Gotham Knights: Designing Mr. Freeze, and Giving Him a Gang to Play With First
The key thing to know about Gotham Knights’ factions is that they aren’t just henchmen for a named villain. The gangs of enemies you’ll find across Gotham’s darkened streets are sorted into affiliations – with their own preferences of street crime and equipment – but they’re mercenaries, not cultists.
Take our subjects for today: the Regulators faction, and classic supervillain Mr. Freeze. The Regulators are an existing gang in this version of Gotham, a group of tech-enhanced ne’er-do-wells who steal advanced goods, traffic organs and augment their own power with their ill-gotten gains. You can meet them doing their own thing as you clean up the streets – but you can also find them allied with Mr. Freeze, and adopting his penchant for ice-enhanced elemental attacks as a result. In effect, Freeze hires the Regulators for portions of his storyline, they don’t just flock to his cause.
It led to a very interesting design challenge for Gotham Knights’ art team – how do you design a villain and a gang that feel like they could work together, but don’t necessarily always do so?
Interestingly, that process was more organic than forced. The team knew they wanted to include the iconic Freeze, but his association with a gang came later. At first, it was all about building a villain who felt recognisable, without feeling overly familiar.
“When we get a villain like Mr. Freeze, I mean the guy's got so much history, it's a challenge for our team when we get it,” explains character art director, Jay Evans. “It's, ‘Where do we go from here?’ Because we look at all the past [versions of the character] that have been done really well. For us, the kind of jumping off point was where does he fit in our Gotham City, on a technological kind of
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