Gotham Knights developers at WB Montréal have explained how Batman would overshadow the entire game if he was included in any capacity.
The team behind Gotham Knights have already made it abundantly clear on multiple occasions that Batman isn’t coming back to life in the game – and that he’s really dead. WB Montréal talked about how including Batman would actually hinder the story Gotham Knights is aiming to tell.
“It simply wouldn’t have made it easier to have Batman present at all, actually, because anywhere he is, he just takes up all of the space, he takes all of the air out of the room, and so it was so much more interesting to start afresh without him,” explained executive producer Fleur Marty (via GamesRadar).
Instead, players can enter co-op as either Nightwing, Red Hood, Batgirl, or Robin, with the four characters investigating the Court of Owls in Gotham City.
“I think [Batman’s absence] really drives these characters,” added lead writer Ceri Young. There are various points where each finds themselves asking: ‘If Batman were here, this is how he’d handle it’. But they don’t have him, and so they have to figure out how to do it their own way and that’s where a lot of their interest and drive lies.”
