First Patch of PC's Batman: Arkham Knight Corrects Several Issues

Fortunately, we have some good news for PC gamers attempting to enjoy Batman: Arkham Knight. But first, a history lesson:

When Batman: Arkham Knight released earlier this week, once-excited fans soon turned to reviews to express their justified, livid reactions. People complained of many performance issues, ranging from stuttering, poor frame rates to infuriating crashes, rendering the game unplayable.

The complaints have thus caused Rocksteady's game to be torn down from shelves and digital distributors temporarily. Yesterday, the first patch to address these problems has been released, complete with notes.

To apologize and update on the current state of Arkham Knight, Yorick, Community Administrator of Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, issued a statement alongside the notes on the official forums:
 

"Rocksteady is leading our team of developers and partners as we work on the PC performance issues that players that 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."

Those involved with Arkham Knight have been working non-stop to correct these issues, beginning with the first PC patch, which addresses problems like missing rain effects and a few bugs. Here is the full list of patch notes for your reading pleasure:

• 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.

Additionally, the admin has announced that the team is currently working on these key areas:

• Support for frame rates above 30 FPS 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.

Fans seem to have calmed somewhat -- at least on the forums -- providing the developers with much-needed candor and support. Let's hope that all the issues will be fixed soon enough.

(Update - Added Pocru's take on this:

Basically, the [overall] problem stems from the fact that 1) The game was designed by Rocksteady for consoles, and merely ported onto the PC, and 2) a third party, IronGalaxy, was responsible for the porting process, and either their incompetence or lack of familiarity, they didn’t do a good job of it.

These fixes are coming out slowly, so current owners will get their game a little more playable with each passing patch, but when it reaches a state where it can be both played and enjoyed well… we may be a ways off. It makes me wonder if Warner Brothers has any plans to compensate the people who were trusting enough to actually pre-order the game on Steam….

Regardless, there’s a lesson here: Warner Brothers is very bad at porting PC games. If memory serves this is only the latest in a pretty long list of PC game quibbles, although this is easily the most severe. Either way, look on the bright side—this just means there will be even more mods waiting for you by the time you finally get to play the game!)