Telltale's Batman: Enemy Within Has Some Wicked Fight Choreography
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When we think of adventure games, we don't think of amazing fight scenes. Not between all the pointing and clicking, the puzzle solving and the conversational trees. But for Telltale Games' Batman: The Enemy Within it only seems natural.
I've talked a bit about the series on the podcast before, and I quite dig the game. There's a lot of combat in the episodic series -- around two major scenes at least per episode -- so animating two characters to beat the crap out of each other is an important part of the game's development process.
On Twitter, Telltale supplied an entertaining glimpse at some of the work that goes into these fights. According to the account, LBP Stunts Chicago and Vlad Rimburg helped craft some of the choreography that went into their scenes. Here's some of the footage of that stunt work, which presumably was used for reference by the animators.
Dayum! That stuff looks brutal. It's interesting to note that a female stunt professional took Batman's place in this fight. While watching this, my wife suggested that it was probably easier to capture the size difference between the Caped Crusader and the drugged-up Bane, though it's also likely she was just the best stunt professional for the scene.
Telltale also posted similar footage from another fight earlier in the series between Batman and The Riddler. It's not nearly as brutal looking, but there's a lot of neat prop work and jumping. In that sense, the footage better represents the gadget based fighting that is such a staple in the comic books.
Take note, game developer PR folks, this stuff is way more interesting that incremental reveals on social media, or agonizingly long Twitch streams. Gamers love to see how some of the sausage gets made in our favorite video games, especially when that stuff looks this amazing.
