Poll: Unpopular opinion: Arkham Origins was better than Arkham Knight (major spoilers!!)

[endtherapture]

I didn't play Origins, but I was really disappointed with how Deathstroke was handled in Knight, since I heard his boss fight in Origins was the highlight of that game.

I like the idea of video game bosses that are about fighting an opponent of equal combat ability in a one-on-one fight (see also: the final boss of Bloodborne, most Platinum game rival characters), so I booted up the fight on Youtube to see how the Deathstroke fight went. Two minutes in and I closed the video because it looked like boring quick-time-event laden garbage.

I love the Arkham games combat system, and I love one-on-one boss battles, but the Deathstroke fight proved to me those two simply don't mix very well. As it stands I think City has the best boss fights overall; Asylum's boss encounters were all terrible, and Knight's boss battles were mostly fighting waves of henchmen until the boss became vulnerable to a takedown, or boring Batmobile tank fights. With two exceptions; the last Arkham Knight encounter, which was a decent predator boss fight, and the highly memorable Johnny Charisma bit.

The Deathstroke boss fight is actually fairly interactive and plays a bit like a combat puzzle as opposed to a QTE. Even so, there's a lot of other great boss fights in the game - Bane, stealth Bane, Firefly and Deathstroke are all highlights.

Maybe it's better interactive. The video made it look like he was just mashing attack and occasionally countering while Deathstroke just powered through everything he did. Actually that was my biggest issue; the lack of reaction to the attacks. Hell, his health bar didn't seem to go down at all except during the scripted sequences.

Yeah it's sort of trial and error when you're playing it - first time I did it it took forever to figure out what to do. It's a genuinely good boss fight, I just wish there'd been round 2 or 3 later in the game. The Bane boss fights more than make up for it though.

Out of my 5 favourite boss fights in the series, 3 of them (Bane, Deathstroke and Firefly) are in Origins, and the other two (Clayface and Freeze) are in City.

 

[Bobic]

I haven't played origins, so really can't comment on the thread topic proper.

However, if you think your boss battle with Deathstroke was anticlimactic, you should have seen mine. So, before you get to the actual boss battle, you have to finish the militia side quests. The last one of those I did was a disarm the bombs one, defend the area, kill lots of tanks dealy. I finished that with a fully charged special weapons meter (all 4 ranks). Deathstroke calls me up, Batman does his 'fine bro, you wanna throw down, let's throw down' thing, and off I go to the location.

So, I get to the fight, and see, to my annoyance that he's got those tanks you have to sneak behind. Out of curiosity, I decided to see if the Drone-hack actually worked on them, expecting it not to. With a chuckle I realise it does, let that tank go off and have fun, while I go deal with the others. I'm doing my thing, see Deathstroke's health bar take a couple of chips, and have another chuckle. I continue stealthing around the other tanks when suddenly, I look back to the top right, and panic. 'Deathstroke's almost dead! Crap!' I drive as fast as I can to the guy, see him parked against the hacked drone, doing nothing to defend himself, getting pounded repeatedly, hoping to at least be able to say I fought the boss, I fire one shot, then cutscene, bam, Deathstroke defeated, off to GCPD.

No fight is as anticlimactic as no fight.

 

[Hero of Lime]

I literally just posted on the underrated games abou how Arkham Origins is not nearly as bad as everyone says. However, I really liked Knight, probably more than a lot of people. I liked the Batmobile, I liked fighting drones, and I felt compelled to do more side missions, something the other games didn't do for me.

Anyway, Origins is pretty cool, I actually kinda like it better than City in some ways, especially in regards to the story. City felt too scattered, while I felt Origins was more focused. Never once did I feel origins was a "bargain brand" Batman Arkham game, it's quality was on par with the other games personally.

 

[Geo Da Sponge]

While I have my problems with Arkham Knight, I had way more with Origins. The set-up of all the assassins hunting Batman kind of fell flat after your realised just how quickly you were rattling through them, between losing them to joke fights, tutorials, and side-quests you could just ignore (I know it's a ridiculously ambitious idea, but having them hunt you through the open-world would have been amazing). I'm still annoyed by Deadshot, the perfect sniper, deciding that the best way to hunt Batman was to lure him into a predetermined location on an exposed rooftop and then... Leave him a message inviting Batman to come and fight him in cramped quarters with lots of cover.

With Origins, they didn't seem to really 'get' the freeflow combat system, and what made City's combat an improvement on Asylum's. Everything felt a bit off, a bit delayed. The addition of the shock gloves as a gadget pretty much removed all challenge once you had them activated. Block anything, punch anyone, it made fighting a complete pushover. The martial artist enemies just seemed like regular thugs but with their rhythm randomly changing just to annoy you. And they failed to realise that the counter-symbols were originally light blue in order to make them show up on dark, grimy backgrounds; when you make most of the game take place outdoors on white, snow-covered backdrops it becomes incredibly infuriating to spot them.

As for the story, Origins was pretty... Meh. A big part of that was due to it being a prequel so there were no real stakes (especially in comparison to Arkham City killing off the Joker). But the whole idea of Bane discovering Batman's identity and then conveniently forgetting again was completely ridiculous, especially since you knew they weren't going to do anything about it anyway.

There's also technical issues. I know complaining about technical issues in Origins seems absurd after seeing Knight's PC release, but compared to Asylum and City, Origins ran terribly. Playing all of them on console, Origins had the most glaring technical issues, most notably in the form of a really unstable frame rate. Getting into large fights in the open world was always a risk because of how they could slow down the game, and if you got into a fight with one group of thugs, left, and then got into a fight with another group nearby the game would outright crash due to trying to handle two "activated" groups of thugs. Oh, not to mention multiple game crashes and the bug I got where I couldn't interrogate Riddler informants.