After releasing to massive controversy, Warner Brothers have removed Batman: Arkham Knight from digital PC stores, after a flurry of technical problems. Batman was released on the 23rd of this month, and was met with immediate criticism from the PC community, with gamers having problems with just about every aspect of the game. Graphical and physics problems were rife and crashes constant, the game was not in a state that any AAA game should be and needless to say there was a lot of backlash.
AMD and Nvidia cards were both wholly unoptimised with extremely poor framerate on both and a very scarce option menu left gamers with very little choices. Many, many glitches have occurred, AI is broken in many places and the Batmobile requires a lot of work. Also for some reason, users running multiple GPUs actually experience better framerate when just one card is in use. Buyer beware at the current state of the game.
This isn’t the first time that the game has been in the spotlight. It had many delays and was first announced to have a release date of late 2014, therefore many suspected that the long delays would only serve to polish the game, how wrong we were. One can only imagine the state that the game would’ve been in, if it had been released at its initial date.
This also brings up the question of just why it was in the state it was in. It had been delayed many times previously and had a long development time, one must therefore assume that it was either an incompetent developer handling the port, or that it was rushed severely. Neither are a great look for Warner Bros. whose reputation has now been undoubtedly damaged.
The season pass was also announced in April at the extortionate price of £32.99. Causing many gamers to call out in anger, especially after the delays. And then just a couple of weeks later, the collector’s edition was scrapped and pre-orders refunded. Supposedly due to the low quality of the models that are included with the game.
With companies now having to work harder than ever for pre-orders, Warner Brothers really is doing a stellar job of just destroying consumer confidence. It should also be said that Arkham City and even Arkham Asylum both launched with technical difficulties on PC and so this isn’t the first time that this has happened, just the most serious.
However, their decision to pull the game from sale is a positive one. It shows their commitment to actually finishing the game, and one can only hope for a quick and speedy fix is on the way soon. Some smaller patches are already on their way out. In the meantime, just be thankful for Steam’s refunds.
