I’m a big fan of shared, collective funtimes, so I must lay flowers at the feet of posters on the Batman Arkham subreddit (maybe not flowers; like, bat-themed knives and big stompy boots. I don’t know, what does Batman like?). A couple of weeks ago, with no new mainline Arkham game since 2015’s Arkham Knight, they started discussing Batman: Arkham World, a fourth game in the series that came out in 2021. Except, of course, it does not exist.
The person who kicked it off appears to be u/FrozeninIce248, who declared that the sub should take a leaf out of the Titanfall subreddit and then did. They posted commemorating the anniversary of Arkham World’s release, asking for “this sub’s opinion on the game”. “I loved the open world in this game the most,” they said, “because it was a literal world”. And boy did the sub respond.
Since then there have been a lot of posts, all expanding the Arkham World lore in both the content of the original post itself and the discussion in threads beneath it. Here are some things I know about Batman: Arkham World:
- It has ongoing DLC and challenge updates
- It may have already been remastered as Return To Arkham World?
- The Joker is back as the main villain
- The Joker is using portals to move around the Arkham World
- These portals resemble the ones Dr. Strange, off of Marvel, uses
- In fact, Spider-Man turns up
- And characters from Star Wars, Godzilla, and Breaking Bad (among others)
- All of these things are because Arkham World is about Batman travelling the multiverse
- With a gadget called the Bat-Universe-Jumper
I’ve seen it alleged by some posts that it’s a reference to a bit of NPC dialogue from Arkham City, in which a thug would understandbly ask if a “big-ass Arkham World” was going to be next. But honestly, who can say? Whatever the case, it’s worth doing a dig through some of the earlier/top posts, because being covered by outlets external to the sub means the meme is already in its end-game (h/t to Lady Emily, whose Tweet is actually what alerted this external outlet to it). There has been at least one post earnestly asking what Arkham World is. If Rocksteady ever acknowledge it, it’ll be dead (a la Morbius)
Technically the canonical follow up to Arkham Knight is Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League, but that’s not as fun and it isn’t out until next year anyway. There’s also Gotham Knights, which looks more traditionally Arkham-y but doesn’t actually have Batman in it.