You can’t buy Batman: Arkham Knight for the PC right now. Warner Bros pulled it from digital and physical shelves last week, after players found that the PC version had critical performance issues. From what sources tell Kotaku, however, this shouldn’t have been a surprise for Warner Bros.
“I will say that it’s pretty rich for WB to act like they had no idea the game was in such a horrible state,” said one quality assurance tester who worked on the game for years. “It’s been like this for months and all the problems we see now were the exact same, unchanged, almost a year ago.”
Two sources, requesting anonymity to avoid jeopardizing their careers, spoke with Kotaku over the past week in hopes of explaining how the broken PC version of Arkham Knight made it out the door. They both said that Warner Bros was aware of the many issues facing Arkham Knight on PC and that the publisher chose to ship the game regardless, not to maniacally screw over customers — but because they believed it was good enough.
Warner Bros did not return my multiple requests for comment.
After suspending sales of Arkham Knight on PC last Wednesday, the company pointed fans towards Steam’s refund page and promised to do right by players:
We want to apologise to those of you who are experiencing performance issues with Batman: Arkham Knight on PC. 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.
Since then, a minor patch was released for the PC version that addressed some crashing bugs, introduced rain effects, and fixed a few other issues. Warner Bros described the ongoing work as “significant” and it “will take some time to ensure that we get the right fixes in place.”
As of right now, it’s unclear when it will go on sale again.
PC versions of multi-platform games have been getting better over the years. For a long time, there was no guarantee most console games would even get PC versions. Now, it’s practically assumed. And despite endless articles predicting the PC’s death, the unionization of PC owners under Steam has allowed them to demonstrate their support using the most reliable form of persuasion: money. The question in 2015 is whether or not the PC version of a given game will be any good.
Arkham Knight, sadly, was not. It had a capped frame rate of 30 frames-per-second, despite Nvidia releasing an early marketing video that demonstrated 60 frames-per-second. (The frame rate can be upped by editing a file that Warner Bros has instructed people to avoid.)
Performance has been dreadful on everything but the most high-end machines, an expectation that was not conveyed prior to release. (When I’m in the Batmobile, it gets as low as 14 FPS on a machine that handled The Witcher 3 at 60 FPS.) And if you’re running the game on a standard HDD, rather than a SDD, since it’s 45GB? Welcome to stutterville, population you.
The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions of Arkham Knight are, technically speaking, excellent. They’re gorgeous, run at a solid frame rate, and don’t seem to suffer from any glaring issues.
The PC version of Arkham Knight was built in collaboration between Warner Bros, Rocksteady and Iron Galaxy Studios. You might know Iron Galaxy for the humorous two-button fighting game Divekick, Killer Instinct: Season Two, or various digital ports of classic Capcom fighters over the years. They were also Warner Bros’ PC collaborator for Batman: Arkham Origins.
Arkham Knight‘s credits list Iron Galaxy as providing “additional engineering and PC support,” which would imply that Rocksteady did the bulk of work there, but from what we’re told, Rocksteady did not work on the PC version — it focused on console.
In the fallout from the PC version, Rocksteady claims it’s now actively working on the PC.
Totally supported decision to suspend PC version. We have our best engineers at Rocksteady working like crazy to help fix the issues ASAP.
— Sefton Hill (@Seftonhill) June 25, 2015
WBGames is working with the PC developer IronGalaxy to address the issues ASAP. Rocksteady will provide any support to get this resolved.2/2
— Sefton Hill (@Seftonhill) June 23, 2015
“Getting it to work on consoles was impossible for months,” said our tester source. “That’s part of why the game got delayed so many times, they were totally unprepared for how hard it was on next-gen consoles.”
Another source, who did not work on the QA team but was close to the game’s production, said this closely lined up with what they’d seen and heard throughout the game’s development.
In various meetings, QA teams were told the new consoles were “not nearly as easy to work with as [Rocksteady] expected” and testers should focus time on finding console bugs. This particular team was made up of roughly 100 people, with about 10% focused on the PC version.
“We reported literally thousands of bugs that were specific to the PC version relating to the frame rate,” said our QA source. “All sorts of fucked up texture issues. The Batmobile in particular has always fucked things up on PC.”
