Image: Warner Bros.
Three and a half months ago, publisher Warner Bros. released one of the most highly anticipated games of the year on PC, Batman: Arkham Knight, and it was such a broken mess that Warner Bros. pulled it.Performance issues, bugs, and other issues that plagued the initial release are, sadly, very common with new releases, but Batman: Arkham Knight was in such a poor state it was unplayable. Wednesday, Batman: Arkham Knight is finally back for sale on PC. You'd think that after so much time it would be a relatively smooth launch, but no."We are still working with our GPU partners to add full support for SLI and Crossfire," Warner Bros. said, referring to Nvidia's and AMD's respective solutions that allow players to use multiple graphics cards at once. That's an issue, but for fringe power-users, if we're being honest.However, Warner Bros. also said that players might run into some issues if they're using Windows 10—you know, that free operating system Microsoft's been begging you to download with incessant notifications in the corner of your screen. In other words, not fringe."For Windows 10 users, we've found that having at least 12GB of system RAM on a PC allows the game to operate without paging and provides a smoother gameplay experience."Okay, first of all, no duh. 12 GB will help anything run smoother because that's a lot of RAM. Second of all, that's too much RAM! Consider that even the recommended system requirement for Batman: Arkham Knight is 8 GB RAM.And finally, there's a couple of quickly growing discussion threads on Steam that are reporting the same issues players had at launch: low framerates, stuttering, crashing, and other graphical glitches. Of course, people for whom the game is working fine are less likely to march over to the message board and report that all is well, but there are already hundreds of mostly negative comments complaining about performance issues. It might not be as bad as the initial launch, but it certainly doesn't seem like the relaunch has gone smoothly.When Warner Bros. pulled the game in June, I hope that it would be a turning point for launching broken games. Pulling games from sale is just not something publishers do. Usually, a developer will issue a patch quickly and just keep selling the game. So you have to wonder, how broken was Batman: Arkham Knight when it first launched? So broken, it seems, that almost four months of repairs later, and it's still having some pretty big problems.
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