Publishers are still shipping broken games.
Batman: Arkham Knight developer Rocksteady Studios has come out to address fan complaints about the latest adventures of Gotham’s Caped Crusader. Primarily, gamers on PC are upset at how poorly Arkham Knight runs even on some of the latest, top-end graphics cards. Some people running Batman on an Nvidia GTX 970, which costs nearly as much as an Xbox One, are claiming they are getting refresh rates that are in the 10-to-20 frames-per-second range, which is unplayable for most people. Even when the game does avoid framerate dips into the teens, the studio has capped it at 30 frames-per-second, which is close to blasphemy among PC gamers.
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“We’re aware that some users are reporting performance issues with the PC version of Batman: Arkham Knight,” reads a post on the WB Games forums. “This is something that Rocksteady takes very seriously. We are working closely with our external PC development partner to make sure these issues get resolved as quickly as possible.”
We're aware that some users are reporting performance issues on PC. We take this very seriously & we're investigating http://t.co/9dGdLBGGIf
— Rocksteady Studios (@RocksteadyGames) June 23, 2015
We’ve also asked Warner Bros. Interactive and Rocksteady for a statement further explaining the situation, and we’ll update this post with any new information.
This is a situation that WB seems like it wants to get out ahead of as soon as possible. Broken games — or sub-optimized releases — were an unwanted theme of 2014. Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed: Unity, Microsoft’s Halo: The Master Chief Collection, and Sony’s DriveClub all launched in various states of disrepair. The situation got so out of hand that Sony third-party relations boss Adam Boyes admitted in an interview at the Electronic Entertainment Expo last week that it was his team’s top priority to stop publisher’s from shipping busted products.
And the reason that a company like Sony is so afraid of broken games is clear when you look at what is happening to Batman: Arkham Knight on Steam. The fan reviews on that portal are scathing.
Only 30 percent of people who have reviewed the game on Steam give it a positive recommendation. That’s after 3,000 total reviews, which means around 2,000 people are unhappy with a game that has a 91 score on review-aggregation site Metacritic for its PlayStation 4 version.
So Batman is in a hole. But he merely adopted it. It’s up to Rocksteady and the unnamed company that did the PC port (we’re looking into it) to drag the game out of the pit.