(As I noted before, the Batmobile chugs the game down to nearly single digits frames on my PC.)
Arkham Knight is the most sprawling game from Rocksteady yet, in addition to it being their first game on new consoles, so the open world understandably made the bug count stack up.
“Testing a game this big is very different from linear or smaller games,” our source continued. “You usually get a mission, chapter or area of the map, or pick one yourself, and just go to town. You bug everything you see. We had some testers bugging more than 100 bugs per day. Devs would fix what they could but they were juggling that with actually finishing the game so they were insanely slow. Only when the game was done and no new features had to be built could they actually buckle down. Once that happens they also restrict what you can or can’t bug, to ensure that they can catch up.”
Our second source said Warner Bros internal QA focused on bug-checking specifically at 720p resolutions. Most PC players with decent hardware expect to run games at 1080p or higher. If Warner Bros was using 720p at as a benchmark, that helps explain the large performance gap.
One unexpected problem? The game’s secretive story. Rocksteady was deeply afraid of plot revelations being leaked ahead of release, said the same source, so traditional PC testing firms that are used to stress test games on different hardware configurations — one of the PC’s biggest hurdles — were avoided. From what I’m told, this is not an uncommon practice for major video games with story-heavy elements.
The PC is a complicated platform, but Warner Bros has a troubled recent history when it comes to the PC, one that suggests the platform is not always a priority for the company.
When Batman: Arkham Origins shipped in October 2013, the PC version was praised for looking better than its console counterparts, but reviewers had to hold back. PC Invasion, for example, knocked the game down to a 5/10, largely due to the game-breaking glitches:
“Let’s see. One of the Enigma Towers (which unlock fast-travel points and are fairly essential to one of the major subquests in the single-player game) is actually impossible to complete on PC. I got stuck on two smaller subquests because the game wouldn’t let me interrogate the people I needed to interrogate. I had to restart one section of the critical story path twice — first because a bug prevented me from opening a door, and then because a bug prevented me from getting off a zipline. I had to restart another subquest when the event that was supposed to finish it didn’t trigger. Another subquest broke because I restarted it, forcing me to quit out and load from the start of the section. And the multiplayer? Well, that hard locked for me every two or three rounds, and the game reset my progression — remove all of my unlocks, weapons, and abilities — every time I restarted it. I’ve pretty much given up on it now.”
In the case of Arkham Origins, however, the PC version wasn’t alone. Console players were dealing with all sorts of bugs, too. Frankly, the game was a total mess for a little while there.
At one point, Warner Bros issued a public statement that it would not be fixing anything but progression glitches, instead focusing on the game’s downloadable content. Take a quick look at the ensuing thread on the game’s official message boards to see how that news went over.
Some egregious glitches were never addressed on the PC, though helpful players on Steam continue to work with frustrated fans hoping to keep playing. One person will actually take a look at your save file and hack you out of a glitched room.
Warner Bros’ next major PC release was Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor in September 2014, but thanks to developer Monolith having worked extensively with the PC platform in the past, the port came out excellent. There was a brief scare over the PC version, as Warner Bros declined to send out review code to most outlets, but it turned out OK. Prior to release, the developers said “the PC was one of our primary development versions” in an AMA conversation on reddit.
Only a few months later, Warner Bros helped Techland ship Dying Light. Like Monolith, Techland has deep PC roots — it only started releasing console games with Call of Juarez in 2006. While the PC version of Dying Light was hardly glitch-free (nothing is!) it ran well on people’s hardware. It was clear Techland made it a priority.
Starting to notice a pattern?
Mortal Kombat fans didn’t have it as good with Mortal Kombat X, though. Released back in April, the PC version has led to nothing but grumbling. It launched with a bizarre approach to pre-loading, in which only part of the game was downloaded ahead of release, while the rest was downloaded after the game was booted up for the first time. This meant waiting hours to pull tons of data, including the game’s story. This was eventually changed, allowing folks to download the whole game at once, but it turned an exciting launch day into an aggravating one.
That’s to say nothing of underwhelming performance, unreliable netcode, and the introduction of new and frustrating bugs with every patch. One Steam thread is devoted to monitoring all the known glitches, ranging from ongoing crashes to being unable to unlock bonuses tied to the Android version of the mobile game. Another thread outlines a way to force Mortal Kombat X on PC to use all the cores on a computer’s CPU, drastically improving performance for many users.
