Batman: Arkham Knight - Discussion Thread

psyph3r said:
I know it doesn't make a difference and I saw that post earlier, I was just highlighting how bad it gets each day.
So much for PC "Master" Race, treated worse than peasants by publishers now. Game runs amazingly well on the PS4 so kudos to Rocksteady, not so much for Iron Galaxy whoever the hell that is.
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There is nothing about the PS4 version to write home about either. It also runs at 30 FPS maybe minus the stability issues. At its core, this game still uses the 11 year old UE3 game engine that was released even before XBOX 360 and PS3 and has seen about 8~10 generations of graphics cards. It is the same engine on which the previous titles were also based on and have no problem running at 60 FPS.

So what if its supposed to have better eye candy, there simply is no excuse for it being locked down to 30 FPS in 2015 on current gen consoles and PC. In addition, from what I read, the texture quality is supposedly not that great on any of the platforms.

Witcher 3 had its fair share of issues on launch, but it was optimized and polished so well. Somebody posted on reddit about how he was able to play the game at 30 FPS with a decent amount of eye candy on a refurbished PC containing a 7 generations old CPU and a second hand Radeon 7770 GPU all of which cost him $220. That is the kind of hardware that you should be satisfied playing at 30FPS.
 
Hmm no, I saw it on the PS4 at work today at it looked great and ran well. Maybe you should get a hands-on experience, that 30fps thing isn't much of a problem there.
It might be an old engine but it goes through multiple updates through it's lifespan so the current one requires more grunt than the one running 10 years back.
 
Wow. Didn't see that coming. Points to Rocksteady, hope they fix it themselves this time. As for Warner Brothers, I hope this is a lesson learnt.
 
psyph3r said:
Hmm no, I saw it on the PS4 at work today at it looked great and ran well. Maybe you should get a hands-on experience, that 30fps thing isn't much of a problem there.
It might be an old engine but it goes through multiple updates through it's lifespan so the current one requires more grunt than the one running 10 years back.
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Well, I have been playing UE3 engine games on 4 different generations of cards (Radeon 1900XT, HD4850, HD6950 and GTX980) and never have I come across a game that ran at less than 55 FPS during the life time of the card that I was using at any point of time. UE3 games are usually locked at 60 FPS which is kind of fine.

Of course they will keep adding stuff and maybe even customize the engine across the years, but still, locking the game to 30 FPS for performance and more importantly stability reasons as they are inferring is not acceptable at all.

Maybe, the experience was fine for you, but for a majority of people, its not acceptable. I personally would prefer games that run at 60 FPS and at the worst at an avg of 40 FPS with the FPS never dipping below 35 FPS. For video, 24~30 FPS is perfectly fine, but for games, at a locked 30 FPS, a game can occasionally dip below that mark and even a 2~3 FPS drop at this level would be perceivable to a player in a real time rendered game. I am not sure about the reasons, but a game requires more FPS than video to be perceived as smooth.

What's even worse is that a lot of people are saying that the graphics/texture quality in this game is not that great enough to warrant the compromise in performance.
 
Well that's what you get when you get 12 people to port your game to the pc.
And no, the people who have problem with 30fps are a very vocal minority (on the console at least) which is why devs continue to optimise and lock their titles at 30fps.

DF did a good breakdown on the PS4 version:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/d...am-knight-on-ps4-is-a-technical-tour-de-force

Also, game has now been pulled off steam
http://kotaku.com/warner-bros-says-theyre-suspending-arkham-knight-pc-sal-1713780990
 
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^^ 12 is not actually a bad number. Its the quality of the people that makes the difference.

I know people in India, especially in the IT services sector are used to seeing gazillions of people being assigned to each project or module, but in product development sector, its pretty common to see small teams handling very large projects.

My company uses a third party server software the license for which costs $35k per node and another $35k per year in support. It has a extensible architecture and provides client and server SDKs for C, Java, C# and Java Script. The entirety of this software is developed and maintained by a 12 member team doing the development, testing and developer support.

This game uses the UE3 engine which is a multi platform engine. For all purposes, they will be able to use the same assets and other stuff built for console by rocksteady studios to quickly rebuild the game for PC. It should not even be that much of a job since that is what multi platform engines are for. More importantly, these people will be primarily responsible for the differing features between the PC and consoles like the additional menus and the features that they control, steam integration and the like. As for nVidia gameready features, as we know, they are developed and integrated by nVidia engineers themselves. Writing of the studio because of its head count does not make sense.

