!

I've seen exactly one person who is "jaded" towards this franchise and it's Jeff. Everyone else at Giant Bomb who has played the game seems to like it a lot. The thing that people need to realize is being critical of one aspect of a game is not the same as not liking a game. And while we're at it, also realize that not liking the same things as you doesn't mean that person is "jaded." Getting annoyed with critics for being critical just makes it sound like you want people to justify your own enjoyment of a game.

I thought Asylum was amazing, City was ok, Origins was interesting, and Knight is awesome. I feel like my expectations were lowered because of people down on it.

But fuck that, these games kick ass and are incredibly well-made.

Game's with more then two entries that don't do that much to change the formula usually fall off for me. I am really loving Arkham Knight, but I couldn't play another one of these games without big changes.