I'm reading the Arkham Knight feature in the latest Game Informer. This thing sounds like a fucking beast. No wonder they decided it's next-gen only. It's not that the open world is huge (they said they didn't even try to make it that big), but that it's super-dense. The game takes place during one night of full-scale city-wide riot engineered by a united front of villains like Two-Face and Penguin who can finally organize in the year since Joker's death without his crazy schemes fucking shit up for them, so you can turn a corner and have 50 henchmen on screen at once smashing up a street in various ways. They also got rid of cinematics entirely and all the story is being told in game play.
Seems also that Rocksteady put a lot of thought into the Batmobile and simplified the driving mechanics as much as they've simplified combat. It's an unstoppable car that can crash through or jump over most cars and barriers, ride on walls, and it can do 360 degree rotate in place even while parked so you can instantly face the direction you want to go. You can call it to come to you at will like a horse, and there's an ejector that will seamlessly put you in a glide whenever you don't feel like driving anymore. Basically they don't want you to frustratingly drive around corners or crash to a stop like in GTA. They want it to be Batman's way of getting somewhere in the city faster than gliding.
