[quote]After the colossal commercial and critical success of Batman: Arkham City it was guaranteed that developer Rocksteady Studios would be delivering another game to complete the trilogy (for starters). Exactly what that third installment would entail given the already well-established benchmarks of the previous two games was far less certain. The newest rumors claim that the next Arkham sequel – which Warner Bros. already confirmed will be coming in 2013 – will be titled Batman: Arkham Origins, and is set for next-gen release on PC, PlayStation 4 and Microsoft’s presumed Xbox 360 successor. The rumors come from French website Gameblog (via CVG), citing an anonymous source as the basis for their report that Arkham Origins will be unveiled at E3 2013 and released late this year. It’s not much to go on, but this report does reinforce much of the information previously leaked. For starters, ‘Batman: Arkham Origins’ was indeed one of the domain names registered by Warner Bros. earlier this year. Rocksteady’s third game in the series was also outed as a Silver Age prequel detailing Batman and Joker’s first meeting; given that relationship’s integral role in the prior two games, the title ‘Origins’ referring to their first encounter certainly fits. It also adds further insight into Arkham City‘s controversial ending. Yet comic book fans will be the first to tell you that the initial meeting between Batman and Joker is a story told several times already, so seeing Rocksteady do the same might not be the most groundbreaking use of their time. We would remind fans that Rocksteady did not call on comic book veteran Paul Dini to write this game, lending further credence to the studio’s claims of taking the series in an “exciting” and “different” direction. However, the name Origins could also refer to the other heroes of the Justice League itself, all of whose members are rumored to be making an appearance in the game’s Silver Age setting. And it is in that aspect of the game’s design that the next-gen rumors hold the most promise. With the shift from Arkham Asylum‘s directed narrative to the more expansive open world of Arkham City, many gamers (logically) assumed that the next game would follow the same trend and host an even larger ‘Arkham World.’ But Rocksteady may be putting next-gen tech to even more surprising uses than world size.[/quote] Source: Gamerant Thoughts?