Batman Returns, Again: 'Arkham Knight' Revisited And Retested

[kewlguy239]

'Batman: Arkham Knight' has been rereleased on Steam after months of interim patches and tweaking. Did WB Games and Rocksteady fix the problems, or is the PC edition of Batman's final foray into Gotham City too little, too late?

Batman Returns, Again: 'Arkham Knight' Revisited And Retested : Read more

 

[bgunner]

I've said it time and time again that developers are releasing the games prematurely and are not fully testing the games like they did in the past. The "Oh we will just roll out a hot patch for day one issues." has really bit WB in the butt big time. I have all the previous Batman series games and was going to get this one. After the spectacular fail WB released The sour taste can not be sweetened by giving me games I already own.

I'm wondering if WB learned and tough other company's or IF the PC world will still be handed Poorly coded console ports that are pushed out before proper testing and beta testing is done.

 

[haftarun8]

Should've developed the PC version first and paired down from there to fit into the consoles. Sure it'll still have problems and won't be perfect, but my guess is you would end up with a game that best takes advantage of the most powerful hardware and can then be paired down and optimized further for lesser hardware such as the consoles.

Analogy: You don't start with a shitty image and try to "enhance" it to look good when it's blown up, you start with the high-quality image first and scale it down to fit any and all smaller constraints.

 

[RedJaron]

I'm a little fuzzy on how the free Arkham catalog offer works. So you have to buy Arkham knight right now and it will be made available for free, or is this going to be a special bundle available later ( including Arkham Knight )? Or is it jut a free gimme for the next year to anyone who buys Arkham Knight?

I already have the other Arkham games on my PS3, but I wouldn't mind re-tromping through them on a hi-res screen if they're free. If the get the bugs worked out eventually, I'd like to finally play Arkham Knight.

 

[arossetti]

The sour taste can not be sweetened by giving me games I already own.

Well said.

+1

 

[tacgnol06]

Preordering is a dumb idea to begin with, doubly so if it's a digital purchase. Whatever bonus they offer, you're still encouraging publishers to push out half-finished games, since you've guaranteed you'll be buying them regardless.

 

[FlayerSlayer]

I like the idea of free older titles as an apology, but this is the last game in a series. People who are still interested in it after all this mess are most likely people that liked (and thus already owned) previous titles in the series. I wonder what percentage of people will be buying AK in the next few weeks (at full price with such bad reviews) wouldn't already have AA, AC, and AO. I feel like giving free titles from a different franchise would be a better bet.

 

[clonazepam]

Love the testing. Very thorough. Informative. I'll pick it up when it appears on the "Games for under $10" list on Steam.

 

[10tacle]

I got the game free along with Witcher 3 (which had its own PC into issues) with an EVGA GeForce card purchase earlier this summer. While it was updated in my Steam folder, I don't think I'll ever be playing it considering SLI is STILL not supported. I'll probably wind up deleting it to make room for other upcoming Steam games. While upset, I have no beef since I didn't pay anything for AK. Also, it is playing fine for the console users. The ball was dropped in the outsourcing of porting the console version to the PC (something I will never understand since it was developed on the PC in the first place).

But I do know one thing: it will be a cold day in hell before I ever even THINK about buying a game for the PC developed by Rocksteady and published by WB.

 

[bigpinkdragon286]

In my opinion, paying developers before a product is finished is likely the biggest portion of the problem. If a game publisher can make most of their game sales from pre-orders and day one sales, before the bad press kicks in and warns away their revenue stream on bad products, why should they care about the state their games are in when they launch, more than they care about the product release into the marketplace itself? As things currently stand, publishers have a monetary incentive to release their products once projected sales figures have been met through pre-orders and day one sales expectations, not finish them, and since refunds on open software products are hard to come by, it's hard to get satisfaction from a software publisher on a bad product.

Consumers are taking away the publisher's incentive to produce good products, and instead, are rewarding them for releasing titles earlier, before they are ready.

 

[clonazepam]

In my opinion, paying developers before a product is finished is likely the biggest portion of the problem. If a game publisher can make most of their game sales from pre-orders and day one sales, before the bad press kicks in and warns away their revenue stream on bad products, why should they care about the state their games are in when they launch, more than they care about the product release into the marketplace itself? As things currently stand, publishers have a monetary incentive to release their products once projected sales figures have been met through pre-orders and day one sales expectations, not finish them, and since refunds on open software products are hard to come by, it's hard to get satisfaction from a software publisher on a bad product.

Consumers are taking away the publisher's incentive to produce good products, and instead, are rewarding them for releasing titles earlier, before they are ready.

I wish I knew how we got to this point. It's a multi-billion dollar industry, so if someone's looking for an industry ripe for exploitation, this is definitely one of the better ones. Most of the customers are children, or the parents of children, who have no idea what they're really getting.

Everyone is so far removed from an actual transaction of real cash exchanging hands for a physical product, its easier than ever before.

We don't have a company like Nintendo strong-arming the entire industry, forcing publishers to play their way or no way at all. The original Sony Playstation's arrival is when we really started seeing quantity over quality.

