Roderick

Batmazement: Knightly Man Bruce

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Holy shit, it's pulling a 70 percent negative reviews on Steam.  Seems like a lot of them are because of framerate and poor performance. 

 

Yeah. I'd probably be more bothered by it if I had payed out of pocket rather than having the cost bundled in with the card. I was ready to chalk it up to my outdated processor, but given the widespread issues, and how smoothly my PC runs The Witcher 3 (I know, one game's performance doesn't necessarily indicate how another will do with the same hardware) it seems like it is relatively messed up.

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http://www.polygon.com/2015/6/23/8831325/batman-arkham-knight-pc-issues

 

It's crazy that a game can be so poorly optimized for PC when consoles are so close to PC architectures these days.

 

Anyway, I watched the GB quicklook and prettyunsmart's assessment of another Batman + tank sounds pretty accurate. Not that that's a bad thing. I'll probably pick this up once I get through my current backlog i.e. sometime in 2017.

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Will probably pick this up on PS4 at some point but I'm interested to see what happens with the PC version. This could be the first big title to have a mass of players requesting refunds on Steam if it is as bad as it sounds.

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The only thing dumber than this being such a bad release (why do WB think they can get away with it) is the general tendency to never edit a Steam review. People are still gonna be parroting issues with this game at release in six months time, sadly.

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Downloaded it last night. I'm going to give it the ol' Gefore Experience and see how it handles for me. Like prettyunsmart, I also got an included copy when I bought a new graphics card.

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My recommendation, as gross as it is, is to leave the default 30fps cap on (it's not even surfaced in menus, anyway, you have to edit an ini file to unlock it). The performance is just way too up and down if you try to run it at 60. I love me some 60fps, but I'd rather have a (somewhat) stable 30 than a constantly fluctuating 40-60.

 

I say somewhat because it still stutters or lags like a motherfucker at some points. Also PhysX fog/smoke seems to kill performance, which is a shame because I quite like the look.

 

Additionally you need to tweak the ini file to raise the Anisotropic filtering from 4 to 16, for some reason, and as far as I know there's no way to fix the problems with textures at the moment. Sometimes high res textures will just not load and you'll end up staring at an incredibly low res version of a wall/box/whatever. Much like Unreal Engine pop in problems, except it never pops in. This was especially egregious for me when a main character showed up for the first time in low res form and I could only tell who it was because of the voice.

 

Additionally, don't believe the benchmarking tool. It's not representative of gameplay performance. Which makes it pretty useless as a benchmark.

 

All of this is a real bummer because the game itself seems good! I think Iron Galaxy really shit the bed on the PC port.

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I found that rolling back my graphics card drivers to the previous version actually helped stability a lot. I haven't even thought about trying to unlock the framerate, but at least it seems pretty stable now, with some occasional inexplicable dips in quality.

 

In terms of gameplay, I'm having a ton of fun with it. It's been just long enough since Arkham City that I'm just generally enjoying doing Batman things. I'm also really liking the ways that they've switched up investigations. You'll have to wander a crime scene while watching an AR projection of a car crash to try to figure out what happened, or review CCTV footage to figure out where you can pick up finger prints.

 

I am disappointed in some of the story stuff.

 

Spoilers for about halfway through the main story:

When you're doing missions for the Riddler, your goal is to rescue Catwoman by doing a series of challenges, sometimes by yourself, and sometimes working in tandem with her. She even makes an throwaway remark about being "just your motivation." That made it all the more disappointing when the plot leaned on killing Barbara Gordon in front of you to give you motivation. It just feels cheap and lazy at this point.

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I'm pretty surprised to read about the technical issues on PC. Arkham City and Arkham Origins ran quite smoothly on PC if I recall correctly. Did they up the Nvidia CapeWorks or something?

 

What is the preorder bonus / DLC situation? Does it keep reminding you that you are missing a significant portion of the content because you did not preorder?

 

Most importantly for me, how are the boss fights handled? I'm not a big fan of big boss fights but the "exploit the weakness of the boss x3" type of stuff in Arkam Asylum and Origins was fine. The boring boss fights of Arkham Origins (along with general Batman fatigue) was one of the main reasons why I never finished the game.

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As far as I can tell, there's a ton of preorder DLC that I'll never see, but the only references I've seen to it in game come in the form of a flashing banner on the main menu saying "BUY THE SEASON PASS!" and a few skins that are greyed out. I do wish I could use the Adam West Batman skin though...

 

There haven't really been that many boss fights so far. A few large predator rooms, some vehicle fights, and a number of extended chase sequences, but no "we're trapped in a small room and this other guy has a giant health bar" kind of things as far as I remember.

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Have they improved the stealth sections at all? I thought they were okay in the first game, but after two more identical games I'm sick of them. I don't find them interesting to play at all.

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The game ran really smoothly up until I jumped out of the batmobile for the first time, at which point it became a juddering mess. Not a positive experience, though I did manage to put in like half an hour.

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Have they improved the stealth sections at all? I thought they were okay in the first game, but after two more identical games I'm sick of them. I don't find them interesting to play at all.

 

Do you mean the parts where you've got a room full of guys with guns and you need to take them out while hanging from a series of gargoyles? Those parts mostly feel the same, though I quickly threw all of my upgrade points into more armor, so I can mostly blow through them without too much difficulty. 

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The stealth portions were actually my favorite parts of Asylum, its a shame that they were never really developed further after that as seemingly everyone loved the combat system, so that got most of the attention in City. Now you get a car! And that's fine...I guess but I would have loved more iteration of the stealth, which this game doesn't seem to be.

