More than four months after being pulled off Steam, Batman: Arkham Knight, a game developed by Rocksteady studios and published by Warner Bros., is once again listed on Valve's digital distribution platform. However, even after all the time spent trying to optimize the PC port, users are still reporting so many issues.
Batman: Arkham Knight's Windows version was first launched on June 23, 2015. However, a day after its release, on June 24, it was taken down due to catastrophic technical problems and performance issues that users reported and refunds were offered.
The PC port was criticized for not being properly optimized prior to release. Even with high-end GPUs, players were still reporting the game dropping down to 10 FPS. Note the initial PC port was limited to 30 FPS, just like how it was for the consoles.
Iron Galaxy Studios was then brought onboard to work on fixing the PC port. A few days later, a small patch was released to address the cause of the game crashing. Early in September, another patch was released to better optimize the game for supported graphics cards, address frame rate dips, and give the players a choice to adjust the frame rate cap to 30, 60 or 90. Texture and storage issues were said to also be addressed with the patch.
With the September patch came the announcement that Batman: Arkham Knight will be once again available through Steam on Oct. 28, 2015. With the re-launch and the 2.3GB patch yesterday, Yorick, a Warner Bros. community administrator, announced that previous Batman: Arkham titles, along with a Community Challenge Pack, will be given away for free to those who own a Batman: Arkham Knight.
"We will be giving away copies of Batman: Arkham Asylum GOTY, Batman: Arkham City GOTY, Batman: Arkham Origins, and Batman: Arkham Origins Blackgate," Yorick says. "The Batman: Arkham library of games will be given to everyone who has already purchased or will purchase Batman: Arkham Knight for PC prior to 11:59 pm PDT, Nov. 16, 2015."
However, even with the bundle, a lot of PC gamers still weren't pleased. And who can blame them — the game still has a lot of issues and the frame rate drops have not been addressed for both AMD and Nvidia graphics cards. Moreover, those who care enough to give Batman: Arkham Knight's PC port a try are those who have already played the other games. Hence, it's not that previous titles are unappreciated, it's just redundant.
"I already own all the Arkham titles; so giving me discounts on titles I already own feels more like a [explicit] you than compensation for a title that hasn't worked in months," wrote an offended game fan.
Furthermore, according to another Warner Bros. community administrator on Steam wb.elder.pliny their team's testing showed that 12 GB of RAM provides a smooth experience as it allows the game to run without paging issues. While the RAM size requirement can be considered valid, the lack of support for SLI and Crossfire, after months of getting prepped for the re-launch, just did not sit well with people running on multiple GPUs.
"We are still working with our GPU partners to add full support for SLI and Crossfire," writes wb.elder.pliny.
For those who are desperate to play the game on decent settings but are having issues, some have suggested that turning keeping "Shadow" on low settings, even if the rest are on medium or high, addresses the frame rate dips issue.
