On the drama of “Batman: Arkham Knight”…

My first gaming post for GLTL will focus on a game you have seen me talk about if you have spent any significant amount of time on my Twitter account: Batman: Arkham Knight.

This game has a rather sordid history. The conclusion of a series of four total games, Arkham Knight seeks to give the Dark Knight a full wrap-up of a long, winding storyline and give gamers more or less the ultimate “Batman simulator,” if you will. The gimmick of the entire franchise is to give you almost free reign to become your own version of Batman, fighting thugs and supervillains in Gotham City.

The first two games, Arkham Asylum and Arkham City, were generally well received, though the latter did have some performance optimization issues. In fact, the original Arkham Asylum is still considered in some circles to be the best of the entire series.

But with the third game, Arkham Origins, things began to go downhill in a major way for publisher Warner Bros’ Games. First of all, actual production of the game shifted to Warner Bros. Montreal, which to this point had not worked on a Batman game in the series. A studio known as Rocksteady had put together the first two games and overall was highly revered by the gaming public for their ability to put together arguably the best Batman games ever created.

But Arkham Origins released with a slew of technical issues, including falling “through” the game world endlessly; an inability simply to resume a previously saved game; and, on XBox 360, a rare but serious save corruption bug. These reported issues were ultimately patched. However, just a few months later, while other players were still complaining of significant issues — including continued progression-blockers which prevented completion of the game — Warner Bros. announced that they would stop all work on fixing the game solely to focus on additional, paid content still not released to that point. In essence, Warner Bros. chose to shaft those who had already paid for a game they couldn’t play in an attempt to make even more money off of gamers who had already bought it. As you might imagine, gamers were up in arms over this.

It was for this very reason that I chose not to even bother purchasing Arkham Origins until after all content was released, and only then at an extremely sharp discount; I think I paid less than $10 for the base game and all of the add-on content which actually interested me (I couldn’t care less about costumes or most types of challenge maps). I was actually lucky; Arkham Origins mostly played just fine on my computer, and I only encountered two significant bugs the entire time. I did experience the “falling through the world” issue once during the first boss fight; it resolved itself as soon as I reloaded my last save point. The other bug came in the add-on campaign, Cold, Cold Heart. I experienced a progression-blocking bug wherein I could not use Batman’s grappling hook to climb a ledge I should have been able to. Luckily, thanks to a YouTube video, I was able to complete that section just by landing in a specific place that is not very difficult to reach.

When Arkham Knight was subsequently announced, the gaming community rejoiced — particularly because Rocksteady was supposedly returning to the helm to craft the experience. Everyone assumed that with Rocksteady returning to what they did best, it would be a must-purchase title. And for consoles, this was basically the case. Some reviews I read for the PlayStation 4 version specifically mentioned some issues with the game itself but overall praised it as a fitting end to the series. And then the PC version was released.

It turned out that Rocksteady did not work on the PC port of Batman: Arkham Knight; instead, Warner Bros. outsourced work to a studio called Iron Galaxy. The technical issues plaguing the PC port from Day 1 meant that even gamers with computers costing potentially $1,000 or more could not play the game without stuttering performance! And those of you who have been a part of PC gaming for awhile know that just the graphics card on a PC can cost as much as a low-end to mainstream notebook computer.

So just how bad did it get? So bad, it turns out, that Warner Bros. actually suspended all sales of Arkham Knight on the PC within a day or so of its release. This meant that those who had already bought it could still attempt to play it, but no one else would be able to buy it. Theoretically, this would give Warner Bros. and whomever they enlisted help from enough time to get the game into some kind of satisfactory shape for a triumphant relaunch. During this suspension, it also came to light that Warner Bros. knew about all of these problems well before launch and simply decided that it was “good enough” to release.

Fast-forward to just before Halloween, and on October 28th, Batman: Arkham Knight was finally re-released on Steam. But alas, the re-release was plagued with many of the same problems. Though some gamers did report better performance, initial impressions were that the updated game was still in pathetic shape. Furthermore, the game’s system requirements were even changed, calling now for 12 GB of RAM for Windows 10 users. Additionally, when Digital Foundry analyzed the performance of the relaunch, they found no significant improvements and primarily support for more paid content. Sound familiar?

All of this led to two major decisions by Warner Bros. First, for anyone who chooses to keep the game, they will receive the entire library of Batman: Arkham games sometime in December. However, they also took the unprecedented step of offering unlimited refunds on the game through the end of 2015, regardless of how much time anyone has spent on the game. Additionally, Warner Bros. has basically declared that Batman: Arkham Knight will never be fixed entirely — much like Arkham Origins. This was even further cemented when just last week, they decided that support for multiple GPUs in the form of SLI and Crossfire will also never be fixed after previous promises that multi-GPU support was on the way.

These amount to the PC version of Batman: Arkham Knight being arguably the most botched release in PC gaming history. Their decision to simply give the entire back catalog of Batman games to those who keep it is simply a slap to the face because the vast majority of gamers interested in the title will have already bought all of the others! You can read more of my thoughts on this in an open letter to Warner Bros. and Rocksteady which I posted to the Steam forums not long after the relaunch.

Recently, I took advantage of the unlimited refunds offer to purchase the game. I wanted to see how big a disaster it truly was and just see if I could get it to work. My results were actually quite surprising, and I was even able to beat it before requesting my refund. But how bad was my experience? I’ll post all the gory details in a follow-up soon…