None of that should be the job of the player.
High Voltage Software was tasked with the PC version of Mortal Kombat X, and was apparently overwhelmed by the project.
“They bit off way more than they could chew and were generally understaffed and pushed their guys really hard,” said one source with knowledge of the game.
Nearly all references to Mortal Kombat X have been scrubbed from High Voltage Software’s Facebook page in the past few weeks. If you want to read their previous statements about the port, written around the time it was incurring the wrath of PC owners, they no longer exist. The company’s Twitter links point to pages since deleted.
“It’s usually an external studio that gets hired to do the PC version,” the source continued. “A lot of these ‘port houses’ tend to over-promise and under-bid to get the job. I think the way port-houses work is a pretty under-exposed part of the industry. They do the dirty work for AAA studios, sometimes with the goal of funding their own original game. A lot of times, they can really struggle to break out.”
And this brings us back to Arkham Knight, which was released on the PC and pulled down from various storefronts in less than a week. What went wrong?
During Arkham Knight‘s development, two sources told me Rocksteady Games was having a tough time getting performance up to snuff.
When the game was shown to press at the Game Developers Conference in 2014, it was freezing and hitching all over the place. It’s unclear which version of the game was being shown to press, but it underscored the technical hurdles facing the game behind-the-scenes.
The game had originally been scheduled for release in October 2014, but was delayed because “it couldn’t be done in the time we had,” according to the developer.
Here’s what Kotaku editor Stephen Totilo wrote when the game was pushed back:
We at Kotaku first saw Arkham Knight running in March. The game is set in a big open-world swath of Gotham City. The game’s creators, playing on a PC build, appeared to be able to glide and drive through large sections of it at will. There were framerate hitches, which is common in unfinished games. Those seemed to be getting resolved when we saw the game again in May. But Rocksteady apparently needs more time.
Eight months later, the game finally shipped, but it feels like the proper PC version is still a ways off.
There’s a pattern with Warner Bros’ approach to the PC, but one hardly exclusive to the publisher of Arkham Knight. When the PC is made a core development platform by the people crafting the other versions, those versions have turned out much better. When the PC version is handed to another developer who’s unfamiliar with the code, it’s turned out much worse. That’s not to say great ports can’t be handled by external developers, but the process requires additional care.
Mistakes happen, obviously, and no game is perfect or bug-free — they’re just too complicated. But the video game industry has a poor record of shipping broken games lately, and Arkham Knight on PC is simply the latest piece of evidence. Sure, sales have been halted for the time being, but that doesn’t excuse Warner Bros’ decision to sell this game for $US60 in the first place.
Comments
39 responses to “Sources: Warner Bros Knew That Arkham Knight PC Was A Mess For Months”
TL:DR
Of course they knew!
When the only version shown for months was the PS4 version, it pretty much goes without saying.
Poor choice by WB. As much as consumers might whine and complain about a delay, in the end all they want is a working product, even if it’s a few months late. GTAV on PC should be evidence enough of that.
Late or broken. You’d think they’d consider which one would impact more on their reputation … and future games sales.
I’d be more surprised if WB didn’t know. Is there anyone out there who didn’t expect this?
You’d think seeing as how a lot of developers have acclaimed the new consoles for being so similar to PC architecture, that PC versions of a game should be pretty damned easy to make. Yes there’s a lot of different hardware to get a game working on, but still.
Warner Bros lost me with the Batmobile edition farce, and now I’m really not interested in playing it
Not cool bros… not cool.
Port houses have an unenviable job to do. They’re expected to get other people’s code working day and date with the main release, but said other people are making sweeping changes right up to the line.
With the exception of the Witcher series and possibly Fallout 4, I won’t buy a game until its been out for at least a month. EA/DICE are the main reason for this.
Its a good way to save money too.
There’s a few details that seem contradictory to what we’ve heard before. Here they say they PC game was a mess a year ago, but other sources say Iron Galaxy didn’t start the PC port until 8 weeks before release. Then the credits seem to imply Rocksteady did the bulk of the work with Iron Galaxy providing support, but your sources say Rocksteady didn’t work on the port at all and that it was entirely Iron Galaxy’s responsibility.
