Say it isn’t so! Joker dies in Arkham city?

No more balloons, green hair or acid flowers? 
Fans of the freak in the purple suit be alarmed because our eyes have seen some dreadful things. A recent hands-on session with Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkham Asylum involved a scene in which Joker appears to be dead.
Sitting slumped in a chair attached to a life support machine, Joker is motionless; Harley Quinn slumped at his feet crying and screaming at Batman for constantly attacking our favourite psychopathic clown. A look over at the life support machine (while in Batman’s ‘detective mode’) presents us with the words, Status: Deceased.
Predictably, the demo abrubtly ends.
Surely he can’t really be dead? That would be like killing off Tom and leaving Jerry, or kiling Darth Vader and leaving Luke… oh, hang on. 
Rocksteady’s Dax Ginn, on hand during our demo session, refused to elaborate on the scenario:
“Can we as designers kill characters off? The option is here as a tool we can use to heighten the sense of threat, but I don’t want to say too much about Joker…”
Read our full hands-on preview of Batman: Arkham City here.