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Warner Bros. Halts Sales of AAA Batman PC Game Over Technical Problems
An anonymous reader writes: The Batman: Arkham series of video games has been quite popular over the past several years. But when the most recent iteration, Batman: Arkham Knight, was released a couple days ago, users who bought the PC version of the game found it suffered from crippling performance issues. Now, publisher Warner Bros. made an official statement in the community forums saying they were discontinuing sales of the PC version until quality issues can be sorted out. Gamers and journalists are using it as a rallying point to encourage people to stop preordering games, as it rewards studios for releasing broken content.
Pre-ordering can be a bad thing because it allows big studios to release low-quality games, but at the same time it can be a good thing because it does help indies and small studios to pay for the development of their games.
There's only one game that's on my list right now: Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
The rage on Steam over this is truly epic. If you're a fan of schadenfreude check out the forums for it. People have blamed everyone but the Pope thus far.
Who wants to bet that this was caused by the physics simulation relying on a constant framerate to be accurate?
Last I read, only 30-something percent of kickstarter projects deliver anything. Now, pre-ordering is being exploited to a much larger degree. Assassin's Creed, Batman... these are not small indy titles. Meanwhile these studios exploiting developers in a sweatshop-like conditions (e.g. EA spouse) to unprecedented degree.
If this was clothing company - you'd have people boycotting the brand. Why this case should be any different?
I put in for a refund yesterday before all this. From the moment it was released you could tell this wasn't going to go well.
That said, I really can't remember the last time it went THIS poorly. It's an impressive level of fail
Anyone else notice that since the last generation of consoles got the ability to patch games, they've been buggier upon release?
...
The AAA stands for AAArkham
And here everyone was praising the new console's hardware platform being more PC like as a good thing. We all thought it was going to make porting these made for console games so much easier. Guess we didn't account for laziness, incompetence and being cheap.
The lesson should have been learned
is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome. :|
Yet, folks continue to pre-order then act all shocked and offended when the title is buggy and near unplayable upon release.
I don't get it. What goes through the heads of folks who keep pre-ordering this crap ? " No nonononono. . . THIS time will be different. Really ! "
I wonder if anyone who actually pre-ordered this thing would realize their being the poster child of naivete the industry craves so much.
Confederate flags don't accidentally offend anyone, they're intentionally a racist symbol. Do you defend the swastika too?
I pre-ordered this on Steam a couple of days before launch. As of right now, it is sat on 1h50m playtime and I'm not touching it again until either we have news on when a major patch is expected or we start to get close to two weeks after release.
Why?
Because of Steam's new refund policy. If you have less than 2 hours playtime on a game and it is less than 2 weeks since release (or less than 2 weeks since your purchase, if you purchased it post-release), you are eligible for a refund. The game in its current state is a very sorry sight indeed.
My personal experiences with it haven't been as bad as some. I have an i7 3820 @ 3.66ghz, an Nvidia 980 and 16gb of nice fast RAM. I also, crucially, have a 500gb SSD that I use for my OS and for drive speed sensitive games (as well as some big old traditional drives for everything else). Running from the SSD and with an .ini tweak to remove the 30fps cap (yes, a 30fps cap in a PC game in this day and age), I can manage a not-terrible level of performance. Framerates with all settings maxed in 1080p flicker between 35 fps and 70 fps, depending on what's happening on screen, though the wide variations do produce some ugly artefacts.
When I first installed the game to one of my traditional drives, performance was appalling. While framerates when stood still doing nothing were the same, taking almost any action in-game, from moving around to entering a vehicle or changing areas, would produce large framerate drops, hideous stuttering, broken textures and texture pop-in. This game has some serious issues with data streaming from storage drives.
The game is also ugly to look at. Ok, ok, I'm being a bit harsh there. As a bare-bones PC port of a late-cycle 360 or PS3 game, it would have looked ok. But compared with PC versions of recent efforts like Shadows of Mordor, Grand Theft Auto 5 and The Witcher 3, this looks terrible. Bear in mind that all of the above run at higher and steadier framerates with all settings maxed on my PC. In Arkham Knight, NPCs movements are repetitive and robotic, textures are low-resolution (the game will only allow "low" or "medium" detail textures to be selected, implying higher detail textures were removed at the last moment) and basic visual effects from the console versions are missing.
My experiences put me at the better end of the scale. I have a powerful PC with a single-Nvidia-GPU setup. Weaker PCs, or even more powerful PCs with multi-GPU setups or AMD cards seem to have things much worse. I've only experienced one crash to desktop - but that's as many crashes in under 2 hours of play as I've experienced in almost 30 hours of play in The Witcher 3.
