A few months ago, WB Games was responsible for releasing what could be deemed one of the worse PC gaming ports ever – Batman: Akham Knight. Despite several warnings that the game was not optimized or ready to be released, WB Games decided to give the PC gaming community the middle finger and released the very unoptimized title, much to the dissatisfaction of many gamers (myself included). I’m not even going to go into the whole Harvey Quinn DLC fiasco.
Eventually the cries of frustration were heard and heads started rolling, which forced WB Games to not only pull the game so that it couldn’t be sold anymore via digital means (Steam, Greenmangaming), but also prompted those digital distribution sites to start offering refunds to those who purchased the title through them. But this didn’t help the gamers who got it via purchasing certain Nvidia video cards or through sellers who sold the game at a discount. Those gamers were left in the wake, many of which have the game installed on their hard drives or sitting idle in Steam.
However, there looks to be some light at the end of a very dark tunnel, as WB Games has posted some new info regarding an in-testing and hopefully upcoming patch for Batman: Arkham Knight. Posted on their forums, the patch will address multiple pain posts and listed below are some of the improvements that you can expect to see via this patch:
- Reduced frame rate hitches
- Optimized system memory and VRAM usage
- Improved performance on all GPUs (requires the latest drivers)
– Min Spec AMD GPU is once again the Radeon HD 7870 2GB - More Robust In-Game Settings, including:
– Added the ability to change settings for Max FPS to 30/60/90
– Added toggles for Motion Blur, Chromatic Aberration, and Film Grain
– Added a “High” Texture Resolution value
– Added Texture Filtering option
– Added an Adaptive V-Sync option (NVIDIA only)
– Added VRAM Usage Meter
– Added Mouse Sensitivity Slider & Mouse Smoothing Option - Fixed low resolution texture bugs
- Fixed hitches when running on mechanical hard drives (HDD)
While our first priority is fixing the issues listed above, the team is continuing to work on the following:
- Skipping the boot up splash screens <—- How is this even a complex issue?
- DLC/Season Pass content
- Additional updates such as Photo Mode
While I’m happy to see there has been some progress made, the game has been unplayable for the majority of the community. Yet WB Games and Rocksteady are continuing to release more and more DLC. C’mon team – we’d love to get this game playable for more than handful of fans and partake in that DLC, but fix the game first. Any why is implementing a way to skip the boot up splash screens an issue that is so hard to fix? That in its self has me wondering about how bad of a state that this game is in.
Batman: Arkham Knight was released on June 23, 2015, and here we are on August 22, two months since the release and I really can’t play it, as my SLI setup eventually dies and single GPU gameplay is very undesirable.
No ETA on the eventually release of the patch, but at least we know it’s in the works and will be coming. The question is however, when?
