So Batman: Arkham Knight, not the best of starts by any means.
Then things go from bad to worse, after the game was pulled from digital and physical sale days after its PC release reports are starting to come to the news surface that WB Interactive apparently knew about the bad shape the game was in and decided to ship it anyway, as it was ‘Good enough’
That statement defiantly doesn’t fill me with confidence.
Two sources, 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 manically screw over customers—but because they believed it was good enough.
” 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 an anonymous QA tester.
“It’s been like this for months and all the problems we see now were the exact same, unchanged, almost a year ago”
Originally set to release in October 2014 but pushed back to June 2015 because of how hard it was to get the game to work on consoles, claiming it was ‘Impossible for months’
QA testers were told to focus on console bugs, this team was made up of 100 people with 10 percent working on the PC version.
“We reported literally thousands of bugs that were specific to the PC version relating to the frame rate, All sorts of f****d up texture issues. The Batmobile in particular has always f****d things up on PC.”
Then there’s the scale of the game compared to the 360/PS3 titles and the new architecture to work with.
“Testing a game this big is very different from linear or smaller games, 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.”
For the rest of the details looking into Warner Bros murky past when it comes to PC releases head over to Kotaku to read the rest of the article, A very interesting read which goes into a lot of depth about some of the hurdles you have to pass when keeping a game’s story secret whilst trying to stress test a game.
As always keep it locked on The Nerd Stash for your daily dose of nerd news and any updates that might happen in this mystery Bruce Wayne himself couldn’t solve.
Has this effect you directly?
Have you got your money refunded back?
My PS4 version runs like a charm! Smug Caleb.