A few wider points about this; while this game is particularly brutal in terms of its drive speed requirements, it is part of a broader picture that drive speed is starting to matter as much as CPU and GPU speed for PC gamers in terms of actual in-game performance (rather than just load-times). Watch_Dogs, Far Cry 4 and Dragon Age: Inquisition all suffered from in-game stuttering issues when running from a traditional drive - though not to anything like the same extent as Arkham Knight. An SSD large enough for games as well as the OS is becoming non-optional for serious PC gamers.
Second, this is the first real stress-test of Steam's refund system. To their credit, Valve seem to be honouring Arkham Knight refund requests without any qualms. And it's surely no coincidence that the first "broken" PC port to go out after the refund system was introduced has led to such a dramatic reaction by the publisher.
We got treated to a whole staged soap opera. First it was Expansion (HoT) requires separate purchase of base game. Then, after everyone had bought the base game, it changed to base game included for new players only. Then, with an artificially staged revolt, it changed again to existing players get an extra character slot. You'd have to be blind not to see where players would expect an extra character slot when the expansion includes a new class.
Meanwhile, with everyone in the media safely distracted, Arenanet just released a new update that nerfed the bejesus out of the game. Yet nobody is talking about that, in no small part due to the immense astroturfing campaign being run on reddit. Must be costing somebody a fortune for that sort of PR.
At least Warner Bros is handling it better.
something something superior PC gaming master race
to growl "I'm BATMAN!"?
So not only are they punishing the people who preordered it, now they're also punishing the people who DIDN'T already buy it by making it unavailable.
Thus increasing demand further for when it really does come out?
To be fair, Rockstar (surely because of a gun Sony pointed at their head, but still-) waited far too long to port GTA V to pc, to the point where the graphics are rather dated.
Nice revisionism, son. I'm proud of you.
The other Batman games suffered major issues at launch too. For example, Batman: Arkham Origins was impossible to complete at launch due to a bug. There was a river where the grapple would never connect so you couldn't get across. It took several patches before it worked reliably for everyone.
This has been the model for the gaming industry since at least 2010. We keep buying shit before it is finished, they take our money, and move on to the next "pre-order now for useless dlc bundle!" Gamers memories must be suffering from pot smoke caffeine abuse.
MYTH - America is good at war
FACT - America loses all it's wars - half of you lost this one.
It's possible to run the physics at 60 fps even if the graphics dip below that. It's called "frameskip" and was common in emulators of 2D game consoles when PC CPUs were weaker.
In any case, how would a repeatable simulation of a dynamic system work without a constant time quantum? If you try to vary the time quantum based on the graphics frame rate, you end up with things like Quake 1 through 3 where the player can make certain jumps only at certain frame rates.
Perhaps the controversy is related to where to set the dividing line between "indie" and "big boys". If a studio is composed of veterans of the "big boys", is it indie? Or how much annual revenue makes a studio "big boys"?
Go app yourself. Apphole.
Please go install the Batman app and get out of our hair already.
Seriously revisionist. Also the "battle flag" only had 2 years use during the Civil War, after which it really wasn't seen outside of a few peoples private homes. It wasn't until the 60's when it had it's huge resurgence (placed on sate flags and such). I wonder what else happened in the 60's that caused the resurgence.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Sure I understand preordering once - but when that game doesn't meet the hype (and they never do), why would you do that again?
Speaking of broken content, who do we have to pay off to get the "you may also like to read" links refreshed? The same three links have been attached to every game-related post for almost a year. I'm not saying that those things weren't important, but, surely there are other, more related, stories somewhere in slashdot-land that are more relevant to the Batman game being broken than: Anita Sarkeesian, Creator of "Tropes vs. Women," Driven From Home By Trolls, Combating Recent, Ugly Incidents of Misogyny In Gamer Culture, and The Daily Harassment of Women In the Game Industry.
We've know for *decades* that you never buy the 1.0 (or x.0) release of software.
It's still The Loser Flag , only displayed by losers on their F-150s and Cameros. and MOPARS, too...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
War of Northern Aggression is hilarious wrong Orwellian double-speak. The South started it when they attacked Fort Sumnter!
Actually I defend the right to be an idiot. Yes they are racist symbols. But you have *RIGHT* to be a fucking moron.
they're intentionally a racist symbol
It didnt start out that way. It started out as a battle flag. The swastika also did not start out that way. It started out as a flag of power. The people who designed the 3rd Reich were actually very clear on why they designed things the way they did. They are *now* considered racist. To understand your foe you need to understand where they are coming from. Otherwise you just end up with a shouting match of 'my TV told me'.
