Gotham Knights Release Time: When Will the Game Be Playable?

During the 2020 DC FanDome virtual event, Warner Bros. announced two upcoming games: Gotham Knights and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. Those titles initially drew gamers’ attention due to a number of shared elements. Both titles feature a roster of popular DC Comics characters, they’re both multiplayer co-op titles, and they were developed by studios that had a hand in the legendary Batman: Arkham franchise. While Suicide Squad is still a few months away (and is coming to us courtesy of the Rocksteady team), Gotham Knights and the team at WB Games Montréal are finally ready to take flight.

According to store pages such as Steam and the Gotham Knights team’s Twitter account, Gotham Knights will launch on October 21. While that would give players a good 24-hour window of anticipation, the game’s Twitter page provides a much tighter ETA. The account states Gotham Knights will feature a staggered release window and launch in each region at the stroke of their respective midnight. The only exception is West Coast gamers; they get to start playing (or at least downloading) Gotham Knights at 9 pm on October 20. Some gamers get all the luck.

The wait for Gotham Knights has been long, arduous, and full of delays (and, for some gamers, cancelations). The developer, WB Games Montréal, originally planned to release the game in 2021, but it later announced via Twitter that Arkham Knights would require more time and be pushed back to 2022. Moreover, WB Games Montréal wanted to cast as wide a net as possible for gamers and let anyone with the previous console generation (i.e., the Xbox One and PlayStation 4) play the game. However, earlier this year, the studio abandoned that plan in order to “provide players with the best possible gameplay experience” (via IGN) 

Gotham Knights’ shifting release schedule wasn’t all delays, though. Eventually, WB Games Montréal settled on an October 25 release date, but during The Game Awards’ Gamescom Opening Night, the studio premiered a villain-oriented trailer with a new release date: October 21. No reason was given, but since far too many game development updates these days consist of delay announcements, we’re not complaining.

Since Gotham Knights will launch slowly but surely over the world, some gamers might be tempted to get a head start by changing their console’s location settings to a region that already has the game. That can work for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, but since it would only shave off a few hours at most (if said impatient gamers set their console’s internal clocks to New Zealand time, that is), so it might not be worth the trouble.