At the end of the day though, its just silly video games meant for children. It's good introduction for them into the dog eat dog world I suppose.

Hah, anyway, what are some other industries where people readily hand over cash months before an actual product even exists? It's crazy. We've also been slowly over time coaxed into believing that virtual items actually have some sort of value. $.99 here, $1.99 there... They've really got the people figured out and know how to pull those strings.

 

[razor512]

Do people who got the game on steam also get the other games for free?

 

[clonazepam]

Do people who got the game on steam also get the other games for free?

"All four of the previous Arkham games will be unlocked for any Steam account that purchased Arkham Knight before 11:59pm PT on November 16, 2015."

 

[clonazepam]

This author linked some other Tom's articles but not the most relevant, based on the comments anyway....

https://steamcommunity.com/games/208650/announcements/detail/128710596358664118

 

[Thanatopsis]

When I saw the article, I got my hopes up thinking it was finally time for me to get it but was thoroughly disappointed looking at the benchmark figures. I have a 4790k, 16GB 1866MHz RAM, and 2xGTX660 TI's in SLI. I can run any other game out there with max settings or at least pretty close. This is just unacceptable. What did these people expect when they released a game in such what I could consider an unfinished state? All they really accomplished was to lower peoples opinion of the company. Whoever made the decision to release it in the state that it's in should be let go. I really loved the previous games in the series and had been looking forward to this, hope it at some point becomes worth it.

 

[Achoo22]

In my opinion, paying developers before a product is finished is likely the biggest portion of the problem.

Consumers are taking away the publisher's incentive to produce good products, and instead, are rewarding them for releasing titles earlier

It's disgusting the way that people are so quick to point the finger at each other instead of the entity doing them wrong. Greedy companies are greedy. It's not because consumers have enabled them. They just are.

 

[cats_Paw]

This Batman Returns is as bad as the movie.
On a more serious note, Im not buying games since some time now unless they are on sale. Just seems like the smart thing to do.

 

[howareyoudoing]

They purposefully handicapped the PC version so that the console counterparts would sell. Simple as that. The game looks amazing and runs flawlessly on PS4 at 1080p with a "modified 7870". You need no more proof than that.

 

[bigpinkdragon286]

It's disgusting the way that people are so quick to point the finger at each other instead of the entity doing them wrong. Greedy companies are greedy. It's not because consumers have enabled them. They just are.

Gesundheit, Achoo22!

You may call a greedy company an "entity," but those entities are made up of people too. So, you would have me blame only the people belonging to one group, over another, even if both are culpable, regardless of degree?

Why are you sickened by what I said? There is certainly nothing quick about it if taken as intended. The industry has shifted to where it's at over the course of many years, not overnight, and this shift isn't the result of finger pointing. Pre-orders started quite some time ago, and actually served a practical purpose at one point. It was a means to guarantee a physical good when it first became available and demand was greater than supply. Digital distribution has rendered the shortage of physical goods on release day a non issue. Again, in my opinion, quality of games upon release has steadily decreased in the last decade while pre-orders on large budget games have grown more common.

Anybody got some graphs? Would be interesting to see if software release quality is inversely proportional to pre-orders!

 

[Deders]

To be fair, the game now looks much better when maxed out than it did even with the interim patch.

 

[jasonelmore]

i would rather have the arkham knight season pass than those 3 older games.. WB knows that we already own those games if we are a series fan, so unless they are giving out extra copies we can give to a friend, i take their offering as a insult.

 

[falcompsx]

The worst part of these piss poor releases is they make me leery to ever preorder anything from any company because its so rampant. I'm excited for fallout 4, and terrified that it will be plagued by BS like this at the same time, so i haven't preordered it yet because i don't want to give them money until i see if it works or not. And Bethesda hasn't even done anything to lose my trust, the industry in general has caused a lack of trust of ALL studios.

 

[Thanatopsis]

On a more serious note, Im not buying games since some time now unless they are on sale. Just seems like the smart thing to do.

I've played way too many games that after a very short while realize I don't care for so I wouldn't buy anything without playing it first.

 

[The_Icon]

Run the game on a HDD and then report back. You will witness a massive change in performance and game's true nature shows up.

 

[Emanuel Elmo]

Lets face it guys. This game as failed that even the word failed does not encompass the full meaning of this failure.

WB pretty much said, if the game still does not run on your PC we will give you a full refund on the game. Oh... yea... we will try to fix it some more but we really don't think it will help.

So... good news everybody.... they made there millions on the consoles.. ripped off PC gamer on the pre-orders, than release a broken game that they promised they would fix and every four months they say.... sorry we can not fix it. We are going to bail.

So glad I did not buy into this game on pre-orders. I would link the article, I am just not sure if I would really violate on rules. So I would rather not. But if anyone does a quick search you should be able to find it.

The article I read was published about 2 hours ago.

Cheers!!! Keep pre-ordering those games guys and lets keep giving great reviews on broken games. I am sure with big companies will change on their own. Cheers!!!!!