 

Question for anyone playing this: What is the structure of the open world like? In the first two games it was mainly used as a hub for getting to your story missions, which involved you going into a building for a ~1 hour story section. I actually really liked that in Asylum, the story missions felt authored and controlled but they still had the open world for a bit of adventure and side stuff. Does it feel like this or are more sections of the game dependent on going back-and-forth in the open world?

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I think the stealth sections in the Arkham games can be interesting because they give you a lot of ways to handle the situation.  Unfortunately they do a very poor job of encouraging you to do anything other than sneak up behind a guy and slowly choke him out.  I've played City a LOT and I'd often try to use the various methods available to me for taking henchmen down, but the easiest method by far to simply sneak up on them one at a time.

 

I'm hoping that the PC issues will be fixed by the time I can actually play the game.  I preordered it from GMG, who is offering a refund of the game if the issues aren't fixed by the next few patches.

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I think the stealth sections in the Arkham games can be interesting because they give you a lot of ways to handle the situation. Unfortunately they do a very poor job of encouraging you to do anything other than sneak up behind a guy and slowly choke him out. I've played City a LOT and I'd often try to use the various methods available to me for taking henchmen down, but the easiest method by far to simply sneak up on them one at a time.

I'm hoping that the PC issues will be fixed by the time I can actually play the game. I preordered it from GMG, who is offering a refund of the game if the issues aren't fixed by the next few patches.

Interesting. Who decides if they are fixed?

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There are a few additions to the predator sections ("stealth"), mostly just to make it slightly less about just gliding behind each person in turn and doing a stealth takedown:

 

There are now multi-target "fear" takedowns. If you can get 3+ people (depending on upgrades) in the same area, you can do a fast (but noisy) takedown of all of them more or less at once. After you've done this it needs to be "recharged" by doing a traditional stealth takedown, à la Splinter Cell's tag & execute ability.

 

Some groups of enemies now include a medic, who will revive unconscious enemies when they come across them.

 

Enemies will now gradually set up more fixed defences as they get more worried, like mines and turrets.

 

It wouldn't shock me if there are a couple more tweaks that are revealed as I go through the game, but I'm not exactly spending a lot of time on it at the moment due to some of the more egregious technical problems. Honestly if I could just get the textures working right I might just hack my way around/deal with the rest, but with half of the textures in the game just never loading in anything higher than the default melted plastic render I can barely tell what some objects/people are meant to be.

 

I'm pretty surprised to read about the technical issues on PC. Arkham City and Arkham Origins ran quite smoothly on PC if I recall correctly. Did they up the Nvidia CapeWorks or something?

 

The PC port on this occasion was done by Iron Galaxy. Favourites of Giant Bomb they may be, and DiveKick is a funny game, but it seems these things do not automatically translate into high level technical chops.

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Interesting. Who decides if they are fixed?

 

I'm not really sure.  The blog post says

 

if after the fix has been released, you still cannot play your game, we will process refund requests for the game

 

 

I am somewhat amused by WB's recommendations for getting the game to work better.  It pretty much amounts to "go to the settings and turn everything off, use an SSD".

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The PC port on this occasion was done by Iron Galaxy. Favourites of Giant Bomb they may be, and DiveKick is a funny game, but it seems these things do not automatically translate into high level technical chops.

 

Hmm.. seems to me they have worked on several PC ports including Arkham Origins and Bioshock Infinite. 

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Hmm.. seems to me they have worked on several PC ports including Arkham Origins and Bioshock Infinite.

 

Both of which were noted to have a number of issues at launch. Arkham Origins was so buggy that the main developer eventually simply stopped patching it in favour of making DLC - how much of this rests on Iron Galaxy is just less obvious because 1) the other platforms were also kind of a mess, 2) the game in general was not as good and 3) the main developer was not Rocksteady, so there was no track record of well made games to compare departments to.

 

Bioshock Infinite, meanwhile, had a number of stuttering and performance problems on PC that were eventually fixed, but until then the developer was making recommendations to do hacky shit like increasing PoolSize.

 

I'm not categorically saying this is all Dave Lang's fault (though, you know, I wouldn't rule it out with that guy), but there is a tendency for ports done out-of-house to be a bit dodgier, and this is a lot dodgier.

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Rocksteady suspended Steam sales (it says PC sales, but this is the Steam message) of Arkham Knight.

 

http://steamcommunity.com/games/208650/announcements/detail/145587678167685991

 

http://www.giantbomb.com/articles/warner-bros-suspends-pc-sales-of-batman-arkham-kni/1100-5229/

 

I wonder if I would be able to get a refund for this, considering I redeemed a code rather than directly purchasing the game.

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If you're talking about a Steam refund... no, you can't get one.

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I'm incredibly unwilling to lay any blame at Iron Galaxy's feet considering I honestly think that there's no way to know what their technical chops are (correlation is not causation) and it's ultimately the publisher's call when to publish a game. With situations like this, I can't help but think that the history of delaying PC releases of games past the console releases is more to do with the fact that often third-party studios do that port and need more time than laziness or devs/pubs specifically hating the PC version.

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It's crazy how they allowed this game to ship on PC in it's current state. I honestly thought that the new consoles having x86 architechture would make things better for PC, but it seems that this wasn't the main problem with bad ports we had last generation.

Anyway, my PS4 copy arrives today, can't wait to try it. Loved Arkham Asylum but disliked Arkham City, let's if I enjoy this one more even considering it's open world nature.

All I know is that the water seems to look terrific in this game:

i6aA5G9.gif

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It's weird too because unlike, say, Assassin's Creed, it's not like they were pushing up against the holiday release window or anything. Just hold the PC release a bit longer! Certainly less of a PR disaster than this turned out to be. Maybe the fact that it was bundled in with those graphics cards added some pressure to get it out the door soon? Somewhere in the corporate chain was a guy who knew it ran like shit and said "ship it" and I just wanna know what why (and probably never will).

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