Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight might be seen as the lighter family-friendly version of DC's iconic caped crusader, but in many ways it was set out to be even more ambitious than the Batman Arkham series that has influenced countless modern action-adventure games.
The game's developer TT Games was at this year's Develop: Brighton panel titled 'Building a Hit: Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight', charting how it followed from the acclaim of 2022's Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga with a desire to give Batman the same treatment. "The promise at start was the complete Batman story in the ultimate Lego Gotham City, the definitive Batman game, as only TT can build it," said head of production and strategic director Jonathan Smith.
There was a similar approach, as game director Mark Green said they also started with the movies because "they're the most well-known and famous." While that involved paying frame-by-frame tribute to the movies spanning each filmmaker's stylistic era, it all had to come together in one Gotham universe that would also outdo how it's been presented in past games. "A lot of the depictions [of Gotham] in previous games have been deserted, probably for lots of technical reasons, I imagine. So we decided to take on that technical challenge and make this a living, breathing Gotham with civilians, traffic and businesses that make it feel alive."
Making an authentic city involved extensive research into real-world architecture, especially from American cities. But in showing Gotham through the years, including prior to Batman's story, this version of Gotham is still different from the real world in one way.
"There's no city planning, people are kind of inconsiderate, so they'll just build on top of each other," art director Dave Woodman explained, showing an example of a building affectionately dubbed the 'wedding cake'. "So there's this style of old buildings on the bottom, and then more modern architecture at the top. So even though you're running around the city, you'll see the history of Gotham before and the whole story arc of Batman."
Of course, the team was still building a Lego city rather than a human one. It was then important to thread Lego references, both directly and indirectly, throughout the architecture and environment, including a surprisingly deep cut into LEGO's own history.
"Lego has a set of production colours that they use today, but for the old city, we asked Lego, 'Could we use the old Lego colours for the old buildings?'" Woodman recalled, and Lego was more than happy to accommodate. "It's all these little small things that kind of build up inside a bigger picture."
Gotham's island-based geography made it easy to style each island after a different movie era as players progressed through the story and reached a new location. This idea of time passing, however, was also reflected throughout the whole city, including locations you revisit.
"As time passes, the storefronts are also changing, so in the first era, it's a vinyl store, then the second era, it's a CD shop, and in the final era, traditional media is going away, so it's become a phone shop," Woodman explained. "It's all these opportunities to tell this story and show the passage of time as you play the game."
Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight also marked the studio's transition from its own proprietary engine to Unreal Engine 5, which was still in its relative infancy at the start of the project. While that presented its own challenges, one tool helped nail the look of the game's Arkham-inspired combat early on.
"One of the key points from the Arkham trilogy is how Batman flows from one enemy to the other with a warping effect," game programming director Rian Walters said. "That's when it coincided that Epic had just made the warping motion plug-in available to us. That became a big part of how we gave people that essence of the Arkham combat that will feel very familiar to them."
An even more important part in nailing the feel of the Dark Knight was through completely hand-keyed animation, a process that director of technical animation Ruthie Nielsen described as a "unique beast", though finding it preferable to mo-cap. "One of the tricky things is making sure that the timing works really well," she said. "You can see that Batman flies across very quickly to different enemies, because we really wanted that responsive feeling as you're playing a game."
While that posed its own technical challenges, including a hilarious bug where Batman's cape would also get stuck in front of him, which the team dubbed the 'Bat Bib', close and frequent collaborations across disciplines were key to making a Batman that doesn't just honour the superhero and the city of Gotham's history. It's also since become a historical milestone as the highest-rated Lego game of all time.
LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight is out now on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC, with the Switch 2 version releasing on 18 September.