*injects Zombie Jesus with a dose of Scarecrow’s serum*
Hush now, ZJ. The people of
Gothamthe world must not know the truth.When the game was first shown it was running on a pc, so even though iron galaxy was responsible for porting the retail version, a pc version had to exist for development of the base game.
This is how all of the seemingly contradictory remarks are all correct.
If that’s the case, then surely Rocksteady must have had at least some hand in the development of the PC version, which would agree with the game’s credits but disagree with the sources above.
As far as I understand it all games start life on a PC, working around the specs of the intended platform (especially for a new console). Once the game hits a certain point they start the work with the dev kits and work on a build to run natively on the hardware. So the PC version they showed was probably only functional on a very specific set of hardware. Iron Galaxy were probably tasked with making a full PC version that will work on a range of hardware.
That’s the usual way of doing it, yeah. It just seems odd, if they’re saying the PC version was a mess a year ago this should have affected the console versions as well, since they’re typically based on the PC code. The game uses Unreal 3 which was built for cross-platform in the first place, the bulk of the code should have worked about the same on each platform.
True, true. I also saw this link floating around https://steamdb.info/app/208650/subs/ suggesting Iron Galaxy really didn’t get their hands on the code until late in the day.
But, they did say that it affected the consoles. From the article:
and
Any fixes to the console code would have been included in the PC code, given that it appears the PC port wasn’t started until 8 weeks before release. Issues that affected both console and PC versions a year ago would be irrelevant if they were fixed.
Yup. From all this, I’d guess that Rocksteady worked on the game in engine on PC as a base before moving onto console development.
So they could show the game off on PC, but the PC build they had was a straight export from engine and hence completely unoptimised. (Analogy: Or the RAW game files like RAW camera footage before an edit gets cut together)
If that’s the case, then yeah, Rocksteady technically had the game on PC but there wasn’t really a PC ‘version’ or ‘port’ until Iron Galaxy took over 8 weeks before launch.
Seems likely, especially with Unreal, TBH.
*Edited for RAW point and flow.
I don’t think the fact that the knew it was broken is new information, that’s fairly self evident.
Yup.. mistakes do happen.. and every game is not going to be 100% bug free these days.. they are many factors of magnitude more complex than those from 20 years ago when things had to work flawlessly out of the box.
However, Arkham Knight is an absolute mess and shameful display by WB for releasing it at all in this state. It’s way, way, way below the line of “acceptable”. Any idiot would have known that.
This article is so wishy-washy. it appears Kotaku doesn’t want to call a spade a spade in fear of upsetting WB too much.
The fact remains, if it runs well on consoles it should be running beautifully on my PC.
If they didn’t want to upset WB they probably wouldn’t have written the article at all…
Yes and no..
I’ll admit to not having worked on a title for xbone/ps4, so things may have changed. But back in the days of developing PC/X360/PS3 cross platform titles, the consoles used to outperform the equivalent (in model numbers) PC hardware, and it’s due to the custom hardware usually present in consoles specifically to handle game related tasks. Things like data streaming systems, memory bandwidth, methods the CPU/GPU can access the memory faster, communicate more directly or parallelise tasks, extra fast CPU/GPU cache systems and cache control systems.
In order to get similar performance from the PC, you have to have higher specced hardware to offset the custom modifications that the consoles had. Most non-developers severely underestimate the performance gains that these modifications provide.
It doesn’t surprise me that this game runs much better with a really beefy PC when running at higher than 720p. 720p has always been the “target” since X360/PS3, because the custom hardware is often limited in other ways (such as only having enough embedded frame buffer memory to render less than 720p in one pass etc). Most console games won’t hold even 30 fps at 1080p, even on PS4/Xbone.
Yet PC gamers expect at least 1080p these days for the most part.. you can see why the performance suffers on PC. Higher resolution, no custom hardware tweaks to support it etc.
It takes a lot of extra work to get an optimised for console game to work on “reasonable” PC hardware acceptably.
Not defending this particular game, because it sounds like there’s more going on than just these engine issues (there generally shouldn’t be quest progression issues separately on each platform, that code should be identical between platforms, so it sounds like there’s more code differences than there should be!)
