Yikes, what a tough week for Warner Brothers and Rocksteady. On the one hand, they’ve released a game in Batman: Arkham Knight that has reviewed well and is likely also selling well. On the other, they’ve managed to anger almost the entire PC gaming community by releasing what appears to be an atrocious port of the console version of the game.
You can read about the plethora of issues in the piece we wrote earlier this week, but they’ve ultimately led to the decision to suspend all PC sales of the game until they can be fixed. Here’s the release on the WB forums:
Dear Batman: Arkham Knight PC owners,
We want to apologize to those of you who are experiencing performance issues with Batman: Arkham Knight on PC. We take these issues very seriously and have therefore decided to suspend future game sales of the PC version while we work to address these issues to satisfy our quality standards. We greatly value our customers and know that while there are a significant amount of players who are enjoying the game on PC, we want to do whatever we can to make the experience better for PC players overall.
Thank you to those players who have already given valuable feedback. We are continuously monitoring all threads posted in the Official Batman: Arkham Knight Community and Steam forums, as well as any issues logged with our Customer Support (support.wbgames.com). If you purchased your copy of the game and are not satisfied with your experience, then we ask for your patience while these issues are resolved. If desired, you can request a refund at help.steampowered.com (Steam refund policies can be found here: http://store.steampowered.com/steam_refunds) or the retail location where you purchased the game.
The Batman: Arkham fans have continually supported the franchise to its current height of success, and we want to thank you for your patience as we work to deliver an updated version of Batman: Arkham Knight on PC so you can all enjoy the final chapter of the Batman: Arkham series as it was meant to be played.
Considering the current situation and the number of people saying the game is in terrible shape, this is probably the right thing to do. Of course, the real right thing to do would’ve been to not release the game in such a condition, especially when so many others in the industry have shown the kind of backlash that can occur when a product is launched in this manner.
Source: WB Forums
duke
How does the games industry keep getting away with kind of performance? It’s almost becoming the norm now for a game to be unfinished (a bit strong, I know) on release. It wouldn’t wash with other products or in other industries.
JoeBoi
I think the issue is games can be patched.
Your Henry Hoover or Dyson tower fan isn’t going to be fixed by a patch released after you’ve bought it.
Carrot381
Maybe that’s the problem
Starman
I heard the team handling the pc port consists of only 12 people.
homerjnick
Whilst bugs and glitches in a product as big as a video game nowadays might be hard to find for a dev team and require a patch, we all accept that.
But in this instance and others its frankly disgusting that the game got released where you don’t need to search for long to see the woeful issues.
When Alien Isolation was released the cinematics were hellish and the developer openly admitted to never testing it on retail consumer consoles but rather the test/development versions of X1/PS4 which are different.
That is wildly different to having a glitch that occurs through a series of events that sometimes can be missed by internal teams.
How on earth are these games getting passed any quality assurance is baffling and as others mention if my new car had a serious defect would that be acceptable and would I have to wait for it to be fixed?
They have to change the law on this. It’s criminal to receive money for a product that simply does not work.
It’s even more criminal for the company to release the product when it is apparent it is broken.
Glitches and bugs will always be here and will require patches but this is not that, this is shoddy worksmanship and they are getting away with it.
Lanselta
I got the game on PC due to silly price from a key reseller, otherwise I would have gone console. My experience: the game WILL NOT run in fullscreen mode AT ALL! It flickers and stutters all the time right from the load up screens. Mashing Alt-Enter brought me out of this, and I was able to actually work it in windows mode. I went into the options and set borderless windowed mode at 1080, and it now works wonderfully. It is absolutely gorgeous! Haven’t play that much yet, but ohh Ivy…..
But I am surprised at the lack of QC here….
Pitcher-T
Exact same situation as me (I almost thought I may have posted this in my sleep without realising it).
I might try the borderline thing, see if that helps.
I managed to play for about 3 hours on Tuesday with the only issue being unloaded textures which I dealt with. Now it crashes and stutters along at single figure framerates.
Fortunately I’m going on holiday for two weeks in a couple of days so fingers crossed it’ll be fixed by the time I return.
leeroye
“We take these issues very seriously and have therefore decided to suspend future game sales of the PC version while we work to address these issues to satisfy our quality standards.”
If that were true they would have tested the game properly, not outsourced it to a 3rd party and not released it in the first place in this state.
cam_manutd
This is one way to tarnish one of the better viewed licensed gaminbg trilogies out there.
Severn2j
I only seem to be getting some stuttering when cutscenes begin, but settle down pretty quickly, so I appear to be luckier than some.. Although, Im using a Nvidia 980 with a G-Sync monitor, so it may be counteracting a lot of the performance issues through sheer grunt.
Either way, its on hold until its been patched, I’ve plenty of backlog to work through for now anyway. Including Arkham Origins, so perhaps Ill give that a go instead..
MadBoJangles
From what I have played (which is admittedly not that much) it has ran okay for me.
I got some framerate drop when using the batmobile, but gliding around and fighting seems to have no issues (so far).
My rig ain’t anything amazing either (FX-8350, Radeon 7950 3gb and 16gb RAM) so maybe I am either a) very lucky or b)not played it long enough for the problems to really surface…
4730k
So I game with a titan x with 16 gigs of ram and I have not had one issue as of yet and I also have a gsync monitor with a 4730k i7
MadBoJangles
Yeah so your rig clearly has the extra power to just basically force it to work I think!
I unlocked the framerate by editing the .ini file, see if that makes a difference to the batmobile sections! :)
The Lone Steven
It seems that somehow, Warner Bros used an old build for the PC version as Joe “Angry Joe” Vargas had an error message that came up with “Build July 2012” when it crashed for him for the 3rd time and he tweeted it on twitter. if it is an old version, the hell Warner? I doubt Rocksteady would be this careless as they take a lot of care but if they did drop the ball or got the builds mixed up then wow. Just wow.
4730k
Ok so as of right now I have no issues with this game I run a titan x with a gsync monitor ….. as far as the Frame rates being capped that is an easy fix in the .ini I’m a wait they will fix it and probably throw in some extra stuff either way I’m kool