Batman just can't seem to catch a break. After the great Arkham Knight Gong Show of '15, Telltale rolled the first part of its episodic Batman adventure out the door yesterday, and it turned out to be similarly clunky. The situation is slightly better than it was this morning, but even many of the positive reviews on Steam contain qualifiers about technical struggles.
Hopefully, things will be better in the wake of the just-released PC performance patch. Telltale said in the patch notes that many of the complaints arose from players trying to run the game on an integrated graphics card rather than a dedicated GPU, or because of out-of-date video drivers. Thus, the update makes two changes: Batman will now default to running on dedicated rather than integrated GPUs (assuming you have both, I suppose), and a new graphics setting will give players the option of selecting either “higher performance” or “higher quality” textures. Telltale also urged everyone to ensure that their drivers are up to date.
We reviewed the first part of Batman: The Telltale Series and found it to be pretty okay: “An enjoyable, routine introductory episode to what might be a unique Batman story, framed in Telltale’s dependable, but tired quicktime-dialogue framework,” as James put it. Given the “more-of-the-same” ring to that summation, it's a little surprising that Telltale wouldn't have the technical side of the equation nailed down pretty tightly by now.
Telltale said it “will continue to investigate any performance reports as they appear,” and update accordingly.
