Batman Arkham Knight is not enjoying a good launch on the PC. In fact, the launch is so bad, it puts to mind the launches of Assassin’s Creed: Unity and Aliens: Colonial Marines.
The game uses the notorious DRM Denuvo (on top of Steam) and appears to be horribly unoptimised, with people reporting that not even a 980Ti can maintain playable framerates on even High, with numerous issues with SLI and Crossfire support (Crossfire is disabled in AMD’s Game Ready Driver, and SLI actually reduces framerate with Nvidia). Reports of stuttering and audio glitches are also numerous. There also appears to be a memory leak in the game, which causes the application to bloat to about 15GBs on RAM before crashing.
It’s also locked to 30FPS.
And AMD cards are even worse off, as even the official system requirements list the HD 7000 series flagship card, the Radeon HD 7970 as the minimum requirement. this basically means that the game is unplayable on low and mid range cards
The issues may be there because WB licensed the PC port to Iron Galaxy Studios, the people behind the Borderlands 2 PSVita port. There are also speculations that Denuvo causes the issues, as it has done so in the past.
Meanwhile, the Steam Storefront for Arkham Knight shows the fallout, with negative reviews pushing the game into the “Mostly Negative” category.
WB has responded to the concerns by saying that they’re working on it.
The launch puts the pre-order deals on retailers other than Steam (who do not have a return policy) in a sinister new light.
UPDATE: Rocksteady apologized to fans and is recommending claiming a refund on Steam in a generous turn of events. They also have suspended further sales until the game is fixed. Green Man Gaming is also offering refunds for the game now.
