Listen Batman, we need to talk. On June 23rd, I was as excited as anyone. Gotham City was looking pretty bad, and I was certain that you’d be the one to take care of things.
Unfortunately, things didn’t go as planned. It’s been four months since we’ve last spoken, and the bat signal is going to need replacing.
This article was intended to explore Arkham Knight‘s performance after relaunch. Before Breitbart Tech, I was just another gamer, and a huge fan of most anything that featured the Dark Knight. Rocksteady had managed to capture the very essence of being the caped crusader in Arkham Asylum and Arkham City, and their final Batman simulator was touted as their magnum opus. Things didn’t quite work out that way.
The day after its intended launch on PC, the game’s sales were suspended. A litany of patches and not-quite-apologies later, fans became bitter. By the time we reached the recent October 28th relaunch, the reception was bound to be polarizing.
For most people, Arkham Knight was already a lost cause. There are no shortages of other holiday releases competing for their time and money, and the residual frustration from Warner Bros. and Rocksteady’s lack of meaningful support has jaded most of the few remaining fans of the franchise.
The last of the faithful were excited to finally get a chance to enjoy the culmination of a series to which many of them had been devoted. Many of these had championed the attempts at repairing the game and were waiting for the patch’s final application with baited breath.
It was time for Arkham Knight‘s — and even moreso its developer’s — redemption. A long standing drama was about to be laid to rest, and WBIE had managed to squeak through without throwing its unhappy consumers a single bone for their trouble.
Nope.
Somehow, Arkham Knight is still a broken mess. At first, I was skeptical. The internet knows how to hold a grudge, and perhaps the flood of reports about the game’s continued crippling problems were so much hyperbole. Perhaps the community patch that many people had applied was somehow interfering, and all we needed to do was untangle the mass of temporary fixes in order to finally enjoy the port that Iron Galaxy so thoroughly butchered.
I decided to see for myself. Turns out, the complaints had — at least at the time — understated the problem. A couple of the most common examples had been “addressed” through Steam. If you’re playing on Windows 7, you just needed to constantly restart the game in order to prevent it from bringing your system to a screeching halt. If you’d upgraded to Windows 10, you just needed a whopping 12GB of RAM to keep your hardware from melting into a bat-shaped puddle.
I’ve well surpassed the requirements to run the game on Windows 10, so I was anticipating the chance to judge the game even outside of those rather egregious technical issues. Unfortunately, the problem handed me was far simpler. The game just doesn’t start. A few moments after launch, and before the WB logo can so much as taunt me, I’m informed that the game has simply stopped responding.
I’ve waded through every adjustment or fix available, from the simple to the elaborate. Even a fresh resintall came with the same problem. With no solution readily available, I’m frankly growing weary of retreading the exhaustive list of things wrong with this game. From now on, maybe it’s best that we assume that even a Gotham overrun by terrorists and thugs is still cleaner and more polished than Batman’s latest outing.
WBIE isn’t feeling this one. The money they needed from the release is already in-pocket, courtesy of an aggressive presale campaign. By proffering our wallets months in advance of the title’s release, we as a gaming community have created a scenario in which they simply cannot lose. To paraphrase Lt. James Gordon of the Gotham City Police Department, perhaps WBIE is the publisher we deserve; it’s just not the one we need right now.
Follow Nate Church on Twitter @Get2Church.
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