You know who'd be livid at the shoddy PC version of Arkham Knight? Batman. He'd glide across the city to Warner Bros HQ, and beat up enough goons on a rainy rooftop to make them rethink their ways. Not to denigrate Bats' approach, but I don't think that's necessary this time: a gajillion negative Steam reviews have done the job just as well. Pretty much everyone involved with Arkham Knight is currently "working like crazy" to fix it, and their efforts are starting to bear fruit.
The first patch for Batman: Arkham Knight's PC version has arrived, and it's said to fix a few issues including the missing rain effects and ambient occlusion. The patch notes:
- Fixed a crash that was happening for some users when exiting the game
- Fixed a bug which disabled rain effects and ambient occlusion. We are actively looking into fixing other bugs to improve this further
- Corrected an issue that was causing Steam to re-download the game when verifying the integrity of the game cache through the Steam client
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash when turning off Motion Blur in BmSystemSettings.ini. A future patch will enable this in the graphics settings menu
Moreover, Warner Bros' Gary Lake-Schaal has posted on Steam to announce the "key areas" that are being worked on to fix the game. Those areas:
- Support for frame rates above 30FPS in the graphics settings menu
- Fix for low resolution texture bug
- Improve overall performance and framerate hitches
- Add more options to the graphics settings menu
- Improvements to hard drive streaming and hitches
- Address full screen rendering bug on gaming laptops
- Improvements to system memory and VRAM usage
- NVIDIA SLI bug fixes
- Enabling AMD Crossfire
- NVIDIA and AMD updated drivers
"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."
"While we work on improving performance, we will also continue to make interim patches available to address issues for those still playing the game on PC."
"We would like to thank our fans for their patience and invaluable feedback. We will continue to monitor and listen for any additional issues."
Cheers, PCGamesN.
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Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.