Last week, Warner Bros. took a heretofore unprecedented measure to pull the PC version of their latest AAA release, Batman: Arkham Knight from digital and physical shelves after complaints of critical performance issues by players. From a Kotaku article, this should not have been a surprise.
One of their anonymous sources was quoted saying:
I will say that it’s pretty rich for WB to act like they had no idea the game was in such a horrible state, It’s been like this for months and all the problems we see now were the exact same, unchanged, almost a year ago.
Two sources spoke with Kotaku over the past week to explain the release of the broken PC version of Arkham Knight. Both of them stated that Warner Bros. knew that there were many issues facing Arkham Knight on PC but still chose to ship the game, believeing that it was good enough.
A minor patch for the PC version has been released since the game was pulled off from digital and physical shelves to fix crashing bugs, introduce rain effects and to fix a couple of other issues. The ongoing process to fix the PC version has been described as “significant” by Warner Bros. They also stated that it “will take some time to ensure that we get the right fixes in place”.
There are times where it is justifiable for a PC version to have a delay for the release date, and this was obviously one of those. Arkham Knight was capped at 30 frames-per-second(fps) despite Nvidia released a marketing video that showed the game running at 60 frames-per-second.
In the credits of Arkham Knight, Iron Galaxy studios is listed as providing additional engineering and PC support which would imply that Rocksteady did the bulk of work there, but from what Kotaku was told, Rocksteady was focused on the console version and is only now working on the PC version after the game was pulled.
The full article on Kotaku goes into much more detail and is worth a read.
