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Arkham on Fire

The PC port of Batman: Arkham Knight continues to be a one-act of errors. In spite of numerous patches, a complete relaunch, and loads of promises, the game withal performs poorly on a broad range of PCs. Even with an extra four months to tidy upwardly the mess, the developers withal can't get the game to run reasonably well. After yet another tidal moving ridge of negative customer feedback, Warner Bros. has caved, and is now allowing for complete refunds until the end of the year.

In a message posted on the Arkham Knight Steam community page, a Warner Bros. representative announced that every possessor of the PC version will be able to return the game for a full refund. Regardless of how many hours you lot've played, yous tin go all of your money back until the end of the twelvemonth. Did you buy the flavour pass equally well? You tin return that too, merely but if y'all decide that you're willing to part with the cadre game equally well — no backsies otherwise.

Over at the Digital Foundry, the performance analysis is showing lackluster results across the lath. If you're running a graphics menu with 2GB of retentiveness, you can wait deplorable operation on annihilation but the lowest texture setting. Rocking a loftier-end card with 4GB of memory? You're probably still ameliorate off locking the frame rate at 30fps to reduce stutter. Even running a GTX 980 and an i7-4790K, the Digital Foundry folks tin can't continue the frame rate steady at 60fps. All these months later, and this port is however a massive headache.

Using the game's built-in 30fps cap, there'due south still some serious problems with frame pacing. If you're using an Nvidia card, its proprietary control panel can solve that issue by using the half-rate adaptive 5-sync selection. Only if yous're using an AMD carte du jour, you're completely out of luck. If you're only dying to play this game, I'd recommend picking up a used PS4 or Xbox One copy if at all possible. Those versions can only offer 30fps, but at least they're consequent.

Truth be told, I can't say I'm surprised past any of this. Last week, I reported on the re-release of Arkham Knight, the bevy of make-goods, and the initial functioning problems. I recommended against purchasing the game on PC for the time being, and this merely confirms my suspicions. The PC release is still on burn, and based on some choice wording in today's announcement, I don't recollect it will always be completely fixed.

Before this year, I interviewed a few developers nigh the procedure of porting games. They had a lot of valuable insight on the process, but the biggest take-away for me was understanding but how complicated everything is. Even nether optimal circumstances, delivering a polished port is a challenging task. And based on what we've heard, this scenario was far from ideal. Information technology seems as if resources were scarce from the starting time, and the dev team has been under the gun to fix this mess in a timely manner. My middle goes out to all of the hard-working devs, only I have absolutely zero sympathy for the suits at Warner Bros. who go along to try to sell consumers a broken game. It's inexcusable.