​

Tonight, we kill the batman... is exactly what Warner Bros had in mind for Batman's recent PC release, as it has suddenly been pulled from platforms like... well everything. The game has faced some pretty harsh issues on PC platforms, including frame locks, glitches galore, and complete unplayability.

Warner's statement below:

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.

The game has been pulled from Steam and is currently unavailable for purchase.
Source

 

[Zanoab]

I'm not saying it's justifiable for a game to crash, I'm saying it's to be expected. The only way to avoid these issues would be to completely abstract programming from the platform which is unfortunately where the industry is heading at the cost of quality and performance. I obviously hope that it gets patched up, I'm merely saying that this is the cross PC gaming has to bear in exchange for the openness and customizability of the platform, it's why consoles are so prevelent even today when PC's are cheap and outclass consoles in nearly every aspect. Coding games for PC is just frustrating because not everything is in your hands - sometimes it's the API's that fail.

Coding games for PC isn't that frustrating. Hardware engineers are always working with the game developers to optimize both drivers and the game as well as provide assistance where necessary. The only difficult part caused by supporting a large variety of builds is optimizing for each build. Even this is easy because the builds themselves are still modular so you simply make the optimizations modular. Have an optimization for NVIDIA cards? Add it to the set of NVIDIA optimizations. Same goes for CPUs and any other part that could affect the game. The key of development is to get it working first (without optimizations) and don't say that is difficult because every part has a common denominator and the fancy stuff is used once optimizations start. If it was as difficult as you say, PC wouldn't have so many indie games with hardly any budget (compared to boring AAA titles) to produce.

Crashes can happen for any reason (which apply to consoles as well). Overheating/driver issues is a good source of crashes as even the GPU trying to throttle itself can sometimes be enough to make everything fall apart. The higher the details are, the longer the system runs code which increases the chance of something going wrong. It is amazing how many strange crashes happen because the system is being stressed too much by maxed settings.

Also, consoles aren't so impervious to crashes too. Just look at the gwent bug in Witcher 3 which was a console exclusive. If consoles are much easier to test, how does such an obvious bug sneak past all the testers (unless you consider everybody who played first to be the testers). At least if it happened on PC, developers could've released a patch with ease unlike having to pay MS/Sony to distribute updates/patches.

 

[Foxi4]

Coding games for PC isn't that frustrating. Hardware engineers are always working with the game developers to optimize both drivers and the game as well as provide assistance where necessary. The only difficult part caused by supporting a large variety of builds is optimizing for each build. Even this is easy because the builds themselves are still modular so you simply make the optimizations modular. Have an optimization for NVIDIA cards? Add it to the set of NVIDIA optimizations. Same goes for CPUs and any other part that could affect the game. The key of development is to get it working first (without optimizations) and don't say that is difficult because every part has a common denominator and the fancy stuff is used once optimizations start. If it was as difficult as you say, PC wouldn't have so many indie games with hardly any budget (compared to boring AAA titles) to produce.

Crashes can happen for any reason (which apply to consoles as well). Overheating/driver issues is a good source of crashes as even the GPU trying to throttle itself can sometimes be enough to make everything fall apart. The higher the details are, the longer the system runs code which increases the chance of something going wrong. It is amazing how many strange crashes happen because the system is being stressed too much by maxed settings.

Also, consoles aren't so impervious to crashes too. Just look at the gwent bug in Witcher 3 which was a console exclusive. If consoles are much easier to test, how does such an obvious bug sneak past all the testers (unless you consider everybody who played first to be the testers). At least if it happened on PC, developers could've released a patch with ease unlike having to pay MS/Sony to distribute updates/patches.

Patching a game for PC's is not a copy-paste process like you make it seem - it's tedious, especially because certain solutions may work well on one chip and not at all on another. A lot of optimizations involve reworking resources, and that wastes the time of artists, not engineers. Having to involve third-party hardware engineers doesn't help much anyways (both PC's and consoles, so I don't see it as an advantage for either) - it complicates things. They have no incentive to help you as they do not participate in a significant portion of the profits, thus they don't care, slowing the whole process down. The Witcher 3 is not a console exclusive and the amount of money required to patch a game on PSN/XBL is insignificant in the grand scheme of things. The reason why bugs like this pop up has multiple layers, but to name the most important two, a million testers will always find more bugs than 30 and it's easier to deal with pressing and releasing a relatively stable build to start the distribution process (which can take weeks) while working on a launch window patch instead of delaying the whole thing. Consoles are definitely not impervious to crashes, but it's undeniably cheaper and easier to optimize for one standardized hardware configuration rather than a near-Infinite amount of custom hardware configurations.

 

[Jiehfeng]

Rocksteady is leading our team of developers and partners as we work on the PC performance issues that players have been encountering. The work is significant and while we are making good progress on improving performance, it will take some time to ensure that we get the right fixes in place.



Below is the list of the key areas where we are dedicating our resources to improve the experience for our loyal fans:



- Support for frame rates above 30FPS in the graphics settings menu

- Fix for low resolution texture bug

- Improve overall performance and framerate hitches

- Add more options to the graphics settings menu

- Improvements to hard drive streaming and hitches

- Address full screen rendering bug on gaming laptop

- Improvements to system memory and VRAM usage

- NVIDIA SLI bug fixes

- Enabling AMD Crossfire

- NVIDIA and AMD updated drivers



While we work on improving performance, we will also continue to make interim patches available to address issues for those still playing the game on PC. The first patch is being released now and the updates include:



- Fixed a crash that was happening for some users when exiting the game

- Fixed a bug which disabled rain effects and ambient occlusion. We are actively looking into fixing other bugs to improve this further

- Corrected an issue that was causing Steam to re-download the game when verifying the integrity of the game cache through the Steam client

- Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash when turning off Motion Blur in BmSystemSettings.ini. A future patch will enable this in the graphics settings menu



We would like to thank our fans for their patience and invaluable feedback. We will continue to monitor and listen for any additional issues.

Source

 

[WiiCube_2013]

Well, there's always the Wii U version to play which is the definitive experience of Arkham Knight.

 

[Jiehfeng]

Well, there's always the Wii U version to play which is the definitive experience of Arkham Knight.

Sarcasm? It isn't there for the Wii U.

 

[WiiCube_2013]

Sarcasm? It isn't there for the Wii U.

Yep. Sarcasm.

If it were on the Wii U it'd be like 720p/15fps. lol

Project C.A.R.S is reported to be 720/23 and this is not acceptable at all so might as well just cancel it.

 

[Zanoab]

Patching a game for PC's is not a copy-paste process like you make it seem - it's tedious, especially because certain solutions may work well on one chip and not at all on another. A lot of optimizations involve reworking resources, and that wastes the time of artists, not engineers. Having to involve third-party hardware engineers doesn't help much anyways (both PC's and consoles, so I don't see it as an advantage for either) - it complicates things. They have no incentive to help you as they do not participate in a significant portion of the profits, thus they don't care, slowing the whole process down. The Witcher 3 is not a console exclusive and the amount of money required to patch a game on PSN/XBL is insignificant in the grand scheme of things. The reason why bugs like this pop up has multiple layers, but to name the most important two, a million testers will always find more bugs than 30 and it's easier to deal with pressing and releasing a relatively stable build to start the distribution process (which can take weeks) while working on a launch window patch instead of delaying the whole thing. Consoles are definitely not impervious to crashes, but it's undeniably cheaper and easier to optimize for one standardized hardware configuration rather than a near-Infinite amount of custom hardware configurations.

It is the engineers' job to write to tools to rework resources. If their engine doesn't accept a specific resource, they either need to rework the engine to accept the specific resource or write a tool to convert the specific resource. If the engineer fails to provide the tools to support their engine, it adds more work for the engineer than the artist.

Involving third-party hardware engineers does help. They have the incentive to help because it is running on their hardware. If it runs a lot better on NVIDIA cards than AMD cards, then it help NVIDIA take market share from AMD. If it runs a lot better on PS4 than Xbone, people would be more likely to play on PS4 over Xbone.

The only way the gwent bug on consoles could not be found is if the testers never played the minigame. Either the testers were lazy and claimed to test the minigame or the developers assumed it was perfect and didn't need to be tested (which is the worst mistake a programmer could make).

 

[Foxi4]

It is the engineers' job to write to tools to rework resources. If their engine doesn't accept a specific resource, they either need to rework the engine to accept the specific resource or write a tool to convert the specific resource. If the engineer fails to provide the tools to support their engine, it adds more work for the engineer than the artist.

Involving third-party hardware engineers does help. They have the incentive to help because it is running on their hardware. If it runs a lot better on NVIDIA cards than AMD cards, then it help NVIDIA take market share from AMD. If it runs a lot better on PS4 than Xbone, people would be more likely to play on PS4 over Xbone.

The only way the gwent bug on consoles could not be found is if the testers never played the minigame. Either the testers were lazy and claimed to test the minigame or the developers assumed it was perfect and didn't need to be tested (which is the worst mistake a programmer could make).

