Arkham Knight returns to Steam, still broken

Months after it was pulled from stores, the PC version of Batman: Arkham Knight is back on Steam. The good news? It’s not as badly broken. The bad news? It’s still broken.

Gamers took to Reddit to complain that the game still had numerous performance issues. Notably high memory usage, frame rate stutters, and lag when using graphics cards in SLI or Crossfire.

Warner Bros. issued a statement on the game’s Steam community page acknowledging there are still problems.

“We are still working with our GPU partners to add full support for SLI and Crossfire. In addition, we are working with these partners to address stability issues on certain cards related to the latest drivers.

After extensive testing, a hard drive paging issue with some GPUs on Windows 7 may occur after extended gameplay sessions. If you encounter this, simply re-launching the game will resolve the issue.

For Windows 10 users, we’ve found that having at least 12GB of system RAM on a PC allows the game to operate without paging and provides a smoother gameplay experience.”

The PC version of Arkham Knight was originally pulled from stores back in June after gamers complained about significant performance issues even on top-end hardware. Basically rendering the game unplayable for a lot of people.

A substantial patch was released in September, prior to it being put back for sale this week. According to Eurogamer, no further improvements have been made to the game in the month since that patch was released.

Warner Bros. is currently offering free copies of other games in the Arkham franchise as compensation.

Editor’s Notes

It seems that Iron Galaxy, the developer behind this sloppy port, has simply decided to dump the entire game into memory. This would explain why it needs so much RAM. It’s a down and dirty way to speed up performance without having to optimize a ton of code. Though I have also heard that the 12GB requirement could be due to memory leaks, another hallmark of sloppy porting.

The fact that Warner Bros. has released the game twice in a broken state is shameful, to say the least. This is precisely why so many gaming pundits are strongly opposed to pre-order culture. It just gives free license for publishers to shovel shit on consumers, hoping they’ll go away. This unethical behaviour isn’t tolerated in other industries. Why are video games any different?