After Assassin’s Creed Unity had one of the worst launches in recent memory, we hoped that developers and publishers would take notice and think twice before releasing ‘unplayable’ games, especially on the PC.
Enter Batman: Arkham Knight, the latest instalment in the Arkham series of Batman games, loved the world over for its fluid combat and all things Batty. Unfortunately, the game was launched less than two days ago in an shoddy state.
After negative reviews of the game began appearing on Steam, the game was removed from the online distribution service and is unavailable to buy. Following Steam, other online retailers have also stopped supplying the game. Of the 8 758 reviews for the game, 5 909 of them are negative.
Just in case you were wondering what is wrong with the game, here’s a laundry list of the issues the PC version of the game is facing, curated from online reviews:
- It lacks visual features present on the console version.
- There is a permanent 30FPS lock that connot be removed without editing .INI files.
- Both AMD and NVIDIA graphics card users report problems with the game’s performance.
- The minimum system requirements for the game were changed shortly before it was launched.
- Warner Bros. (the publisher of the game) has come forward to say that the PC version is “intended to deliver an experience on par with the current generation of gaming platforms”, meaning that they previously had no plans to improve the performance of the game.
While many may see the removal of the game from Steam as the responsible thing to do, we can’t help but wonder if this was a money-saving scheme on the behalf of Warner Bros. Very recently, Steam updated its refund policy allowing users to get refunds for almost any reason, including the terrible performance plaguing Arkham Knight.
[Image copyright – DC via Comic Vine]