Fans have been waiting eagerly to see what sort of new content we will be getting in Rocksteady’s upcoming Batman: Arkham Knight DLC. The season pass costs $39.99, only 20 dollars less than the game, so fans have been expecting something along the lines of a totally new gameplay experience. Now that details about the new Batgirl DLC have been revealed, what do we think about the worth of the season pass? Is the price right? Should you pick it up, even now after the game has been on the market for a while?
Well let’s start by saying, pretty much avoid any DLC that you possibly can if you are playing the game on a PC. It still doesn’t, you know, work for many PC users, so pitching your money to Steam for a game that will just soil itself and die as soon as you boot it up seems like a poor use of your money indeed.
But if you are one of the lucky ones who purchased the game on a console platform, hooray! You actually get to experience all that Arkham Knight has to offer, and you will be happy to learn that the Batgirl DLC includes almost none of that, and is better off for it.
The DLC chapter, called A Matter of Family , is set before the events of the first game in the Trilogy (everyone just ignore Batman: Arkham Origins , nothing to see here, move along) Batman: Arkham Asylum . It features Batgirl and Robin attempting to rescue Commissioner Gordon from the Joker. This takes place before Batgirl was confined to a wheelchair, and sets up the rest of the plot for the Arkham series in the future.
Unlike Arkham Knight , the scope of A Matter of Family is actually quite small. Batgirl and Robin have to sneak around tightly confined areas to get to their objectives, which is very unlike the “drive the Batmobile around like you are in Twisted Metal ” gameplay of Arkham Knight. This focus on stealth, combat, and problem solving makes it feel a lot more like Arkham Asylum , which is something that most fans of the trilogy (sit down, Arkham: Origins ) would say is a good thing.
The one thing we don’t know, however, is how long the DLC is going to last. If we are talking something like a 6 hour gameplay experience filled with an extended story, on top of the DLC we are going to get in all the other coming months, then I would say the season pass is worth it. If it’s just a three hour tour, you might want to buy it individually. Rumors are going around that further DLC will only be challenge maps and the like, which is OK, but frankly, I’d like to see more story chapters.
Judging by the pricing, at $6.99 for the DLC alone, a mere fraction of the season pass’s price, I’d actually say we will likely have far more story based DLC chapters to come. The Season pass costs $39.99, and if we were to extrapolate the pricing from this individual piece of DLC, six story chapters would cost $42, a mere two dollars over the season pass pricing. This leads me to believe that we will be seeing a LOT of new content in the future, or at least we should if the season pass is going to be worth anything.
Season pass owners will get access to A Matter of Family on July 15, and everyone else can purchase it seperately on July 22.