Bruce Wayne is kidnapped whilst protesting the use of Arkham City, a dilapidated part of Gotham that is used to house the resident of Arkham Asylum. He is trapped inside the facility, forced to fight the most powerful criminals in Gotham, and confront Hugo Strange.
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Mark Hamill is apparently a massive Lost fan, and lead writer Paul Dini actually wrote for the show, so a few nods snuck their way into the script. Near the end of the game there's a short speech from 'Joker' (really Clayface wearing his face) that echoes the tone of Lost's series finale pretty closely if you know what you're listening for.
Crack open the circuit box where Deadshot keeps his gear stashed and there's a weird glowing prop that a lot of players assumed was a lightsaber reference. Turns out it's actually just a low-res model of a sniper scope that ended up looking way more sci-fi than intended. Still funny that it fooled so many people.
Pay attention to the thugs during the Protocol Ten sequence and a handful of them are wearing masks that look suspiciously like Scarecrow's. It's never explained outright, whether it's meant to hint that some of his followers ended up locked up in Arkham City too, or whether it's just a leftover asset that got reused. Either way it's a fun little detail to spot mid-fight.
Victor Zsasz went from a quick tutorial fight in Arkham Asylum to a proper side mission in Arkham City, and it sounds like he was originally supposed to get even more attention than what shipped. Digging through the game's data turns up a full written bio for him that never made it into the finished product, suggesting Rocksteady had bigger plans for the character before time or scope got in the way.
According to leftover development data, the wider Bat Family was originally going to be playable characters you could freely roam Arkham City as, not just in the Catwoman and Robin challenge maps we got. It got cut for the same reason a lot of ambitious ideas do on a big open-world game like this: not enough time to actually finish it properly.
Game director Sefton Hill has talked about an idea where the end credits would've turned into an interactive fight scene against Rocksteady's own staff, with each knocked-out developer's name and job title flashing up in slow motion as you beat them. It sounds like an absolute blast, but it never made it past the planning stage.
Early in development, Batman was going to occasionally trip while sprinting and sometimes just miss when he threw a Batarang, presumably to make him feel a bit more human. Playtesting apparently proved it was just annoying rather than adding character, so it got quietly dropped before launch.
There were plans for proper weather effects across Arkham City, including a whiteout that would've dropped visibility to basically nothing and forced players to lean on Detective Mode just to get around. It got scrapped because it hammered performance too hard on the hardware at the time, which is a shame because it sounds genuinely tense.
Since Thomas Elliot surgically reconstructs his own face to look like Bruce Wayne, it made total sense to have Kevin Conroy voice both Batman and Hush in this game. He'd go on to do the same double duty when Hush shows up again in Arkham Knight a few years later.
Maurice LaMarche pulls double duty here, voicing both Mr. Freeze and Julian Day, better known as Calendar Man. It's actually Calendar Man's only voiced appearance across the whole Arkham series, so it's a bit of a blink-and-you-miss-it credit for LaMarche in that role.
