L.A. Noire is a bad example of what Bruce Wayne sequences could be like (and a bad example of a detective game) and you'd be best served spending your time dissecting a better one. Actual point-and-click games like the Returns game mentioned above would be a better direction, and could be applied to Batman gameplay instead or in addition. Make a long post about that instead, or use your imagination a bit.
I've used my imagination quite a bit, thanks, but I save my good ideas for my own games, not Rocksteady's. That said, I can say with almost 100% certainty that Rocksteady has already tried to implement detective style missions into the existing Arkham games and have likely scaled them back to what they exist as now because they likely weren't fun at all. You can see the remnants of them with the follow-the-footsteps stuff and the tracking stuff and really, literally everything that has to do with Riddler trophies is that absolute best case scenario for "detectivizing" Batman in these games. In essence, they cover that base over multiple facets:
1) Word Riddles - deductive reasoning
2) Spatial Puzzles - utilizing a ruleset to solve a given problem
3) Hidden Trophies - thorough investigation and spatial reasoning
Those are the hallmarks of detective work. The reason they are relegated to side stuff is the same reason that puzzles in action adventure games are either
a) for babies
b) optional (non-critical path)
Because when a user gets stuck on a puzzle, they are no longer playing the game. I don't mean that they quit, I mean that there is nothing for them to do if they don't "get" a puzzle. Take Batman, for instance: If a user is stuck on a particularly difficult fight, they can try and lose and try and lose and try and lose and they will still be PLAYING the game. They will still be interacting with the systems, picking up nuances, learning, growing, experiencing. Ditto for a Predator encounter. If, instead, there was a Riddler word question gating progress and the user didn't get it, they aren't doing anything. There's nothing really to try, the actual solving of a puzzle is all in the user's head. They can't "get better" through practice at the puzzle. They can eliminate possible fail states until they find the correct answer, but that isn't getting better at the game. It's rote tedium. Additionally, any good puzzle generally asks the user to "think outside the box" or outside the ruleset, to give them that "A HA!" moment when they see the trick. As such, ruling out possible fail states is kind of pointless since the answer of most good puzzles exists outside the obvious puzzle states.
Which is basically a detailed way of explaining why the detective stuff should continue to exist the way it is. Once you strip Batman down to Bruce Wayne, you gain nothing but a change of scenery and lose all of the play space you get with those wonderful toys.
VR detective segments (for any game featuring that type of gameplay) would provide an interface streamlined enough to allow for interesting scenarios/crime scenes interacted with through "point-and-click" gameplay. as point-and-click gameplay is now, you can't reasonably ask someone perform engaging, minute actions (e.g. dust this particular spot of a book for prints) in games that don't have fleshed-out minute control. That's why such segments are just palette cleansers in so many games — the degree of control isn't enough to realistically make those segments engaging without running the risk of making an obtuse, interest-losing segment.
Sounds like you want to post in this thread.
There's a couple of things here: I personally think PnC "gameplay" is some of the worst around. It too often is a mixture of the worst types of things a game can have: one-to-one lock and key progress gating, invariate solution systems, a complete lack of interactivity, and "divining what the designer wants" rather than getting a ruleset and exploring and solving within it.
When it's done right, it's just clever gating; it's the shit you do between the actual good gameplay parts of games. It's content tourism. It's tell me a joke when I try all the wrong things until I try the right thing.
The experience of finding solutions exists OUTSIDE the playspace of the game - it relies on cultural context and knowledge (what does X do with Y, when Y just a social construct?) rather than presenting rules and allowing the user to play within them.
Real puzzles are more like the Layton ones: Here are the rules, here's what you can do, figure it out or find the trick. And Batman has a bunch of those: they are the Riddler's spatial puzzles.
Now, I wouldn't be opposed to detective sections employing more spatial puzzles and reasoning. This is what I thought the Origins crime scenes were going to be. Unfortunately they were just GPS gaming; rewind until it highlights what to press X on and then fastforward/rewind until you find the next thing to press X on. They were a quick time event at its slowest possible speed.
Telltale/Dontnod-style dialogue sections with characters who may or may not be up to no good, walking around Wayne Tower and going to your Applied Sciences division to pick out upgrades you may eventually want to get, action/stealth setpieces where Bruce doesn't have time to go grab his batsuit from the back of his car, training at Wayne Manor, investigating shit during the day...
All of this would be better with Batman than Wayne. It would literally be de-powering you and making you go through tailing or forced stealth sequences without gadgets or abilities. How would you handle fail states?
But more importantly...why? Why create all that new art just so that you can take away all the things that make Batman fun? Why not instead use that time to create more elaborate situations that make fuller use of the combinatorial power of Batman's gadgets?
As it stands they've only ever explored one facet of the whole Batman character, and rarely ever stepped outside of that. As it stands, Batman has never felt like a character who has a real duality to him. He's never felt like someone who has one obsession, but still isn't sure what he wants out of his life outside the costume (or if there even is a life outside the costume.) Gotham has never felt alive in these games, in no small part due to the fact that elements like the Batmobile etc. inherently bring up gameplay problems with stuff like public endangerment which inherently conflicts with the character. Not to mention the way they design that world is very detail-heavy, and once you throw a shit-ton of AI civilians walking around, cars, etc. it becomes a way tougher nut to crack. Hell, if you let players have Batman just float down to the streets and walking around among the civilian populace like nothing was up, that would feel really out of place. But then is it Rocksteady's/whoever's job to prevent that kind of stuff, or do they need to embrace it and still find a way for it to work while letting the player figure out themselves "this is too dumb, I'm gonna stick to swinging on the rooftops."
Saying it's Rocksteady's job to make it work is a fool's errand. They made it work by making the games the way they are. Once you add civilians everything changes. World design can't be these intricately layered fun houses with good flow because the chain link fences, and narrow roads that go nowhere aren't conducive to reality. Arkham is created as a playground, not a life sim.
I guess that's the difference between me and anyone who wants GTA: Batman - I couldn't give a fuck about making the city feel "lived in". All that does is lead to a ton of development that actively makes the game worse. Wide roads with cars in the way that just act as aimless pipes. Urban sprawl. Areas of houses that are worthless levels. More compartmentalized "here is where you can fight and here is where you can't". Binary reaction states where you get to run away from instead of into danger. A ton of worthless space.
But we've never seen Batman just go on patrol, stop some random muggers, or quietly investigating something, going back to the batcave to analyze some evidence, and then go "I can't get close to this person... but Bruce Wayne can."
You know what games do this? Assassin's Creed. It's terrible.
I don't want Bruce Wayne segments to even be semi-regular in a Batman game, but if you're going to say someone's ideas are bad, at least provide some kind of alternative that accomplishes the same thing.
No, I'm doing the correct thing: You don't add something because you think it might be fun. You analyze it, realize it would be total shit and add nothing and throw it in the garbage. An editor is what more games need.
