The blame for the poor quality of Batman: Arkham Knight on the PC has shifted over the days since its launch. Warner Bros. and Rocksteady Studios were initial targets. Then we discovered that the PC version had been outsourced to Iron Galaxy Studios, so it’s their fault, right? Well, the blame has come full circle, and looks to be landing at the feet of publisher Warner Bros. and staying there.
The publisher always has the final say in whether a game ships or not, so Warner was always going to take some of the blame in this. However, people working on the development team forArkham Knight have come forward (anonymously to protect their jobs) to explain this debacle really is all on Warner Bros.
Two sources have spoken to Kotaku, one from the game production side, the other being a quality assurance tester who worked on the game for years. Apparently the game was full of performance bugs and problems months ago. If you loaded up a PC build from 12 months ago, it would play pretty much exactly the same as the launch build everyone struggled with and Warner later pulled from sale.
So why did Warner Bros. choose to ship the game in this state? Because someone decided it was good enough. While that seems ludicrous, it is just the last in a long line of big mistakes made during the development of the title across all platforms.
The development of Arkham Knight was not easy, and Rocksteady is thought to have struggled with developing an open world game on the latest generation of console hardware. That’s why they focused on the console versions, but the testing team remained shared across all platforms, meaning the PC version only ended up getting around 10% of the testing resources. Warner also refused to use external companies for stress testing as they were so concerned about the story leaking.
Another big mistake: Warner Bros. used 720p as the definitive resolution for the game, and therefore all performance and bug testing was focused on running at 720p. PC gamers will run at higher resolutions than that, especially those early adopters who picked the game up on launch day. So it’s no surprise they found a buggy game that struggled to run even on high-end hardware.
The game suffered delays because of Rocksteady’s troubles with the console versions. The PC game was in a terrible state because it didn’t get the testing it needed and even the testing it did get was focused on running smoothly at a console-friendly screen resolution. Warner ultimately knew this, but chose to do nothing about it. Doing something about it would have meant delaying the launch of the PC version or spending more during development, they chose to do neither and instead just crossed their fingers and shipped a broken game.
Batman: Arkham Knight may or may no re-launch before the end of 2015 on PC. It really all depends on how serious Warner Bros. is about fixing the issues and just how many issues they have found, or are still finding.
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