Gotham Knights Will Present a New, Older and Wiser Version of Harley Quinn
Gotham Knights developers shared that Harley Quinn in the upcoming game will not be the "manic pixie" that we used to know. Instead, she'll be a more mature and dangerous character.
Gotham Knights will see its launch pretty soon – on October 25. The new game set in the DC universe already seems to be something different from what we usually expect from stories about Gotham – first of all, we will not see the main protector of the city, Batman, as the story unfolds around his successors, Batgirl, Nightwing, Red Hood, and Robin, who have to fight against the criminal underworld after Batman's death.
Meanwhile, the developers also brought a different vision of some villains including Harley Quinn who was previously known as a humorous female sidekick to Joker.
In a recent interview with IGN, Gotham Knights creative director Patrick Redding revealed that the game will not depict the Harley Quinn that we all know – instead it will be an older and wiser character who "doesn't need to be the manic pixie anymore."
"She has gotten to a point where she knows who she is," Redding said. "She has a very clear sense of what her identity is, and she's going to present herself in this much stronger, developed supervillain way."
Redding, however, notes that the Gotham Knights Harley is not completely different from a character that we are familiar with – she is just a person who has grown older, gained some experience, and became more mature. He explained that Harley presented in the title has already "been through two main acts of her story" – first, she was Joker's girlfriend, and then, she opened up as a woman who broke free from her pathological love interest in Batman's archenemy during the Suicide Squad era.
This latter image of Harley when she was more of an anti-hero rather than a villain who was "doing the right thing or doing terrible things for good reasons" has appealed to many DC fans, according to Redding, as people wanted to root for her and see her "doing things that at least ultimately have a positive outcome."
Redding said that this idea of Harley branching in the direction of good was already well-explored, in the developers' opinion. So, they decided to see what could happen to the character if her life was going in a different direction.
He shared: "We thought, 'What happens if we take her the other way?' What happens if Batman's absence and the rise of his successors inspires Harley to say, 'Well, why don't I finally get to have my career as a supervillain on my own? I have all sorts of ideas. I'm a brilliant psychiatrist. There's all sorts of crazy things that I can do, especially in Gotham City.'"
Redding also spoke about how the art team approached the character based on this new idea and how this new image influenced the work of combat designers. You can learn more about the team's approach to creating Harley Quinn in Gotham Knights by reading the full interview here.
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