Arkham City storytelling: Rocksteady and Paul Dini talk narrative

After popping up earlier to discuss the 'heat' between Batman and Catwoman in Rocksteady's stunning looking sequel, Paul Dini's back with some more thoughts on narrative.

Speaking with Joystiq, lead narrative designer Paul Crocker and famed Batman writer Paul Dini shared thoughts on the narrative arc from Arkham Asylum to Arkham City.

"The biggest challenge for us was taking the game out of Arkham Island and into Arkham City," Crocker said. "As people have seen in the secret room in the last game, we had it planned. I guess it was a rough road back, to a degree, because that meant we had to do it. But the idea of the city has grown into bigger and bigger detail, and really that was the biggest challenge."

Dini has recently been working on a comic that bridges the two games and tells of how Quincy Sharp, as the newly pointed Mayor of Gotham City - how he got that job is beyond us - has instigated the sectioning off of portion of the city to contain the escaped inmates of the breached asylum.

"We wanted to have a big event that would sort of play into people's paranoia and fear that Sharp would use to say 'this disaster has happened, let's lockdown the city," Dini explained, before elaborating on the Quincy's motivations for such an desperate act.

"You see that he's being manipulated from behind by Hugo Strange, who's also manipulating some of the villains as well, even though they're largely unaware of it."

And so the drip-drip-drip of information continues and anticipation builds to fever pitch ahead of the game's release in mid-October. Game of the year contender? We certainly think so.