I may not agree with their ideals. But I will fight for them to express them instead of trying to suppress them I try to convince them they are wrong. I see suppression of speech in any form as an affront to what I am. Do you let other suppress you?
So to answer your question? Yes I do defend it. Do I own one? Not a chance. I own an American flag. Because that is what I am. I am not a German from the Third Reich or a Confederate. Two countries which no longer exist. I do not fly other idiots flags. I fly my own thank you very much.
If you want violence stripping people of their voice is a very nice way to do it. It is HOW you end up with things like the 3rd Reich and the Confederacy. Dont think so? Read up how after WWI the world set about to strip Germany of any voice in anything. It created a crucible in which Hitler flourished. Or take for example the Confederacy they felt they were being ignored over and over in the Senate and Congress in favor of the North. Both groups were stripped of their ability to say anything which created hardline feelings in things which could have been easily resolved beforehand. Instead being PC created the very thing they did not want. Why? Because they suppressed the ideas. The ideas were not properly ended with proper discussion and became beliefs. A belief is a nearly impossible thing to destroy and usually ends in violence.
Does anyone have some kind of coherent explanation, aside from Norton Antivirus, as to how you would (on AAA budget, handling a popular franchise that is also the video game presence of a very popular character) manage to release a game on both XBone and PS4; but have it suffer crippling performance issues on the PC, reported by both AMD and Nvidia users?
I realize that PCs are quirky beasts; but they are quirky beasts architecturally very similar to(typically more powerful than, for any vaguely serious gaming system) both contemporary consoles, and even some software/dev overlap with the Xbox; and somehow other people have managed to get a game to release and have it either be horribly broken everywhere, mostly working everywhere, or at least horribly broken for 'GCN 1.0 GPUs with drivers before Catalyst 10.x' or some other well defined group of deviants.
How does this happen?
You need to look at the bigger picture. That may have been the first attack but why did it happen? Regardless of how or why, the fertilizer going around about this is ridiculous. Next it'll be the white stars that will be racist and banned from all flags.
Title was no longer available for digital purchase
Why do you care about having a physical copy?
Answered before you asked. In some cases, sellers of downloadable works have in the past ended redownload privileges even to paying customers without compensating them. Look at all the PlaysForSure music stores, for instance.
Second, a lot of physical stores still sell physical copies cheaper than Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, or Valve sells the downloadable version. It's like Amazon, where some print books are cheaper than the Kindle edition.
Wonder if it's more due to the 970 3.5 gig memory cap issue.
So yeah. Super Mario Brothers 3 is easy enough to QA so you can release a perfect game.
Super Mario Bros. was 40K but still shipped with the minus world glitch. You'd be surprised at how many glitches Nintendo left in Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros. 3. Read this thread about a hack of Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros. 2: For Super Players (an initially Japan-only mission pack sequel to SMB1 that uses the SMB1 engine) that removes well over a dozen glitches in the game, including many depicted in this montage.
Don't cry for historical sanction of your interpretations if your history is wrong, idiot.
I defend THE Swastika as a Hindi symbol of luck. As such, it's been around for five millennia and managed not to offend ANYBODY. The Turned Swastika is a bastardisation of both the symbol and the meaning (particularly since the Nazi Swastika is depicted in a white circle on a red background - I don't personally know the significance of the colours Hitler chose, only that it was influenced by his involvement with the Thule). That one, I don't defend either as a battle motif nor as a Marxist political rallying symbol. Hell, I still see people wearing the Swastika on their foreheads during such holidays as Diwali.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Sorry, just because the flag was flown by the racist army of northern viginia in a battle, does not make it any less a symbol of racism. Your argument literally makes no sense. I symbol of the racist south is still a symbol of the racist south, you fucking idiot.
before they could patch a game 1.0 was all they had so they made dam sure it was a quality release. they have gotten lazy and are pushing broken game's with the mindset we will fix it later. and what recourse did a gamer have until just recently with steam refund
You impatient pre-orderers of AAA titles are the cause, you enable this behavior by the big greedy studios. By all means support Alphas of indie that look appealing to you but why you would pay $50 or $60 for game before it is out and been reviewed and which will be half that in 3 months is beyond me. You need to up your ADHD meds apparently.
The Joker(s) runs the company. Whaddya expect?
Table-ized A.I.