Or the error simply never popped up on their devkits, which is entirely possible. Hardware engineers have no incentive to support game devs unless contractual obligations are concerned which is only ever the case with consoles. NVidia has no reasons whatsoever to optimize Gameworks for AMD chips and AMD has no reason to optimize TressFX for NVidia chips, what you're saying is utopian. In fact, both have all the reasons in the world to sabotage eachother with the consumers paying the price, as it was the case with Witcher underperforming on AMD setups. Currently NVidia in pretty pissed off because all three major players in the console wars went with AMD, they have good motivation to be bitter about it.

 

[Mystic Shadow]

PC master race just got kicked in its glorious face. Lmao

 

[CathyRina]

PC master race just got kicked in its glorious face. Lmao

Happens all the time but this just makes bigger headlines than the other.
Ever tried out a Tecmo koei PC Port?
We don't need to Mention AC Unity do we?
Or Dark Souls that was playable right?
Or a Square Enix Final Fantasy ports. These are usually really kaputt.

 

[WiiCube_2013]

PC master race just got kicked in its glorious face. Lmao

Xbox One ports tend to be pretty bad too in comparison to PS4.

 

[CathyRina]

Xbox One ports tend to be pretty bad too in comparison to PS4.

the fact that there is a Dual Shock 4 presented on the Controls menu makes me believe this is actually a PS4 port.

 

[WiiCube_2013]

the fact that there is a Dual Shock 4 presented on the Controls menu makes me believe this is actually a PS4 port.

So the PC version is a port from the PS4 version but what if it were from Xbox One? It'd run even worse?

 

[Xzi]

PC master race just got kicked in its glorious face. Lmao

Not really. We'll have a playable and better version of the game soon enough, and we only had to pay $20 at release to get it. In some cases, it was straight up free with an Nvidia code. It'd be an entirely different case if Rocksteady were to just forget about it and not do anything about the shoddy state of the PC port, but they're working very hard to fix it because the PC gaming audience is more relevant than ever before. It'd be a huge blow to lose all those sales, especially because people can simply refund it on Steam now if they aren't satisfied.

Meanwhile, I guess my poor face will just have to go back to playing any of the other 800+ games in my Steam library. Enjoy the one good exclusive available on each next-gen system, though, buddy.

 

[Kioku]

Not really. We'll have a playable and better version of the game soon enough, and we only had to pay $20 at release to get it. In some cases, it was straight up free with an Nvidia code. It'd be an entirely different case if Rocksteady were to just forget about it and not do anything about the shoddy state of the PC port, but they're working very hard to fix it because the PC gaming audience is more relevant than ever before. It'd be a huge blow to lose all those sales, especially because people can simply refund it on Steam now if they aren't satisfied.

Meanwhile, I guess my poor face will just have to go back to playing any of the other 800+ games in my Steam library. Enjoy the one good exclusive available on each next-gen system, though, buddy.

800+ games in your library, of which, only 16 you may actually play on a regular basis? Seems like a waste of time and money to me, buddy.

For real though, I finally get a decent enough computer to enjoy games at the glory they should be.. Only to get shafted by poor development and testing? Cheers. They're doing it backwards. Needs to be developed on PC first, then ported to consoles. Not the other way around.

 

[Xzi]

For real though, I finally get a decent enough computer to enjoy games at the glory they should be.. Only to get shafted by poor development and testing? Cheers. They're doing it backwards. Needs to be developed on PC first, then ported to consoles. Not the other way around.

Yeah that will start happening with AAA titles more and more going forward. Everybody is realizing that consoles are simply less-powerful gaming PCs now that much of their use is becoming running apps. Good thing all around, because it means consoles are starting to get mod support, too.

 

[dubbz82]

WB has had a few pretty major hiccups as of late with their PC versions of things. Mortal Kombat X is still pretty botched up as of the time of writing...

 

[pdensco]

yay lol XD

 

[stanleyopar2000]

they don't give two shit about the PC version. Reports are saying that they knew about the bugs and bad quality for MONTHS. They pulled it to have it not stain the arkham knight IP for potential console sales. Once console sales start to slow you watch. They'll put it back on the steam store.

 

[WiiCube_2013]

they don't give two shit about the PC version. Reports are saying that they knew about the bugs and bad quality for MONTHS. They pulled it to have it not stain the arkham knight IP for potential console sales. Once console sales start to slow you watch. They'll put it back on the steam store.

That much is clear that they knew the PC version was broken but they were hoping customers would just shut up and accept it the way it was. It didn't work out for WB, thankfully.

WB has also screwed up with the Tom & Jerry fans/collectors that wanted the full uncut episodes on Blu-ray and because of what happened with volume 2 they never got around it. God fucking damn the sensitive and political correctness.