“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,” a quality assurance tester who had worked on Batman: Arkham Knight and its troubled PC port “for years” 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.”
The quality of the PC release of Rocksteady’s latest (critically lauded) Batman installment was immediately called into question, culminating in its removal from the Steam marketplace just a day later. At the time, publisher Warner Bros. released a statement which read, in part:
We want to apologize 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.
But a report citing multiple anonymous sources on the project would indicate that the state of the PC release was no surprise to the publisher, which had overseen performance issues in the game for some time, across platforms, ultimately resulting in the game’s delay from October 2014 to June 2015 (and again to late June 2015).
“Getting it to work on consoles was impossible for months,” the source said. “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.”
They added, “We reported literally thousands of bugs that were specific to the PC version relating to the frame rate. All sorts of fucked up texture issues. The Batmobile in particular has always fucked things up on PC.”
The issues with testing Arkham Knight included the usual scope of an open-world game, coupled with the unfamiliarity of new console hardware, an unusually aggressive approach to secrecy that limited the game’s exposure to third-party testing firms, and a primary developer focused on consoles first.
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