Batman: Arkham Knight’s Newest Skin Seems Really Fishy

Batman Arkham Knight fight scene

If you’ve been on Twitter the past few days, you might have seen screenshots for a new skin that’s apparently been added to Batman: Arkham Knight. It spread like wildfire after it was posted, and the screenshots certainly look good, but we have some doubts about the veracity of the claims, so let’s break it down.

Yesterday, a small group of Twitter accounts started posting screenshots of a new skin added to Arkham Knight based on the 2022 film The Batman featuring Robert Pattinson. The skin, the accounts claimed, was made available in an update to the Epic Games Store version of the game, seemingly by mistake, as it was a little bit buggy, with the cape looking not quite right and the model being a little bit rough.

As the story goes, the update was pulled shortly after the screenshots and subsequent videos started circulating on social media. Booting up the Epic Games Store version of Batman: Arkham Knight won’t give you a The Batman skin for Bruce, just the other 34 skins that come with the game.

The circumstances around this apparent new skin are pretty suspicious, though. Most of the accounts posting original screenshots and videos of the skin are either game modders with long histories of modding Arkham Knight and other games, or people who have dozens of posts about using mods in Arkham Knight. Those same accounts are saying that it’s not possible to import totally original models into Arkham Knight, so this apparent new skin has to be real and from Rocksteady.

That’s where things get complicated. The screenshots and videos exclusively coming from modders and mod-adjacent accounts is fishy, but it also stands to reason that people who are obsessed enough with the game to mod it would probably be the first on scene when a curious new patch dropped. It’s also not unheard of for patches to accidentally be released early on one platform or another, and the Nintendo Switch version of Arkham Knight is just around the corner and could be a good excuse to add more skins to every version.

That said, right now, we’re leaning towards it being a hoax, though only barely. This could be a Nier Automata situation, where the community said it wasn’t possible to mod the game only to have a largely-publicized new area be the result of modders. But there is one thing that pushes me, personally, towards it being a hoax, and that’s the suit’s description.

Every suit in Arkham Knight comes with a short and snappy description underneath it, usually a quip or joke. The one in this apparent The Batman skin has one too, reading “I am the shadows.” referencing a line from the film. So why is that so suspicious? Well, no other description, on any of the other 34 suits, has a period at the end of it. It’s a small thing, and could very well be an oversight from the developer and not necessarily an error from modders, but it’s straw that broke the camel’s back for me, so to speak.

I also downloaded the game from the Epic Games Store as soon as these screenshots surfaced, and turned off automatic updates, but my game is entirely free of The Batman.

In any case, it won’t be long before we find out for sure. Batman: Arkham Trilogy got a last-minute delay on Switch, but it’s due out in a little over a month — on December 1, 2023. We’ve also asked WB Games for a comment, though it has not responded at the time of publishing. We’ll let you know if we get a response.