‘Batman: Arkham Knight’ Buggy PC Port Handled By Console Developer, Not Rocksteady
The launch of Batman: Arkham Knight can only be qualified as a hot mess for PC gamers. The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One releases of the superhero title have gone relatively smoothly. Could that be because Rocksteady developed the console versions itself, and outsourced the PC version to a studio better known for its console game work?
PC gamers quickly discovered that Batman: Arkham Knight has wildly varying frame rates, texture loading issues, and other problems, even on high end machines with the latest high-end Nvidia graphics cards. Gaming rigs with AMD-based graphics cards have fared even worse, as Arkham Knight is apparently the latest victim in the war between the two graphics card manufacturers.
The Steam reviews for Arkham Knight can only be described as brutal. There are currently over 4,000 user reviews, and they are “mostly negative,” as one user after another reports on performance issues.
Rocksteady acknowledged the problems with the PC version of the latest Batman title in a post in the game’s community forums.
“We’re aware that some users are reporting performance issues with the PC version of Batman: Arkham Knight,” Rocksteady wrote. “This is something that Rocksteady takes very seriously. We are working closely with our external PC development partner to make sure these issues get resolved as quickly as possible.”
This was the first official confirmation from either Rocksteady or Warner Bros. Interactive that the PC port for Batman: Arkham Knight was handled by another studio. The PlayStation 4 was the lead development platform for the game, and Rocksteady did the Xbox One version, as well.
Utilizing another studio to port a game or help with development is not unheard of. It was done with Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, and is being done with Black Ops III this year. The odd part is that the porting duties were given to Iron Galaxy Studios, as Kitguru discovered in the game’s credits. This is a studio that has a stronger history handling console games than PC.
Iron Galaxy is known for providing support work and ports for various games. It helped with the Borderlands: The Handsome Collection for the Xbox One and PlayStation 4. It stepped in to do the second season of Killer Instinct after the original developer was purchased by Amazon, and did a solid job upgrading the graphics and adding new characters. It also worked on the PlayStation 3 port of Destiny with Bungie.
The last PC port that Iron Galaxy worked on was Batman: Arkham Origins. Ironically enough, that game was also hammered in reviews due to a buggy launch.
Stay tuned as we see how fast Rocksteady and Iron Galaxy can get a patch out to fix the performance problems with Batman: Arkham Knight.
[Images via Batman: Arkham Knight, Kitguru]
