Patience, Batman! Warner Bros. Games pushes Gotham Knights to 2022

DC fans who’ve been watching the skies since last August for a Bat-Signal heralding the release of Gotham Knights can drop their vigil for the time being. Warner Bros. Games says the drought of new games set in DC’s Batman comics-verse will have to last just a little longer.

In a tweet to fans on Friday, Warner Bros. and the development team at Warner Bros. Games Montreal said they’re giving the upcoming game the time it needs to please all the players wowed by Gotham Knights’ pair of announcement trailers during last summer’s DC Fandome. Though the studio didn’t tease a firm release date, it said the game will now be arriving sometime in 2022, rather than its initially-teased 2021 console launch.

Bruce Wayne doesn’t exit the Batcave with tech that leaves Lucius Fox’s lab half-baked, and apparently the studio feels the same way:

Delays are often part and parcel of the wait for new AAA games, and Warner Bros. says this one’s all about building a quality title that can exceed fan expectations. “We are giving the game more time to deliver the best possible experience for players,” the studio shared.

As reasons go, it's a hard one to fault, but the wait for Gotham Knights extends a lengthy span when no proper AAA Batman games have appeared since 2015’s Batman: Arkham Knight, the 4th installment in the vaunted Arkham series. Since then, there’s been an Arkham remaster bundle and a pair of episodic Batman gaming narratives (2016’s Batman: The telltale Series and its sequel Batman: The Enemy Within) — but nothing on the open-world scale that Gotham Knights is aiming for.

Though Bruce Wayne’s long shadow hangs over Gotham Knights and drives what we know so far of its story, the game itself has so far been teased as a post-Batman title, which brings together supporting characters from the extended Bat-family after Batman himself appears to have (gulp!) — died under mysterious circumstances.

Gotham Knights is set to feature swappable gameplay from a 4-character lineup of Robin, Nightwing, Batgirl, and Red Hood — though we’re still hanging back on speculating whether Batman himself could make a surprise appearance. Framed with co-op play in mind and set in Gotham’s open world, the third-person action-RPG lets a player level up a quartet of skills and attributes unique to each character.

Based on what we’ve already seen in the trailers, the game also carries over the movies’ cinematic flair for dialogue, featuring a voice cast that helps keep the focus on the Court of Owls-derived story. Even while they’re fighting bad guys, the chatty members of your Bat-squad still have something to say, delivering plenty of punchy one-liners both in and out of battle.

Gotham Knights was announced just ahead of the arrival of next-gen consoles from Sony and Microsoft as a cross-generation release, and that still appears to be the case. Watch for Gotham Knights to land sometime next year for PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, and PC.