Enough heroics, I want to play as a damn villain!
My favourite characters are all villains, so what I most want to see is options to play as Riddler, Two-Face, Poison Ivy, Lex and the rest. Seriously. No foolin'. I want to be able to do that. Make villain protagonist storylines with Batman/Superman/the police/authorities as the enemy.
This could provide all kinds of interesting possibilities, if for the character they replace Batman's moral compass and various stealth/detective/batjitsu methodology with game mechanics which instead reflect the neuroses/psychoses of the villain character, and weapons or devices to reflect their methods. So for example as Riddler you have to target appropriate victims/police/Batman by committing a crime against them or planning one and then communicating a clue to your target in the form of a riddle. Failing to leave a clue or leaving one too easy would result in a heavy penalty, while committing the actual crime would be the physical part and would mean performing feats of high risk theft, kidnapping and stealth engineering or sabotage, with a crew you hire (plus Query and Echo, yo henchgirls). Farming points could be done by simply sticking up people in the street and asking them a riddle, then beating/robbing them if they fail to answer. Breaking any of your own rules brings a penalty.
This would require gameplay of strategy and organization, and could be awesome.
Playing as Two-Face, meanwhile, could be following a more conventional plot as a robber and gangster, but if your crucial decisions are resolved with a coin toss of randomized 50/50, maybe depending on how important the decision is or how many potential outcomes your character can forsee, then you would have to plan ahead to work around either of the 50/50 coin-decisions when they come up. Failing to plan ahead/take action for both possible outcomes will reduce your future options and bring a penalty. This could also be an awesome game.
For Joker, maybe you'd have the most freedom and wouldn't even have a linear plot to follow, but can piece one together depending on the results of your actions, giving you a sense of acting on a whim all the time. However, failing to be sufficiently "funny" or spontaneous will bring a penalty.
Penguin would be more conventional, but maybe require you to keep up your legitimate businessman front and reputation. Poison Ivy would have interesting options for using pheromones and seducing your way to victory, while Scarecrow can manipulate different areas of the brain to trigger different hallucinations as required.
Any other ideas? At any rate, the more I think of this the more I really want to see it, possibly as DLC content.
Whether Telltale's approach would make this harder or easier to pull off I don't know, but I really want to see it happen.
Comments
It's been basically confirmed that this game deals with how Bruce Wayne lives and as well as Batman, and that's it's in its own universe and not a Batman Family story so we probably won't have an option like this.
Awww. If it was DLC, I'd pay money for this, no doubt about it.
I like your idea, but I think that making a game like this wouldn't be very Telltale style. Their games focus mostly on story and dialogue, while this sounds like a full package game with a lot of action. Who knows, maybe we will get a game similar to this in the future. But, if that happens, I doubt it will be from Telltale.
It could be interesting if there was a 400 Days style single episode as DLC where you'd get to play some of the villains for some sequences, but I doubt that could work as a full game. Mister Freeze would be my choice though, owning to the character's tragic and thus somewhat sympathetic backstory with his wife Nora. Playing Victor as he strives to revive his wife at any cost would be engaging.
He would be a popular choice for this, no doubt. But any of the characters have enough background to expand into a full game, IMO. They all live in a city with each and the Bat-family. Personally, I'd like to see lesser known characters used as well, if they decided to go down this route.
I hope we get an action game like this, with co-op definitely. But Batman himself seems like a harder character to use for the Telltale style than most of his enemies: he is the stealth martial artist, they are mostly plotting stuff, performing non-combat physical tasks, hiring mooks and giving orders, supervising physical violence rather than administering it with their own hands.
Even if they use sequences of quick-time actions for combat or some kind of aim-and-click mechanism (which is probably what Bat himself will get, in some form or another) then I'd be pretty happy with that.
We haven't yet seen a game where we can play as Penguin, Black Mask, Riddler etc in a real sense so this would be a no-brainer opportunity to do so. IMO.
Here's who I want to play as...
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You want to play as the Dramatic Voice Guy narrating his way through Gotham's underworld? Nice choice, but I've still got a nerd-on for Harvey or Ivy, I'll hold out for them.
No, I want to play as the Joker! I figured that was obvious.?
PSYCHE!! You'd lose points for missing that gag, Kenny. The Joker would've seen it coming a mile off and 5 ppl would be dead by now.
They will definitely use a lot of quick time events. A big part of Batmans job is to punch baddies, so I don't see the game happening without those.
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"Why so serious... Let's put a smile on that face."
So, a couple of months on, post-release and post-gameplay... who here would like to play as a villain? And if so, which? Which bad guy would be best suited to the gameplay and have the most engaging story and gameplay potential? Thoughts?