Console fanboys are probably laughing right about now. Why? Because just two days after the general release of Batman: Arkham Knight, developer Rocksteady Studios and publisher Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment have decided to pull the PC version until further notice due to serious performance issues.
“We want to apologize to those of you who are experiencing performance issues with Batman: Arkham Knight on PC,” the developer writes. “We take these issues very seriously and have therefore decided to suspend future game sales of the PC version while we work to address these issues to satisfy our quality standards. We greatly value our customers and know that while there are a significant amount of players who are enjoying the game on PC, we want to do whatever we can to make the experience better for PC players overall.”
The two companies add that they will continue to monitor all threads that are posted on the Steam forums and the official Batman: Arkham Knight forums. They also encourage disgruntled PC customers to sit back and wait for the bug issues to be ironed out. If that’s too much to ask, then customers can request a full refund on Steam or from the retailer where the game was purchased.
“The Batman: Arkham fans have continually supported the franchise to its current height of success, and we want to thank you for your patience as we work to deliver an updated version of Batman: Arkham Knight on PC so you can all enjoy the final chapter of the Batman: Arkham series as it was meant to be played,” the update concludes.
Complaints regarding the PC version began on Tuesday and Warner (aka WB Games) quickly provided an update stating that it was aware of the performance problems. Later on, the company tossed up a list of recommended settings for hungry PC gamers wanting a fix. These settings were based on the minimum hardware specs and the recommended specs, thus PC gamers can choose from two recommended lists. Both seem to cap the framerate to 30 fps.
“It is incredibly important that users with a min spec video card with 2 GB of dedicated VRAM (or 3 GB on AMD) to keep the Texture Resolution set to Low,” WB Games warned. “Increasing this to Normal will cause significant performance issues.”
The company also warned PC gamers not to change anything in the game’s .ini files and to stay away from Nvidia’s GeForce Experience and AMD’s Gaming Evolved Optimization tools. On the drivers side, customers should be using GeForce GameReady WHQL Driver version 353.30 or AMD’s Catalyst 15.6 beta driver.
Over the last two days, PC gamers trying to run the latest Batman: Arkham game have suffered significant game-halting crashes, various framerates dipping into the single digits and stuttering. Nvidia is supposedly working with the developer to help clear up a number of issues that are causing the problems.
That all said, the problem with Batman: Arkham Knight is unfortunate, but keep in mind that it’s not experienced by all PC gamers. Many customers are reporting that they’re not experiencing any show-stopping problems whatsoever. Still, those affected by the issues are leaving bad marks in their reviews of the game, which is unfortunate.
What’s also unfortunate is that these issues plaguing the new Batman game will likely play as an example of how consoles are “better” than the Windows PC platform. With consoles, developers have two hardware sets to work with (PS4 and XB1). On the PC side, they must develop a game that runs on a huge number of hardware configurations, which probably isn’t an easy task.
On that note, maybe we should give Iron Galaxy Studios, the team that ported the game to Windows PC, a break?
From maximumpc
from http://bit.ly/1BEzout