I think most PC gamers understand that their OS slows games down slightly compared to dedicated consoles. For those who don’t understand these things about a PC vs. Console, they probably shouldn’t have a PC in the first place… (I work in IT and deal with a lot of people (gamer and non-gamer) who honestly really shouldn’t be allowed on a computer).
The issue is moreso people who have ridiculously beefy computers that are worth thousands of dollars, and STILL getting seriously poor performance compared to a console.
Furthermore, they expect a game to run at 1080p 60fps+ on their high-end PC when it will run at close to that on a console, as there are plenty of other games out there that are multiplatform that perform fine.
You can’t blame consumers for expecting a company to keep up with the competition…
As someone who used to work on cross-platform middleware for the PC/X360/PS3 generation of hardware, the performance overhead on PC is much smaller than you seem to be suggesting.
The reason that generation of consoles performed well was because they had cutting edge components that didn’t have equivalents on PC for a few months afterwards, and didn’t become targetable hardware for a year or two. That’s not the case with the current generation of consoles, which are using components that are considered 1-2 generations old compared to the PC space. They were specifically chosen to not be cutting edge to keep unit costs down, since the money is made from game sales, not hardware sales.
Hardware isn’t the cause of Arkham Knight’s problems, a bad port is. Any algorithms written for console-exclusive API calls have to be rewritten to work on PC and that takes time. This game simply wasn’t given enough of it before WB pushed it out the door.
Probably never considered the fact that perhaps you’re the one who doesn’t know what a spade is, huh?
Nothing to see here, move along. It’s sad that PC gaming has been like this for some years, that’s why I made the move to console only gaming, haven’t looked back 🙂 Despite the fact that I miss RTS and FPS blows goats with a controller 🙁
My favorite part of this has been watching a whole bunch of people thanking WB for fixing the pile of shit they sold them deliberately. Consumers have rights, try to remember that next time someone shits on your pie.
“One unexpected problem? The game’s secretive story. Rocksteady was deeply afraid of plot revelations being leaked ahead of release… so traditional PC testing firms that are used to stress test games on different hardware configurations were avoided.”
I can see how this could be an issue, but ultimately ineffectual as I was one of many who (correctly) deduced the Arkham Knight’s identity from the press release material even before the game was even released…
Fuck Dave Lang!
Joke. He and the rest of Iron Galaxy have great previous work, would love to hear from those guys regarding this.
Nice work Patrick, another great piece.
I caved. I’ve given up on my PC version now. Thinking of getting it for my PS4. I’m not waiting for them to try and shine up this turd of a port to make it acceptable…
Sorry PC but you lose this round. Try again when Metal Gear Solid 5 comes out.
Awesome way to improve shipped PC titles/punish companies that ship broken ones, buy it again on another platform.
That’s like the worst thing you could do; when WBM accounts and managers look at figures they will just see ‘releasing broken PC port causes a number of users to double buy = more profits for us; therefore intentionally gimp every PC release!’. Maybe a bit of an exaggeration, but you get the point; it’s like if you had a friend who blatantly stole something from you, so instead of having a go at them for stealing from you, you just go buy another one to replace the stolen item, AND remain friends with them. What’s stopping your friend from just stealing from you again since there is no consequence for them.
I see your point, I do. But I just wanna play the damn game the way it was intended.
Cos bad PC port aside, it’s a damn good game.
Don’t buy the PC version till you get a refund for the PC version. You will make more of a point to them getting money back as they loose more for than what you paid with handling the refund process.
Thanks. and will do.
Wow, I played Arkham Asylum and City and loved those games, but never got around to Origins.
Had no idea the PC port of origins was so bad, and after seeing that thread where they stated they won’t patch the game as DLC takes priority, I have really lost faith in them as a game company. Obviously Arkham Knights PC release only furthers this.
Clearly they are extremely greedy and have no respect for the PC community, or even just gamers in general.
I will personally not buy either game (Knight or Origins) on any platform because of this, nor any WBM game in the future. Hell, I’ll just pirate it if I really want to play it; I haven’t pirated a game in years, but screw it if they won’t respect the consumer, I’ll show them my own equal levels of respect for them.
Iron Galaxy helped do the port for borderlands to next gen, and it works marvelously, so either they are no good at PC porting, or they are being used as an excuse and cannon fodder