If you do most of your gaming on consoles, there’s a good chance you spent last night kicking ass and blowing up tanks in Batman: Arkham Knight. Unfortunately, if you’re a PC gamer, you probably spend most of your evening yelling at your screen in frustration.
By most accounts, the PC version of Arkham Knight is an almost unplayable mess. Gamers who pre-loaded the game so they could play as soon as it unlocked at midnight have been running into frequent crashes and freezes. Those who have been able to get the game working have had to deal with terrible performance. Even if you have the recommended specs, you can expect the frame rate to drop to 5 to 10 fps seemingly at random.
Arkham Knight developer Rocksteady has responded to the issues with a standard-issue statement…
“We’re aware that some users are reporting performance issues with the PC version of Batman: Arkham Knight. 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.”
So far the only solution Rocksteady has offered PC gamers is that they should turn all their settings down as low as possible. Not exactly the fix fans were hoping for.
Apparently, the development of the PC port of Arkham Knight was farmed out to Iron Giant Studios, a small developer of only 12 people who has mostly worked on mobile and last-gen games. PC ports being foisted off on studios not up to the task has become a bit of an unfortunate trend lately, but given Rocksteady’s usual commitment to quality, I’d hoped Batman: Arkham Knight would have been the exception.