Hi everyone! It’s officially dark at 6pm and the crisp, woodsy smell in the air lets me know that the holidays are just around the corner. With so many great 3D-compatible titles, such as UNCHARTED 3: Drake’s Deception, Batman Arkham City, and Assassin’s Creed Revelations, recently launched and coming, there’s no shortage of 3D entertainment on the PS3 system this holiday season. That being said, the 3D Display is sure to be a hit under the tree, so we thought we’d give you all a personalized tour of the product.

Featuring a luminous 24” LCD screen with full HD 1080p 3D presentation, the 3D Display delivers an incredible high-definition stereoscopic 3D experience, offering best-in-class visuals in both 2D and 3D for all of you gamers. As our first official gaming display, the 3D Display is enhanced for gaming with SimulView, a special feature that allows you to view individual, unique, full-screen images of gameplay in two-player mode.

We’re very excited to be able to deliver a comprehensive 3D package at an affordable price. We firmly believe that 3D games will lead the charge into 3D adoption and this bundle arrives when great 3D games are launching. The 3D Display bundle is available at a retailer near you for $499.99 (MSRP). It includes the 3D Display, a copy of MotorStorm Apocalypse, one pair of PlayStation 3D Glasses, and an HDMI cable. The 3D Glasses will also be available separately for $69.99 MSRP.

What 3D titles have you played? Are you excited about SimulView? Let us know!

PlayStation.Blog: In Arkham Asylum I was able to level up almost all of my skills by the end of the game. Does Arkham City bring more skill upgrades and more skill diversification, perhaps specialized character builds?

We’ve certainly expanded the number of upgrades in the game – we had 20 upgrades in Arkham Asylum, and we now have 33 different upgrades in Arkham City. There are a lot of ways to develop your skills and use them in the game. There’s not a massive skill tree, per se, though certain upgrades do unlock other upgrades. Ultimately, it’s more about how you decide to use your skills. We’ve really expanded those options with Arkham City.

PSB: Since you start with most of the gadgets from Arkham Asylum, will there be room for new gadgets?
Yeah. You start with five of the gadgets from Arkham Asylum: the Batarang, Bat Claw, Remote Batarang, Explosive Gel and Cryptographic Sequencer. And every single one of those gadgets has new features and improved useage. Overall, we’ve expanded the number of gadgets from eight to 12.

We have a number of new gadgets as well, such as the Remote Electrical Charge, called the REC for short. It’s a projectile-taser weapon that you can fire into enemies to stun them or fire at their gun to make it go off and create a distraction. The REC can also power machinery and create magnetic fields that work in some puzzles. Another new gadget is the Freeze Blast technology from Mr. Freeze: it can freeze enemies in place, or you can use it to freeze an enemy’s weapon and take it out of action. Our focus was to give the player as many options as possible.

PSB: What are the biggest refinements you’ve made to Batman’s controls, gameplay mechanics, and overall “feel” since Arkham Asylum?
The biggest thing we’ve focused on is his navigation and his ability to get around Gotham City, making that as exciting and fun as possible. The game is much bigger, a larger expanse but also much more vertical. We worked a lot on the glide system; when you’re gliding you can pull R2 to throw Batman into a dive. And as you hurdle towards the ground you can build momentum to propel you around the city. You can also get a grapple boost upgrade that boosts you off ledges and rooftops. And you can combine these two moves, the dive and grapple boost, to get around Gotham City without even touching the ground, if you get good enough.

What’s really nice is that you have to constantly be evaluating your surroundings like Batman would: where to dive, where to move as you weave through back alleyways and over the tops of buildings. It gives you the feel of being Batman in Gotham City. We wanted to live up to that promise.

PSB: Will the Bat Cave be returning in Arkham City, and will it be featured more prominently than it was in Arkham Asylum? (via @PSIPodcast)
I don’t want to give away any spoilers! I can definitely say that we’re focusing on the key Batman elements: you have the action, but obviously the cerebral, the forensic, the psychological, being the world’s greatest detective and so forth. Those are all important elements, and we have them all in Arkham City.

PSB: All the new villains are part of the main quest or from side quest? I fear too many characters and too little time to develop them (via @OverlordZombie)
I think I understand that concern. From our point of view, though, we wanted to make the best story we possibly could. There was never an attempt to squeeze in extra characters for the sake of doing so; we just wanted a really strong Batman story. The story is about this relationship between Batman and the supervillains. Some of the villains are part of the main story, others are part of the side missions. We’ve spent as much time crafting the side missions as we’ve spent on the main story. They are in no way filler, they’re really great entertainment.

