So, Batman: Arkham Knight is finally out, and it’s pretty damn good! Well, unless you’re playing on PC. As we’ve reported, the PC version of Arkham Knight shipped with ugly, unfinished graphics, terrible performance issues and an unforgivable number of bugs. The situation was so bad, Warner Bros. made the very rare decision to pull the game from the marketplace altogether.
Too bad Warner Bros. didn’t know about the state of the PC version of Arkham Knight beforehand! If they did, they definitely wouldn’t have released the game, right? Set your faces for not-so-stunned, because it turns out that Warner Bros. was fully aware the PC version of Batman: Arkham Knight was a total pile for months. Perhaps as long as a year.
Kotaku spoke to various people who worked on Arkham Knight, and the state of the PC game was no secret behind the scenes. As we already reported, the PC port was handed over to Iron Galaxy Studios, a small mobile developer of only 12 people. That was just part of the scrimping; only 10 people were assigned to bug test the PC version of the game, while more than 100 worked on the console versions. This was due to Rocksteady having an unexpected amount of trouble getting the game working on consoles.
“We reported literally thousands of bugs that were specific to the PC version relating to the frame rate. All sorts of f*cked up texture issues. The Batmobile in particular has always f*cked things up on PC.”
Another issue was that Rocksteady was worried about storyline spoilers getting out, so they insisted only in-house bug testers be used, most of which didn’t have a lot of PC experience. Bottom line, the PC port’s state wasn’t a last-minute screw-up, it was a debacle that grew and blossomed over a long period of time.
“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.”
Currently, Rocksteady is working on fixing the PC version of Batman: Arkham Knight, but given that they’ve already had their own issues developing it, you have to wonder how long it will take to get the game working. At the very least, let’s hope Warner Bros. has taken some sort of lesson away from this. Hey, miracles sometimes happen.
(Via Kotaku)