FACT - America loses all it's wars
We lost WWII? Or does that somehow not count as a war that America fought in?
I'm sorry you like to twist history into your own views.
Sorry if I missed the study, but what makes this all because of preorders? I've been playing buggy games for decades, plenty of which I didn't preorder, many of which weren't even expected to be huge hits, why is everyone so sure that preorders are why developers aren't fixing games? I'm not saying they definitely have nothing to do with it, but as someone who preorders a game about once every year or two, I'm genuinely curious what evidence there is that my actions are damaging the games. And for anyone thinking I'm a dumbass for preordering games, I like to get collectors editions of sequels to games I already enjoy because I like having cool things to put on display to represent those games. I genuinely like that extra stuff, lots of people do, I'm not saying you should but don't give people shit because they like different things.
To be honest, I think it has more to do with priorities changing at major game companies. It seems to me like the industry started off as gamers making games they enjoyed for other gamers, and making a bit of money off it. As the industry has grown and become more profitable, many of the people making the games aren't as passionate about the games themselves and are more concerned with making money. This is fairly obvious with larger companies such as Activision, franchises like CoD have a new release every year instead of even attempting to make a game one would enjoy for longer. And we've all seen the Destiny fiasco, a game I enjoy but am getting fed up with at the same time. It seems to me they're just choosing quantity over quality. That's really just me guessing, but without any evidence one way or another, I think anyone's guess is just as good.
When I grew up people told me jack o' laterns are symbols of the occult and child sacrifice.
/. "enlightened thinking" or whatever), but most people who carve pumpkins are not intending to promote the devil.
It's true that people who sacrifice children are into the jack o' latern stuff (and YES they do exist, please don't dismiss that under the guise of
Or at least insofar as they are cutting a pumpkin.
That wasnt your war - you just joined the party late as usual . After you had finished selling all your shit to both sides.
That makes you the racist. This is history being fucked by idiots.
??
If slavery was legal in the North up to and during the Civil War, then why was there so much ado over Dredd Scott?
In terms of the law, they would have just sent him back, but the abolitionists thought they had a case because slavery was illegal in the North.
And furthermore, what was the Missouri Compromise all about? I thought that was where the Northern states couldn't own slaves?
my concern with Guild wars 2 is the Publisher NcSoft pulling the plug with little notice.
It makes no sense on the PC in any case because the primary point of preordering is to make sure you get a copy on launch. Well, if you're doing a digitial download then you're going to get a copy regardless which is how most PC games work at this point anyway.
Now for little companies that don't have publishing contracts? Pre-orders are fine. I pre order games from those guys all the time and have so far not been burned once. I know people get burned but I've been lucky.
I've pre-ordered everything from inexile for example. I preordered planetary annihilation. I've preordered star citizen. i pre order tell tale games that seem interesting.
That's fine. But some batman game being developed by a big publisher? Why would I preorder? exclusive content? Pfft.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I don't know why so many commentors are under the impression that PUBLISHERS get money from pre orders... They don't. The publisher doesn't get paid until you pick up the game on launch day. Until that time, Walmart or EB or whoever you ptreordered from is just holding the money.
Think about it, if it worked the way you'd day, then cancelling a pre order or switching it to another game would not be possible. But it is, with every retailer I know of anyway.
Hell, Amazon doesn't even charge your credit card at all until the game ships.
The reason I pre order all games is due to the pre order DLC and bonuses, which I then promptly sell on eBay omn launch day for $10 or $15, making the game cost less. Hell, sometimes the sale of the pre order bonuses covers the entire cost of the game.
Slavery was still quite legal, it was the buying and selling of slaves that was outlawed in the North prior to the 13th amendment.
The gaming industry should have to face fines for releasing games this badly coded. And its very clear the gamers are a bunch of cowards, afraid to miss out on a preorder special gun that is no more powerful they any in the game released on opening day. But even still thats not the problem the problem is fix it later created by the whole software industry, Linux included. No one has clean hands IMO for this problem but for gamers as serious as they take themselves to not stick together is ..sad and funny. that's my 3 cents worth
Jack of all trades,master of none
So it doesn't count. Good to know you like to cherry-pick your data.
Iron Galaxy was responsible for the shit port of Origins, and they're once again responsible for this shit port. The agenda driven CBS site Giantbomb have a lot of close personal friends with Iron Galaxy studio and have quietly forgotten to mention them once in their article of this coverage, with multiple staff/mods in the comments attempting to dismiss and give Iron Galaxy the benefit of the doubt. Giantbomb is a sterling examples of corruption in Gaming Journalism and why #Gamergate came to exist.