PSB: The boss fights are different, right? In Arkham Asylum many were very similar. (via @KevJones311)
In Arkham Asylum I guess we never really thought of the Titan henchmen as boss fights, but as part of the normal combat flow. I can certainly see the concern. When we think about boss fights, we look at the supervillain and how he can challenge Batman.

Take Mr. Freeze. He’s very powerful with his suit, so Batman can’t take him head-on. But Freeze is also super intelligent, so that fight is all about trying to outsmart Freeze. When you find a way past his defenses, when you manage to sneak up and hurt him, he’ll study your behavior and shut down the techniques you’re using. It’s dynamic. If he sees that you’re using the glide kick, he’ll reduce the temperature of the air in the room to freeze up Batman’s cape and stop you from gliding. If you use the floor grates, he’ll freeze them up so you can’t use them. As the fight goes on, the environment dynamically evolves.

PSB: How has freeflow hand-to-hand combat been improved since the first game?
We didn’t want to overcomplicate the system. I think its strength is that it focuses on selecting the right move, not long combos or complicated sequences. You really feel like Batman when you play because it’s a very simple, very rewarding combat system. Now the number of options has been expanded massively.

We’ve added a lot of things, like simultaneous counters so that Batman can fend off two, three enemies at once. We added projectile counters, too, so he can throw objects back at enemies. Enemies can use combo attacks now, and you have to pull while countering multiple strikes. You can perform beatdowns, a series of really fast blows that can finish an enemy off without you having to use a takedown. You can even use your gadgets in combos: the Bat claw, the Explosive Gel, REC, even the Freeze Blast. It’s still really easy to pick up and play.

PSB: How much time will the average gamer spend in Detective Mode this time around? (via @TheMarriedGamer)
I understand those concerns. On the flip side, the whole point of the game is to experience what it’s like to be Batman: we didn’t want to reduce his effectiveness or drop a battery life meter on Detective Mode, because that wouldn’t be Batman. So we looked for other ways to solve the issue. We’ve done that by thinking of Detective Mode as being a way for Batman to hunt enemies down; you turn it off to navigate. That balance works well.

As an example, in Detective Mode now, the environment doesn’t look quite as clear. We pull the enemies out of the environment so you can identify and inspect them instantly but the environment itself doesn’t look quite as distinct. Then when you navigate, it will feel very natural to switch Detective Mode off. We still let the player use it when he wants to, though. We just had to find a more natural useage for it.

PSB: Can we drive the Batmobile or Batplane? (via @mitii5)
We did look at that, those are obviously key elements of the series. But after a lot of thought, we wanted to focus on the feeling of Batman moving through the city, this very vertical city. It’s an inhospitable place: it’s quarantined, it’s got roadblocks in place, so the best way to get around is to glide across the rooftops and through the streets. So that’s what we focused on. When you play, you’ll see why that’s the most effective way to travel.

PSB: I’d like further clarification on the things to expect in the Challenge Rooms. (via @Felix824)
People really enjoyed them last time — it’s a place to develop your combat skills and push them to the maximum. We added this idea of modifiers. There are 12 modifiers in all, and any combination of them can be applied to any challenge room to get a different experience. One example is a a protective aura that moves around the room between different enemies, so you have to pick and choose when to attack. Some of the modifiers are positive, too, such as one that allows you to smash through enemies who hold shields or tasers.

On top of that, we have a campaign mode where you face three challenge rooms in a row. But you start with as many as six modifiers and you have to use them all before you finish all three rooms. You can do them in any order: two in this room, four in the next or however you want.

PSB: Will there be any hidden secrets similar to the Arkham City blueprints in Arkham Asylum? (via @RetroDLC)
We love that feeling of the Arkham DNA being throughout the environment in Arkham City. There are going to be lots of secrets and Batman references and Gotham folklore. And the Riddler’s coming back with a vengeance – he’s been plotting his revenge since Arkham Asylum. Throughout Arkham City are 440 different trophies to collect, and each one has its own puzzle. And to raise the stakes, Riddler has taken hostages this time. So if you don’t play his game…

PSB: What are you personally most excited for players to experience in Arkham City?
The thing I’m personally most proud of is how we balanced an open world with the strong, focused story. The feeling that you really are Batman and that feeling of being almost overwhelmed by the sheer number of things that you’ve got to do.

