It's safe to say that the PC launch of Batman: Arkham Knight has been a bit of a shambles, to the point that Warner Bros suspended sales due to performance problems. Developer Rocksteady Games has since been working to resolve the issues, with the first of what may be many fixes having been rolled out.
However, the patch that's now available on Steam is very much a first step, only addressing some of the minor faults users have experienced. It's largely centred on the visual elements of the game, killing a bug that disabled ambient occlusion and rain effects, while preventing a few causes of crashes.
For those players who have been able to get the game to run, the visual upgrade will be welcome. The lighting and texturing effects that should now work have the potential to make Arkham Knight look better than the PS4 version, currently the best looking way to play the game. The patch also addresses an error that caused Steam to re-download the entirety of the game if you attempted to verify the integrity of the game cache.
Fans may be waiting a while for the major fixes to be pushed through though. The update, posted by Warner Bros Interactive's vice-president of game technology Gary Lake-Schaal, leads with this: "Rocksteady is leading our team of developers and partners as we work on the PC performance issues that players have been encountering. The work is significant and while we are making good progress on improving performance, it will take some time to ensure that we get the right fixes in place."
Remaining work includes adding support for frame rates above 30fps (the fact that a PC game was capped to this was cause for contention even before the wider problems revealed themselves); fixing bugs causing low resolution textures in general and full screen rendering issues on gaming laptops; improving overall performance, including hard drive streaming, system memory and VRAM usage; and making more graphics options available to the players in the settings menu, rather than forcing them to make edits to .ini settings. Better support for AMD graphics cards and fixing a handful of issues with Nvidia ones is also on the agenda.
Sadly, there's no time-frame given for the remaining fixes, leaving those still suffering major problems with Arkham Knight unable to play the final game in the trilogy. Warner Bros says, at least, "we would like to thank our fans for their patience and invaluable feedback. We will continue to monitor and listen for any additional issues".
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
