Batman: Arkham Insurgency - 11 Things It Must Learn From Asylum

3. Minimise Side Missions, Focus On Storytelling & Pacing

Just because your game is advertised as - or eventually goes - 'open world', doesn't mean it has to do so within the first 10 minutes, or even for the majority of its time. As we're seeing with the genre slowly become the norm, developers like Platinum Games open something like NieR: Automata with a phenomenal, scripted sequence, then a hub-world series of conversations, then you're allowed to roam free and explore.

Persona 5 is another title that contains a number of linear gameplay sections, only to open up more and more as the game goes on. The Arkham sequels certainly attempted to pepper their open worlds with a number of defined 'levels', but there was no sense of escalation, overarching storytelling or deliberate pacing. You 'got round to them' whenever you liked.

What little open-ended areas Arkham Asylum did have - the whole game was free-roaming, after all - showed us that less is more. These connective parts in between the wings of the asylum itself were the perfect breathing room after any more directed segment. For Arkham Insurgency, it'd be fantastic to see WB design a campaign that goes from directed levels and storytelling, perhaps into larger areas and back again, before towards the back third of the entire game, then we unlock the full map.

It's high-time developers considered the pros and cons of "going open-world", and a franchise as narratively strong as Arkham really needs to up-end how we think about the genre.