Warner Brothers knew about Batman issues for months already

A bit of a yikes  and PR nightmare for the product series, publisher Warner Brothers already new for months about the problems with Baman: Arkham Knight, but decided to move forward and release the game in the hope that end-users would find it good enough.

Two sources talked to Kokatu, over the past week in hopes of explaining how the broken PC version of Arkham Knight made it out the door. They both said that Warner Bros. was aware of the many issues facing Arkham Knighton PC and that the publisher chose to ship the game regardless, not to maniacally screw over customers—but because they believed it was good enough.

We reported literally thousands of bugs that were specific to the PC version relating to the frame rate. All sorts of fucked up texture issues. The Batmobile in particular has always fucked things up on PC. 

"Testing a game this big is very different from linear or smaller games," our source continued. "You usually get a mission, chapter or area of the map, or pick one yourself, and just go to town. You bug everything you see. We had some testers bugging more than 100 bugs per day. Devs would fix what they could but they were juggling that with actually finishing the game so they were insanely slow. Only when the game was done and no new features had to be built could they actually buckle down. Once that happens they also restrict what you can or can’t bug, to ensure that they can catch up." 

Our second source said Warner Bros. internal QA focused on bug-checking specifically at 720p resolutions. Most PC players with decent hardware expect to run games at 1080p or higher. If Warner Bros. was using 720p at as a benchmark, that helps explain the large performance gap.

Since then, a minor patch was released for the PC version that addressed some crashing bugs, introduced rain effects, and fixed a few other issues. Warner Bros. described the ongoing work as “significant” and it “will take some time to ensure that we get the right fixes in place.”

One of the problems was that the game was focused on 720P gaming, while gamers obviously laugh at that resolution. One of the sources also noted he literally reported thousands of bugs in regards to PC gaming framerates. Especially scenes where the batmobile appears the FPS becomes horrible. 

Arkham Knight was released last week, but two days later WB pulled the digital version of the game from the stores. It is currently unknown when the game will be inserted into the channel again.