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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
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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.
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?
Anyone else notice that since the last generation of consoles got the ability to patch games, they've been buggier upon release?
...
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.
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.
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.
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?
I'm just wondering how the game is so badly broken for people attempting to run it on an x86 with AMD drivers and Microsoft APIs, when there apparently exists an xbox version that 'works' by the standards of shrinkwrap software.
I do realize that the xbox does not run Windows(in any meaningful sense, they probably borrowed from NT rather than anything else when they needed OS bits; but it's a pretty specialized selection); But there are substantial similarities in both hardware and software between the two; and it's not as though both first and 3rd party engines, middleware, etc. weren't largely able to paper over much, much, weirder differences last generation.
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.
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.
No. The problem happens across all possible hardware configurations.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Spelling Nazi Edit: Grammer = Grammar
A very large part of it is companies putting embargos on game reviewers; so while in the past we might have seen a review about a new Batman game coming out that plays like absolute shit and the buyer deciding to wait, now the developers push out extra skins or bonus weapons or whatever it takes to get that first pile of cash to them before people read any reviews. So instead of holding the game back for another couple months for polish, the developers decide "well... good enough I guess" and dump the turd to the public.
After that, They can take their time patching because they've already got a massive portion of the possible purchasers cash.
"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try." -Homer Simpson
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
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.