Arkham City's world to be load-free, open from the get-go

The real (read: still entirely fictional) Batman wouldn't be stopped by silly load screens or invisi-walls, and according to Rocksteady, neither will Arkham City's.

"Everywhere that's open to the sky is available to the player from the off. So they can go anywhere they want and that was the emotional feeling that we wanted to convey; you're Batman, you can do what you want. That's the empowering thing that Arkham Asylum didn't really deliver because it was such a linear, tight, intense story," Rocksteady game marketing manager Dax Ginn told CVG.

"It's all open, all the time. Our technical director was like, 'What? You want an open-world that's open all the time that's five times bigger than anything we've done before? Are you crazy?'"

He went on to explain that - while interior areas ask you to stow your Justice Fists and wait a couple seconds - exteriors are load-free all the time. The techno-wizardry that is streaming has allowed Rocksteady to pull this off, though Ginn noted that it's been a "massive, massive challenge."

Meanwhile, he also put the kibosh on whispers of multiplayer for Arkham City, but Rocksteady's definitely not ruling it out for future installments.

"We considered it pretty briefly and then realised that it would have hit and hurt our production and also it didn't really make a lot of sense for a game that is so single character-centric. I can totally see that multiplayer is a super popular thing and online playability seems to be growing and something that people desire. So I can't say that what's going to happen down the track, but for Arkham City we're focused on the single-player experience."

From what we've seen, that was a damn good choice. You can sky tackle people, for crying out loud. Mark our words: that alone will revolutionize gaming forever.