Summary
- Batman: Arkham Shadow might look interesting, but as a VR exclusive, many fans will miss out.
- Worse, it's exclusive within VR to the Meta Quest 3.
- But how, and why, is that different to PS or Xbox exclusives?
A 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:new B♉atman Arkham ga♓me has just been revealed, and it's a VR game - 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Batman: Arkham Shadow. Many of you will have read that sentence like that meme of the guys all cheering then sitting there stony faced, or would have if you didn't likely already know that. Last week, my colleagues 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Eric Switzer and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Andrew King had opposing views on whether this game was good news or not. But I'm less focussed on the substance of the story than the curious reaction to it.
Batman is one of the world's most popular characters, and for a significant chunk of his fans, the Arkham games are either their favourite Batman story, their first Batman story, or both. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:S🌳uicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was afraid to let go of its legacy, while 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Gotham Knights was too heavily influenced by it to do anything unique. Even with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Spider-Man topping sales charts, Batman Arkham remains a benc𓃲hmark for many when discussing the superhero genre in gam♐ing. Heavy is the head that wears the cowl.
Batman Goes Back To Arkham
That all means it’s tough to do a Batman story in video games that isn't Arkham, because everyone is going to compare them. Clearly that was a fear Gotham Knights felt. I understand going back to Arkham (the game is a prequel set between Origins and Asylum, so has plenty of open road too). I also understand people being disappointed that, like the Joker on a jailbreak, we're always brought back to Arkham's clutches. But the reaction to VR shows how far the medium still needs to come.
Arkham Shadow is a Meta Quest 3 exclusive, which means I won't be playing it. I only have a PS VR2, and I don't use it very much. VR headsets are still cumbersome and uncomfortable (PS VR2 is the only one that seems to fit around my glasses), they're extremely expensive, and the games are lagging behind what consoles and PCs can produce. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Exclusive🎐s are particularly tricky in VR - they help developers get funding, and work as adverts for the headsets themselves, offsetting some of the concerns of a low playerbase. But it also means I, Batman Arkham fan, VR headset owner, and journalist who needs to play video games for their job, won't ever play it.
Exclusives Are A Complex Issue In VR
Exclusives demand players buy multiple headsets, which all but the die-hard VR fans won't ever do. They provide another barrier to entry, after the already significant barrier of VR as a concept being an expensive and difficult sell for the general public. That's bad. But they allow developers a bit of breathing room to make games they otherwise wouldn't have been able to afford thanks to that first significant barrier. That's good.
Ultimately, developers may stand to make more profit from taking cash to make a game exclusive and selling to a smaller section of players than they would have if they took no cash during development and then sold it to anyone with any kind of VR headset. Exclusives are keeping VR studios open. But I also worry they're killing the medium.
Underneath this though, the reaction to Batman: Arkham VR has shown the problem with these complexities in the face of an audience who just wants to play your game. Certainly, I wish the game was coming to PS VR2. Many more are wishing it wasn't a VR exclusive at all, but that it would release on their regular consoles. But this game was funded by Meta. It exists entirely because the company paid for it to be in VR.
There's something deeper than disappointment in VR exclusives. If you're on Team Xbox and the PlayStation gets a cool game, or vice versa, there's that natural FOMO. With VR, it's more like revulsion. Why does this game I want to play require a goofy $300 helmet? VR has a serious image problem, and exclusives alone won't fix it. This problem is not entirely a market-share issue either; as of figures in 2022, .
I don't know how, but VR needs to move itself from being an outside format that occasionally gets some games that might be cool if you could just play them on a TV into being a core component of modern gaming. That probably starts with pricing, and paying for expensive exclusives won't bring headset prices down anytime soon. I'm never going to be able to play Batman, but for those who can, I hope it's good.
Batman: Arkham Shadow
- Top Critic Avg: 86/100 Critics Rec: 100%
- Released
- October 21, 2024
- ESRB
- T For Teen // Violence, Mild Blood🎃, Language
- Developer(s)
- Camouflaj
- Publisher(s)
- Oculus
- Engine
- Unity
Batman: Arkham Shadow is an all new game in the superhero action series, developed 🀅by Camouflaj exclusively for the Meta Q𒆙uest 3 VR headset.
- Platform(s)
- 🦄 Meta Quest 3, Meta Quest 3S
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