You’re probably tired of hearing about problems with Batman: Arkham Knight on PC, and, believe me, I’m tired of writing about it! But today something weird went on with the game’s Steam page (again!), with reviews for the game getting flagged as “pre-release,” despite having been written this week.
Arkham Knight‘s history on PC is complicated. When the game was originally released back in June, performance was atrocious on all but the most high-end of machines. We aren’t talking “oh, PC players just have super high standards,” either — it ran like garbage. As I reported earlier this year, Warner Bros. knew that version of the game had problems when it shipped. The complaints were so loud (and damning) that Warner Bros. took the unprecedented step of stopping sales for the PC version and offering refunds for anyone who bought the game.
In late October, with a few patches under its belt, Arkham Knight was sold on PC again. There were definite improvements to frame rate and other issues, but it’s hardly a perfect port. However, the Steam page took the strange step of flagging reviews for the game in its original form as a “pre-release” review.
Arkham Knight, however, was not a game released in an Early Access format!
This was quietly changed the next day, and while Arkham Knight on PC still ran pretty crappy, at least the review situation didn’t seem so shady anymore.
That is, until it happened again!:
What’s weird is the inconsistency of how the tag was applied. There were other reviews featured on the page, written recently, that didn’t have the pre-release branding. Did it have to do with what version they’re playing? When they bought it? Is Warner Bros. flagging individual reviews as pre-release?
Valve did not respond to my request for comment, though Warner Bros. told us it was “a mistake and it is in the process of being fixed.” And it looks like it has been!
The cynical among us might suspect Warner Bros. was trying to suppress negative reviews of Arkham Knight by saying they’re pre-release, in the hopes a naive customer might overlook them, but even positive reviews got the tag.
Weird, right?
Comments
12 responses to “Arkham Knight’s Steam Reviews Are Getting Flagged As ‘Pre-Release’ … Again”
lol You’re kidding me. Jesus christ… this just gets worse and worse. They seriously need to just scrap the PC version. They cannot rescue it, they cannot come back from it… it was *never* in ‘pre-release’ after all, so the first lot marked as that were done so in a dubious manner anyhow, this is just outright fraudulent now.
No! Don’t scrap it. I really want to buy it.
When it’s $5, but still. I totally want it.
Hopefully by the time its 5 dollars most people will have the hardware to just brute force through the terrible performance.
I read on some forum people were investigating the performance issues, and one thing they came up with was the fact that PCs were actually running the game too fast.
The claim was that the game’s resource cache was tuned to the amount of time it took for consoles to load resources. The data was arriving too quickly on PC, though, so old data was thrown out in order to make room. When the game went looking for the older resources they had to be loaded in again, which led to the stuttering issues.
I have no proof, but it’s a good story. Anyway, faster PCs may actually be the cause of some issues, not the cure.
That’s as funky as the slowdown issue that Halo 3 had when Microsoft introduced the ability to install games on your XBox HDD. Normally it would be faster but Halo 3 was specifically programmed to expect it to be run from a disc and always cached assets to the utility partition of the HDD. This meant that when it was on the HDD it would be trying to read and write on the same device, creating a massive slowdown.
As last time, reviews are tagged based on whether they fall before or after the game’s release date in the Steam database. Whatever happened above, it’s no longer the case. Visiting the store page now shows the release date as 23 June, and very few of the reviews are marked as early access. Pretty sure this was just a mistake made while updating the game data, since it seems to have been corrected in less than 2 hours.
Edited to check: there were several depot updates on the Arkham Knight appid a few hours ago where they appear to have added a new QA build. It looks like the release date was changed and corrected during those updates.
I have just finished playing through the game in the last 2 weeks and IMO it is the best Arkham game of the series and ran really well on my PC (i5 3570, 8GB RAM, GTX970, Windows 10).
It’s a shame they stuffed the port up at release but I do recommend it for fans of the series.
My PC is pretty much the same as yours, warchest, so I guess I’ll give it a go!
…when it drops below A$20.
Can we move beyond all the technical issues and just see Knight for the mediocre/bad game that it is?
They probably figure they’ve burnt all good will for the game they had so they have nothing to lose at this point, and hey, it may generate a few more sales.
Time for a whole new slew of ASCII dicks then.
For those interested, I have an i5, 8GB ram, and 970. Playing at 1440p was ok, at 30 fps.
My recommendation is, if you have the horse power, just max out the settings and lock the game to 30FPS with nVidias adaptive half refresh v-sync. 60FPS was never possible for me (Driving and grappling always drop to 20 – 40fps anyway), even at 720p lowest settings. Chuggaluglug.
30FPS was somewhat more obtainable but there are still bugs etc. Gave up on it when I got to
the city in the fear gas shrouda while ago, but concluded that it was better than City but still not as good as, my personal fav, Asylum IMHO.This review crap doesn’t surprise me either TBH. This gen is getting worse and worse in this regard. 🙁