We knew that the Batman: Arkham Origins Season Pass would serve up some add-on content for the campaign, and Warner Bros. Games Montreal chose to ring in the new year with a little hint of what’s to come on the game’s official Facebook page. An apparent screenshot shows a “Humanitarian of the Year” award statue from the Wayne Foundation. That’s what it looks like, anyway; “Wayne” is mostly scratched out. Most tellingly, the statue is ringed with ice and it appears to be holding a heart-shaped diamond above its head.
See the image here:
For those unfamiliar with Batman lore, all of this evidence strongly suggests that the villainous Mr. Freeze will be featured in some way in the coming DLC. Given how Arkham Origins treats Batman’s relationship with The Joker, it’s even fair to speculate that we’ll see the icy criminal’s first tangle with the Caped Crusader.
The most popular modern take on Mr. Freeze establishes Victor Fries as a GothCorp scientist confined to a special suit due to his inability to survive outside of sub-zero conditions. He’s more of a tragic villain as compared to The Joker’s deranged madman though. The episode of Batman: The Animated Series that introduced this take on Fries establishes that he’s working to cure his terminally ill wife Nora while she sits frozen in cryogenic stasis. The project is shut down by GothCorp’s unfeeling CEO, who then kicks an enraged Fries into a table filled with chemicals from his experiment.
It’s this mixture of chemicals that alters the scientist’s internal makeup, sentencing him to life in a cryogenic suit. Seeking revenge, Fries brings an ice cannon of his own design to the site of a gathering where GothCorp’s CEO is to be presented with a humanitarian prize. His plot fails, of course, as Batman steps in to save the day. It’s not hard to see how WB Montreal is hinting at the identity of the coming DLC’s villain. Especially with that diamond in the statue’s hands; Mr. Freeze is historically a big fan of the valuable gem in the comics.
There’s no release plan or anything else revealed about the DLC just yet, but you can probably expect to hear more soon.
