Batman: Arkham Knight on the PC was such a broken, jagged mess of bugs and glitches that it’s impossible to believe no-one at publisher Warner Bros noticed the state of the port until after the game had launched.
So it’s depressingly unsurprising to read a new report that suggests they were all too aware. According to two separate sources that have been in contact with Kotaku, WB had been receiving warnings from Q&A for almost a year before launch.
“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,” said one long-term quality assurance tester at the company. “It’s been like this for months and all the problems we see now were the exact same, unchanged, almost a year ago.”
Arkham Knight has been pulled from Steam now, of course, but its 30FPS cap and host of additional problems left a bad taste in PC gamers’ mouths. So why did the game ship in such a sorry state? Part of the problem appears to be that developer Rocksteady found developing for next-gen consoles far more difficult than it had initially expected. That dragged more and more Q&A testers across to the console versions, and left the PC team with a team of only 10 or so.
“We reported literally thousands of bugs that were specific to the PC version relating to the frame rate,” added Kotaku’s Q&A source. “All sorts of f*** up texture issues. The Batmobile in particular has always f*** things up on PC.”
Despite their obvious frustration, both sources claim that the decision by WB to release the game was incompetence rather than deceit – they genuinely believed the game was in a fit state. That fact won’t be of much comfort to those who splashed out £40 or so on a broken game, however. Check out the full story for more information, and a bit of background on WB’s history with PC ports.
