Hm. I've played all three previous games, and I really enjoyed them. Asylum was it's own thing, but City and Origins were pretty similar. What I appreciated was that there were a variety of things you could do in the game. You could, of course, go beat up thugs, but you also had riddles to solve, Anarky signs/Riddler pictures to tag, trophies to collect, and side cases to solve that actually involved at least more than just "Continue to beat the snot out of people." Capturing the various major criminals was pretty fun in most cases.
I actually prefer to not have too many boss battles, to be honest. Much of the time, I find boss battles to be poorly designed. In most cases, they're either QTEs or they're essentially the same approach to such fights as boss battles from back in the 1980s Nintendo era. "Oh, you have to hit him with your freeze beam like, 3-5 times depending on difficulty, and then when he's frozen, hit the eyestalk. You should be able to get in 2-4 hits each time. In the second stage, when his armor drops, you have to use your spin attack right before he inhales. Don't forget to hide behind the column on the left of the screen in between his attacks."
It just ends up being a mix of being able to recognize patterns, and hit buttons in the right sequence/timing. I much preferred, for example, the way you take out Deadshot in Arkham Origins (which is similar to how you take out Two Face in Arkham City as Catwoman).
My guess is that the free-roam -- if there is any -- will come with the DLC in the season pass. For some, like what I heard the Harley DLC is, it makes perfect sense to NOT have them free roam. But for others, like Batgirl or Robin or Nightwing, it'd make more sense to free roam.