As the 30 FPS thing, console experiences were anyway always compromised and low FPS, up-scaling from a lower rendered resolution and lower quality textures and cut off quality features are not uncommon and pure console users may be used to that, but people who are exposed to multi-platform gaming would be more sensitive to such stuff and feel things that amiss
 
That's what has pissed people off, WB makes a ton of money from DLC's and all kinds of nonsense but they still had to outsource it to another studio.
Again you're wrong on the 30fps thing, I've worked as a game tester for 7 years and as a dev tester for 1 and in my experience only 10-15% of people could notice that the fps was below 30 without the presence of a fps counter. On one port project in fact the game was running at a constant 20-24fps and when I called the programmers to my desk, they were like "What's wrong, we don't see a problem", this coming from so called professionals in the industry lol, ofc the game was heavily panned by critics and fans after release. Most people just don't have the eyes to notice the difference i guess.
 
The whole thing is a clusterf**k. Never thought it would outdo AC:Unity's mess but it did, which is quite an achievement in my opinion.
 
I think this is the first game that felt the full wrath of Steam Refunds. It should show the publishers that half assed ports will no longer be accepted.
 
Assassin's Creed Unity shouldn't even be brought in comparison to the performance of this game. Unity ran at 60 frames with everything maxed out on my 970 with Shadows at High and with FXAA. With all the hoopla of the mess it was in the beginning, I spent more than 70 hours with no massive issues, save for some minor glitches. I had virtually no performance issues, erratic stuttering and the game looked bloody gorgeous.

From what I have seen and read on the performance issues of this game, I'm baffled as to how can one even screw up a UE3 based port of this game on PC. It's really disappointing. I don't ever recall a situation where the developer/publisher had to stop the sale of the game and have a revised release date. Just hope future PC developers take this as a serious cue to focus on properly developing their games on PC.
 
That's the thing with PC gaming, the variables are so much that your experiences will differ greatly even when your config is the same.
Maybe you got lucky with AC Unity but a lot of people couldn't play it, for e.g., my friend is currently having a blast with Arkham Knight on his 660Ti and says he hasn't encountered any of the problems being reported, he isn't getting a refund either but we all know that isn't the case for most people.
 
I'm not debating the fact of PC performance being varied across different configurations; it's always been that way. I'm touching upon the fact that a game with an aging engine being botched up by the same people who delivered Arkham Origins which had way more in game graphic options and had a rather smooth performance. This is being compared to AnvilNext engine which is clearly next generation with visuals enhancement that actually justify the performance hit.

Ubisoft has taken a lot of heat for their game performing poorly on PC since Assassin's Creed III (?) but it never escalated to the level where they had to practically stop their products sales. Sure there have been delays and post release blunders, but never to this extent. Imagine Arkham Knight running on 980Ti and dropping frames below 30 at any point. Would that be acceptable?

It's not just that. Removing/reducing crucial effects from the game like Ambient Occlusion, depth of field, particular rain effects interaction etc. and retaining them on the console front; it's ridiculous. Unity did have glitches, no doubt, but nothing which entirely broke the game and/or the end product. It did become a face of mockery for a while, but in this age of meme filled Internet hatred, what game doesn't.

Stopping a product's sale is a major concern. Warner Brothers had some serious balls to pull off this move and it's really a major step in the right direction (hopefully).
 
Like jc already mentioned it's the effect of Steam refunds, In the case of AC:U people were just stuck with a broken game in their library, hoping to get a patch soon.
Now they took such a big sales hit that they had no option but to pull it off Steam and shelves altogether, in the end it's a win for PC gaming and hopefully no one throws out a shoddy port again.
 
Update from Rocksteady:

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.

Below is the list of the key areas where we are dedicating our resources to improve the experience for our loyal fans:
  • 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
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. The first patch is being released now and the updates include:
  • 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
We would like to thank our fans for their patience and invaluable feedback. We will continue to monitor and listen for any additional issues.

http://steamcommunity.com/games/208650/announcements/detail/145587678178226617

They are working faster than Bioware did with its horrendous DA:I PC launch.
 
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.
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They release the game, then stop the sales because of complaints and then tell the public that there is significant amount of work involved in fixing the game. That alone shows what kind of state the game was released in and that they might not be completely oblivious to the issues. Most of these are not issues that you cannot catch during the standard testing cycles. These are not issues that arise with some combination of hardware or special conditions which might slip though QA.
 
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