The other thing is just gliding through the city, grappling-boosting off the top of buildings, diving down through alleyways. I can’t tell you how many hours of work we’ve lost to that.

As a result, I’ve had a keen eye on Arkham City, so yesterday I swooped over to the Warner Brothers gamescom area and watched a demo of the new challenge maps, which offer a high-score chasing, combo-stringing alternative to the meat and drink of the story campaign. Compeered by Dax Ginn, marketing game manager at Rocksteady Studios, two members of the dev team played through identical challenge maps on different TVs – one as Batman and one as Catwoman – in a face-off as a small group of journalists watched the stereoscopic 3D beatdown.

Afterwards, I caught up with Dax to discuss the gamescom build of Arkham City and their approach to character development with this sequel.

What do you have to show us in this build of Arkham City?

At E3 and San Diego Comic-Con we showed some of our single-player story and side-missions and, here at gamescom, we’ve brought the third big part of our game: our challenge mode. We’ve brought both combat and Predator challenge maps and we’re showing it all in 3D.

We’ve put so much work into this area but we haven’t shown them to anyone yet so that’s what’s most exciting right now.

How are you treating the challenge mode in this sequel?

They’re kind of like a dojo where you can go to sharpen your skills. For all its atmosphere and emotional intensity, Arkham Asylum was a very driven, focused experience; with Arkham City the design is aimed towards giving the player freedom, so there are a lot of choices on offer at any given moment. The challenge in that, for us, is not being able to control and ramp up the difficulty in the same way we did in the first game, so if you find at any point you’re getting slaughtered in the main game, you have the challenge maps to work on your skills.

The second function of the mode is to massively blow out the amount of content in the game and we’ve added in a reward structure with the Riddler Revenge feature, where you earn up to three medals for getting a high score in combat or taking out enemies in specific ways in the Predator maps, and online leaderboards.

With Catwoman taking a central role in what we’ve seen of the game so far, and a distinct, Rocksteady take on Robin appearing in challenge mode, what is the essence of those two characters?

The ‘Rocksteady take’ is a very good way of putting it because we’re given a lot of creative freedom to define the Arkham verse, as we call it. Take a look at what we’ve done with Penguin – the monocle doesn’t really work in the 21st century so we’ve smashed a beer bottle into his face and that’s our take on it. That sums up our approach to character design: gritty and nasty, and with a tangible sense of threat in the game world.

Catwoman’s design is driven by the hostile atmosphere in Arkham City and her Catsuit has a military feel – if you look closely then you’ll see a very fine black and grey camouflage pattern, in keeping with her being very difficult to detect in the shadows.

Because Robin only appears in the challenge maps, our focus is on taking him in a direction not seen before. To fit in our world then he needs to be hard-hitting and have abilities that are approaching the potency of Batman’s, so he has a bow staff and shield, and he is an explosions specialist, with vision augmentation that allows him to identify explosives in the environment. Robin is a complex character and very different to Batman – it’s not a case that we’ve just reskinned him.

How has the Rocksteady team built up such an extensive knowledge of the Batman universe and characters?

Working closely with DC Comics helps a lot. They are masters of that universe and we consult them on every aspect of the game because we want to make sure any new idea is there to create a deeper experience of feeling like Batman.

The alter ego is a big part of any superhero and yet you have never explored that. Why did you decided to steer clear of Bruce Wayne?

Because it’s a Batman game. He’s powerful and aspirational but you never lose sight of the fact that he is mortal. It’s such fertile ground and in Arkham City we will go deeper into the man behind the cowl by bringing in characters like Hugo Strange, who knows Batman’s true identity, and Talia al Ghul, who has a romantic relationship with him. Through those characters we see his vulnerable side but our aim has always been to make an action game, not a business simulator, and when you start thinking about what you would do while playing as Bruce Wayne, it doesn’t seem terribly exciting in comparison.

My favorite parts of Arkham Asylum were when events would suddenly take a dark turn to the left, like the scene in the morgue and the Scarecrow levels. How will you surprise players this time around knowing that they are now expecting that kind of stuff?

