Warner Bros 'Knew' About Batman: Arkham Knight PC Issues from the Beginning

Rocksteady's latest Batman title in its Arkham series – Batman: Arkham Knight – is one of the top games released this year. While the game's console versions are doing good, the PC version has been plagued with several issues, so much so that its sales were suspended by the publisher.

Now, it seems the twist in the plot is far deeper than was originally thought.

Warner Bros. knew that Rocksteady's latest Batman title (PC version) would suffer from several issues on its official release, suggests a report.

The report that is bound to leave PC gamers fuming came out in public domain, thanks to Kotaku.

Several insiders, including a few quality assurance testers, told Kotaku that the PC version of the game was never ready in the first place, but was pushed out nonetheless.

"It's pretty rich for WB to act like they had no idea the game was in such a horrible state," said one such tester of the PC port, which was later pulled out from sales counters.

"It's been like this for months and all the problems we see now were the exact same, unchanged, almost a year ago," the tester added.

Another tester had a similar revelation to make.

"Getting it to work on consoles was impossible for months. 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."

According to Kotaku's sources, the PS4 and Xbox One versions of the game were harder to work with than Rocksteady had thought of initially. So, out of about 100 QA testers, only 10 were deployed to work on the PC port for Batman: Arkham Knight.

Another source close to the project said that the bug-checking for the game was done at 720p resolutions, so it performed better than when it was being played on higher resolutions that most players like to set it to.

"We had some testers bugging more than 100 bugs per day," said another Kotaku source. 

"Devs would fix what they could but they were juggling that with actually finishing the game so they were insanely slow," he said.

"Only when the game was done and no new features had to be built could they actually buckle down. Once that happens they also restrict what you can or can't bug, to ensure that they can catch up," he added.

Apart from that, it was even reported that Warner Bros. had decided against employing third-party PC testing firms, which specialise in scrutinizing games across a wide range of rigs, because the publisher was afraid that the game's storyline and details could be leaked. 

"Testing a game this big is very different from linear or smaller games," Kotaku's source continued, and added: "You usually get a mission, chapter or area of the map, or pick one yourself, and just go to town. You bug everything you see. We had some testers bugging more than 100 bugs per day."

"Devs would fix what they could but they were juggling that with actually finishing the game so they were insanely slow. Only when the game was done and no new features had to be built could they actually buckle down. Once that happens they also restrict what you can or can't bug, to ensure that they can catch up," the source said.

In case you are wondering if this is the first time a Batman game was shipped with a crumbling PC port, please recall Batman: Arkham Origins, ported by Divekick developer Iron Galaxy Studios, also suffered a similar buggy launch.

As of now, Warner Bros. is yet to comment on the allegations regarding the suffering PC port of the game.

Stay tuned for more updates!

[Source: Kotaku, Eurogamer]