"Closing the book" on Arkham City - Rocksteady discusses the toughest Batman DLC pack yet

Batman: Arkham City DLC pack Harley's Revenge is now live - a two-hour epilogue in which Batman and Robin wage war on a more-than-usually psychotic Harley Quinn.

After playing the pack through, we sat down with Rocksteady Studios marketing manager Dax Ginn for a quick post-mortem.

DLC is often seen as an opportunity to break away from the main game a bit. What was the goal for this DLC Pack?

Certainly to do something different. We had just completely burnt ourselves out making Arkham City. We took a big break during November once the game had launched in October. It wasn't until we'd come back in that lead up to Christmas that we started thinking about how we're going to approach this final chapter.

So Harley Quinn's Revenge was something that we felt like, it would be cool to take an interesting direction, but we didn't have the brain space to really focus on what that would be. So having had a bit of a break over November, we really thought about messing with chronology, messing with the interplay between Batman and Robin, creating a kind of cooperative feel that it actually being a cooperative mode, so switching control between Batman and Robin but starting off as Robin and then messing with the timeline so that you kind of get bits of the story coming at you in unexpected ways, felt like a really interesting direction to go with this.

Because the main game is so chronological, we wanted give that kind of theatrical spin so that you're not really sure what the state of play is within Arkham City, and you're not really sure what Harley's motivations are. So we wanted to reinforce that with a fairly kind of twisted and slightly crazy timeline as well.

Does the fact that Arkham City players won't necessarily experience this story affect how you tell it?

It's a shame if people miss it if they loved Arkham City, because this really does close the book, this is the final chapter in Arkham City. The interesting thing for us is giving an opportunity to explore Harley a little bit, it was something that allowed us to go a little bit nuts.

Because she is nuts, she's completely crazy but now she's rudderless as well. Without Joker to tell her what to do, which he did very effectively, she's now inherited his gang, she's now got a lot of power at her fingertips, but she's not a born leader - she doesn't really know how to handle that power, and so she makes some pretty stupid decisions.

At the same time she's a total loose cannon and a complete threat, so that gave us an opportunity to tell a story which did tease more of her personality and maybe explore elements of her personality which have never been seen before, because she's always had Joker to kind of keep her on the straight and narrow. But not anymore, she's completely off the chain and going mental.

In terms of the difficulty, you're quite literally not pulling any punches are you?

Well, I think if you finished Arkham City you going to be interested in Harley Quinn's Revenge, but those who finished Arkham City might have a lot of skills under their belt. It's a pretty tough challenge, but at the same time it might have been a few months since gamers will have played Arkham City. So there's still a really solid tutorial structure and infrastructure to remind you this is how the game works and this is how combat works and specifically this is how Robin works.