It’s a really tough challenge. I can’t be completely truthful with my answer here because we want to make sure that surprises remain. We have moments in the game that are designed to take you by surprise and… this really is a difficult question to answer… players are going to appreciate what we have done because those moments you mentioned worked so well in the first game, and we totally understand that there’s an expectation now. We’ve thought a lot about what we think people are going to think, and then worked out ways to stay one step ahead.

Let me know if you have any questions based on my time with Arkham City and I’ll do my best to answer over the weekend.

There’s five of us in the private screening room and Dax Ginn, marketing game manager at Rocksteady, has just played through an early mission from Arkham City, lasting around 30 minutes, which I’m not going to spoil for you. We are free to call out questions afterwards and one journalist asks, “Will we see anything like the Scarecrow missions from Arkham Asylum?”

“Did you like the scarecrow stuff?” he replies to slow nods. “Well we did too. Aren’t you glad that you didn’t know about the Scarecrow levels before you played Arkham Asylum? If they had been part of the marketing campaign they wouldn’t have had that kind of impact, so I’m just going to leave it there.”

The biggest difference between Arkham City and its predecessor is the move to a more open setting. In the intervening 18 months, Quincy Sharp, who was the warden of the Asylum, is elected Mayor of Gotham and transfers all of the inmates to Arkham City. Batman has been watching all of this happen and he knows that he’s going to have to deal with it.

Arkham City is also around five times bigger than the Asylum and most of it is open to the player from the start.” Anything that is open to the sky is open to player right from the off,” Dax explains. “Nobody tells Batman where to go so it was important for us to give that freedom right at the start. The interiors are gated and will open as a result of narrative progression.”

“Our attitude towards pacing is to throw everything at the player straight away and let them decide how and when they want to navigate those options. Telling a story in Arkham Asylum was very easy because it was a very linear experience. Arkham City isn’t a sandbox game but it’s not completely linear either – it’s somewhere in-between.”

“What we don’t want to do was ruin the pacing with frivolous collection missions where you have to go and find 50 things while Gotham is burning – Batman wouldn’t do that. We have a tight core narrative with clear paths; going off-piste inevitably yields other options but they are always character driven, whether that’s answering a phonecall from Zsasz and having him taunt you or finding an informant who reveals another snippet of information.”

Batman is able to negotiate this large, open space by gliding and swooping to gain momentum, using his Bat Claw to catch the corners of buildings and propel himself skyward. He can even hook onto patrol helicopters and perch on the landing gear as chaos unfolds beneath.

“If you’re just flying around the streets looking for a fight,” Dax adds, “you’ll pick up bits of information that have been designed to be communicated in an ambient fashion at that particular stage in the game. There is a vast amount of conversational dialogue that has been a serious job to write and record, but we finally finished it last Wednesday.”

“We’re constantly looking at Arkham Asylum and seeing how it feeds into Arkham City. The same applies to characters, combat, moves; they all carry over but how they have evolved is directly related to the new challenges Batman is facing.”

This also applies to Detective Mode, an X-ray overlay that you use to gather forensic information. Some people had mixed feelings about it because, while it was very useful, they felt like they were missing out the game’s incredible visuals by using it.

“There weren’t a lot of criticisms of Arkham Asylum but that was one of them,” says Dax, “and thinking about why people reacted the way that they did and what we’re going to do about it was really interesting. Batman is a detective, so removing detective mode wasn’t an option for us because it suits him so well and it allows us to do these slower paced investigation sections.”

“Our thinking was more about why people responded to it in that way. Gamers wanted it to be more of a tool, just like the Bat Claw is a tool. We hadn’t balanced it right so it felt more like an exploit than a tool, because it gave you so much information. That’s our understanding of the criticisms and our response has been to balance that information better.”

Before we finished, one journalist enquired if Rocksteady would be interested in working on a game adaptation of The Dark Knight Rises.

“He [Christopher Nolan] is a pretty amazing guy and that would be a brilliant lunchtime meeting to have, discussing how that might work. But what we find with the comic book license is that we get creative freedom to push the characters in pretty much any direction we like; we’re not bound to a single narrative. I’m not saying we’ll never make a game based on a movie, but as of right now and from a creative perspective, it’s not something we want to be doing.”

Arkham City is looking very much the worthy successor to my flatmate’s favorite PS3 game. From the sound of it, we can expect plenty of surprises when it is released, and I can promise you won’t read about them here first.