Just show's the contempt the studio has towards its customers...
There's some interesting points in here, especially regarding big studios outsourcing the PC ports to smaller studios.
“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,” said one quality assurance tester who worked on the game for years. “It’s been like this for months and all the problems we see now were the exact same, unchanged, almost a year ago.”
Two sources, requesting anonymity to avoid jeopardizing their careers, spoke with Kotaku over the past week in hopes of explaining how the broken PC version of Arkham Knight made it out the door. They both said that Warner Bros. was aware of the many issues facing Arkham Knight on PC and that the publisher chose to ship the game regardless, not to maniacally screw over customers—but because they believed it was good enough.
Warner Bros. did not return my multiple requests for comment.
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“Getting it to work on consoles was impossible for months,” said our tester source. “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.”
Another source, who did not work on the QA team but was close to the game’s production, said this closely lined up with what they’d seen and heard throughout the game’s development.
In various meetings, QA teams were told the new consoles were “not nearly as easy to work with as [Rocksteady] expected” and testers should focus time on finding console bugs. This particular team was made up of roughly 100 people, with about 10% focused on the PC version.
“We reported literally thousands of bugs that were specific to the PC version relating to the frame rate,” said our QA source. “All sorts of fucked up texture issues. The Batmobile in particular has always fucked things up on PC.”
Arkham Knight is the most sprawling game from Rocksteady yet, in addition to it being their first game on new consoles, so the open world understandably made the bug count stack up.
“Testing a game this big is very different from linear or smaller games,” our source continued. “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.”
Our second source said Warner Bros. internal QA focused on bug-checking specifically at 720p resolutions. Most PC players with decent hardware expect to run games at 1080p or higher. If Warner Bros. was using 720p at as a benchmark, that helps explain the large performance gap.
One unexpected problem? The game’s secretive story. Rocksteady was deeply afraid of plot revelations being leaked ahead of release, said the same source, so traditional PC testing firms that are used to stress test games on different hardware configurations—one of the PC’s biggest hurdles—were avoided. From what I’m told, this is not an uncommon practice for major video games with story-heavy elements.
The PC is a complicated platform, but Warner Bros. has a troubled recent history when it comes to the PC, one that suggests the platform is not always a priority for the company.
When Batman: Arkham Origins shipped in October 2013, the PC version was praised for looking better than its console counterparts, but reviewers had to hold back. PC Invasion, for example, knocked the game down to a 5/10, largely due to the game-breaking glitches:
“Let’s see. One of the Enigma Towers (which unlock fast-travel points and are fairly essential to one of the major subquests in the single-player game) is actually impossible to complete on PC. I got stuck on two smaller subquests because the game wouldn’t let me interrogate the people I needed to interrogate. I had to restart one section of the critical story path twice – first because a bug prevented me from opening a door, and then because a bug prevented me from getting off a zipline. I had to restart another subquest when the event that was supposed to finish it didn’t trigger. Another subquest broke because I restarted it, forcing me to quit out and load from the start of the section. And the multiplayer? Well, that hard locked for me every two or three rounds, and the game reset my progression – remove all of my unlocks, weapons, and abilities – every time I restarted it. I’ve pretty much given up on it now.”
In the case of Arkham Origins, however, the PC version wasn’t alone. Console players were dealing with all sorts of bugs, too. Frankly, the game was a total mess for a little while there.At one point, Warner Bros. issued a public statement that it would not be fixing anything but progression glitches, instead focusing on the game’s downloadable content. Take a quick look at the ensuing thread on the game’s official message boards to see how that news went over.
Some egregious glitches were never addressed on the PC, though helpful players on Steam continue to work with frustrated fans hoping to keep playing. One person will actually take a look at your save file and hack you out of a glitched room.
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“It’s usually an external studio that gets hired to do the PC version,” the source continued. “A lot of these ‘port houses’ tend to over-promise and under-bid to get the job. I think the way port-houses work is a pretty under-exposed part of the industry. They do the dirty work for AAA studios, sometimes with the goal of funding their own original game. A lot of times, they can really struggle to break out.”
And this brings us back to Arkham Knight, which was released on the PC and pulled down from various storefronts in less than a week. What went wrong?
During Arkham Knight’s development, two sources told me Rocksteady Games was having a tough time getting performance up to snuff.
When the game was shown to press at the Game Developers Conference in 2014, it was freezing and hitching all over the place. It’s unclear which version of the game was being shown to press, but it underscored the technical hurdles facing the game behind-the-scenes.
The game had originally been scheduled for release in October 2014, but was delayed because “it couldn’t be done in the time we had,” according to the developer.
Here’s what Kotaku editor Stephen Totilo wrote when the game was pushed back:
We at Kotaku first saw Arkham Knight running in March. The game is set in a big open-world swath of Gotham City. The game’s creators, playing on a PC build, appeared to be able to glide and drive through large sections of it at will. There were framerate hitches, which is common in unfinished games. Those seemed to be getting resolved when we saw the game again in May. But Rocksteady apparently needs more time.
Eight months later, the game finally shipped, but it feels like the proper PC version is still a ways off.There’s a pattern with Warner Bros.’ approach to the PC, but one hardly exclusive to the publisher of Arkham Knight. When the PC is made a core development platform by the people crafting the other versions, those versions have turned out much better. When the PC version is handed to another developer who’s unfamiliar with the code, it’s turned out much worse. That’s not to say great ports can’t be handled by external developers, but the process requires additional care.
Mistakes happen, obviously, and no game is perfect or bug-free—they’re just too complicated. But the video game industry has a poor record of shipping broken games lately, and Arkham Knight on PC is simply the latest piece of evidence. Sure, sales have been halted for the time being, but that doesn’t excuse Warner Bros.’ decision to sell this game for $60 in the first place.