I clearly remember seeing two days before the release that the PC could be had for $35-$40. Could it be these sellers had inside knowledge and purposely sold this broken product before word got out? If so, wouldn't this be something the Feds could look into?
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
This story wants to be a rallying cry for the sentiment to not pre-order games, but this was, what, the fourth game in the Batman: Arkham series, right? And it looks like it's on UE3 like the others, and it was done by the same studio that did two of the previous three games.
Pre-ordering can be dangerous, sure, but I think people were reasonable to perhaps assume that this game wouldn't have huge issues, and even if one or more of the previous games had issues surely whatever it was (cape physics?) could have been worked out by now.
I know things change between games and a $60 purchase is not cheap but telling people they're stupid for pre-ordering the fourth game in a series with most of the same elements in place is like telling people who are at the opening night of a movie that's a sequel to another movie they liked that they're being stupid for not waiting for reviews. Sure, the new movie might suck but is it unreasonable to think it probably won't?
Schnapple
The southern states were the ones most often holding the legislature hostage over slavery issues. It was the southern states that pushed for and managed to get the Fugitive Slave Act (1850) enacted, with pro-southern supreme court justices defending it. The southern states were in no possible way being ignored. It took time for anti-slavery movements to gain enough political power to win Lincoln the election; a major political party dwindled and split over the slavery issue so that few remember the Whigs anymore. All the infighting up north and in the west meant that the southern Democrats had lots of political power.
Fact: the civil war was about slavery, pure and simple. The leaders of the new confederacy said so themselves. They required any state joining the confederacy to make pledges to maintain the institution of slavery. If there had been no slavery then there would have not been a civil war.
The confederate battle flag is being used today as a symbol of racism. The idea that it is about southern heritage is revisionist bullshit, unless they mean the southern heritage of holding slaves and denying post war blacks their civil rights. The confederate battle flag lasted for such a short period of time in history that it is absurd to treat it as a lasting symbol of anything beyond the civil war period. The flag is used precisely because it brings to the forefront the emotions of people who think they should not have lost the war that they started and instigated. The use of the flag after the war was relatively rare and spotty until it became more popular during the civil rights era (probably as a symbol of resistance against what they saw as more northern interference into their segregationist way of life).
But ultimately what it comes down to is this. Most people see the confederate battle flag as a racist symbol. Whether that is true or not, everyone flying that flag knows this. They KNOW that most people seeing the flag will find it offense and they fly it anyway.
Why it happened? Because they lost their long held grasp over the government and were worried that they'd have to give up slavery. They saw the writing on the wall and did not want to become a dwindling minority with no power. To them, "state's rights" meant the right to maintain the institution of slavery and to *expand* the institution to new states entering the union. Fort Sumter was attacked because they knew they were going to secede and they didn't want enemy troops in their midst.
The union had been in a bit of stalemate for a long time, slave versus free states, few were really happy overall with the situation. But the expansion into the west brought about troubles with the power balance, as well as growing clout amongst abolitionists. The institution of slavery was a horrible black mark on the constitution and the peaceful situation was not going to last much longer regardless of who had been elected president or who controlled the forts.
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you don't need to be concerned, they definitely will
Getting the money before release isn't really the issue.
Getting the money before people know what an unholy broken dog your product is, that's the issue.
Publishers discovered that they could guarantee X million dollars of revenue on day one, AND that the return rate wasn't purely based on it working on day one because people have a lot of inertia and would wait a few days to be reassured that their problems were being addressed and a patch was forthcoming "soon". They also discovered that advertising spend, empty promises of bonus content, the ability to download early, and in-game progression systems that reward jump starting on others meant they could massively increase the day one sales on digital download as well.
What they couldn't do was upset their shareholders and blow revenue forecasts and not release, so if it's horribly broken, it ships. Even if it didn't even start on half the systems out there, it wouldn't effect that quarter's revenue, and that's what's most important.
Not that anything's going to change, the people writing these articles aren't the teenagers who are proving the MBA scumbags right.
This is how it works on wikipedia. One moment you're looking up how kalman filters work and then 8 hours later you're still browsing but looking at the history of bamboo plantations.
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* Gonna go "cry in your cereal" now, boy?
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APK
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AFTER ALL THAT?
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and Arkham City were rock solid stable. Origins, made by the same developer as Knight, is a buggy mess.
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You mean like The Phantom Menace?
Why? Guild Wars 1 is still up and running, for heaven's sake.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.