There are certain expectations fans have when it comes to triple-A games, the handful of big-budget franchise titles released by major studios each year. One more of the more reasonable expectations is that with millions of dollars in the development budget, a triple-A game should at least be playable on an average system without any serious stability issues, yet there were a few games released this year that sadly failed to hit even that mark.

By far the worst offender this year was Batman: Arkham Knight, the fourth game in a critically acclaimed game series published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment.

Oh, there was nothing wrong with the game itself. Arkham Knight received generally favorable reviews and currently holds an 85/100 and 87/100 rating on Metacritic for the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 versions, respectively. Critics praised Arkham Knight for epic scope, solid voice acting and fun combat.

This makes it all the more disappointing that PC users had to wait roughly a third of a year to play the game due to Arkham Knight’s almost comically bad PC port.

‘Arkham Knight’s’ disappearing act

As soon as Arkham Knight released on June 23, 2015, reports began flooding in from PC users that the game was an unplayable mess, with frequent crashes and graphical glitches, as well as frame rates that dipped into slideshow territory.

In a somewhat surprising move, Warner Bros. decided to pull the game from online PC game stores, like Steam, just days after release, saying that it would work quickly to resolve the game’s many issues.

“We want to apologize to those of you who are experiencing performance issues with Batman: Arkham Knight on PC,” a Warner Bros. representative said at the time. “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.”

Warner Bros. move was somewhat admirable, as it at least recognized that it could not sell the game to fans in such an atrocious state. The publisher’s intentions were made somewhat less admirable when sources speaking to Kotaku claimed that Warner Bros. had been well aware of the problems plaguing the Arkham Knight PC version, and yet it chose to ship the game anyway.

“I will say that it’s pretty rich for [Warner Bros.] to act like they had no idea the game was in such a horrible state,” a source identified as a quality assurance tester on the game told Kotaku. “It’s been like this for months, and all the problems we see now were the exact same, unchanged, almost a year ago.”

Four months pass

It soon became apparent that the scope of Arkham Knight’s problems could not be solved in a matter of days or even weeks. Over the course of several months, Warner Bros. released a small number of interim patches with mixed results, and the game would not return to digital store shelves until October 28, over four months after it had first been pulled.

Unfortunately, even after the game went back on sale, it still suffered from numerous problems, albeit not quite as severe as when it had first been released. At that point, Warner Bros. seemingly threw its hands up over the situation and decided to dole out a few free games to appease fans who were still angered over the whole situation. The publisher announced that anyone who purchased Arkham Knight before November 16 would receive the three previous games in the series for free.

This was good news for people who were jumping into the series for the first time, but for long-time fans, it offered nothing.

As a final apology to the fans who had not already requested a refund for the game but were still dissatisfied with the state of the PC version of Arkham Knight, Warner Bros. announced in November that it would be offering full refunds for anyone who purchased the game before the end of the year.

Epilogue

So what is the state of the game now? The general consensus seems to be “meh.”

One of the most frustrating aspects of Arkham Knight’s problems is that it is almost impossible to predict how the game will perform on a given system. Some players with low-end systems reported that they were able to play the game with few problems, while players with high-end gaming rigs found it to still be unplayable.

Since the game returned to Steam, the user ratings for Arkham Knight dipped into the “Mixed” category, with many reviewers still complaining of stability issues.

Image courtesy of Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment