According to inside sources, Warner Bros has known about the state of Batman Arkham Knight for a very long time. As we now know, the poor state of the game at launch has caused numerous issues and eventually led to Warner Bros halting sales until more fixes come out. Not surprisingly, Warner Bros actually thought the quality of the game was good enough for gamers and released it as such.
Developers were hard pressed to fix bugs as the priority was to release the game on time with the console version. This wasn’t helped by the fact that the PC port was mostly handled by Iron Galaxy Studios, a third-party PC porting house. Not doing a port in-house can potentially cause issues as third-party developers tend to underbid in order to get the contract.
On the bug side of things though, Warner Bros kept everything in-house. WB did not contract out to testing firms and did not have a beta period, meaning tested was limited to PC configurations Rocksteady and Iron Galaxy have. Warner Bros seemed to be more worried about potential leaks than making sure the game was working properly. Testing also focused on 720p which WB felt was the standard, rather than the 1080p or higher favoured by most PC gamers.
Warner Bros it seems, completely misunderstood their target demographic of PC gamers. It’s important that developers take the time to properly make their games, even if it means delays and not launch alongside their console counterpart. Hopefully, the game will be rereleased with most of the bugs fixed in the near future.
Thank you Kotaku for providing us with this information
It’s really sad that it ended like this. I mean, yes, they are going to patch it and fix everything, they have to, because it’s such a good game. I don’t recall any of the Batman games that had such huge problems.
Hope they fix all soon. Little bit of patience, that’s all. The game is too good to be ignored, specially on PC.
I believe Arkham City too to be problematic when it first launched. Arkham Origin have game breaking bug that would not let you take over on of the Tower for Batwing thingy and some graphic glitch i think. But both got fixed fast. We are 2 weeks into the game launch date but only got 1 small 65mb patch. Well done Rocksteady.