One of the year’s most anticipated games is the conclusion to Rocksteady’s epic Arkham trilogy, Batman: Arkham Knight. Today the ESRB announced the game has earned an “M” for mature rating. Previous entries Arkham Asylum and Arkham City both earned T for teen ratings. The news came as a surprise to game director Sefton Hill because it wasn’t the studio’s aim to make an M rated game.
In a statement from the company, the studio acknowledged that the rating would cause some younger players to miss out on the experience but ultimately the choice was made to avoid diluting the story Rocksteady wanted to tell. “It would have been wrong to water down the game and deliver a story we didn’t believe in to keep the game ‘mass market’ or enable it for more people. We feel that’s the wrong way to go about it. We said we love the story and we don’t want to jepoardize that.”
Both of the studios previous Batman titles were regarded as some of the generations best games. While the level of violence and language could have been seen as excessive for a conservative mass market, the games never jumped the lines that a Grand Theft Auto or Mortal Kombat did to get their M ratings.
One has to wonder and maybe get a little more excited for what we’ll see when the game releases on PS4 and Xbox One in June.
An ‘M’ rating kinda flies in the face of what superheroes are all about doesn’t it? I mean, not even the Nolan films were rated higher than PG-13, and they’re about as gritty as you can get with this material without devolving into parody. As an example, Injustice, a game built on violence basically, only had a T rating.
What do I know though? I’m in love with Batman: The Brave and the Bold.
I can’t wait. I’m even more interested now to see what they did to earn an M rating.
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