Batman: Arkham Knight
It’s difficult to talk about horrible PC game launches without discussing public enemy number one: Batman: Arkham Knight. When Arkham Knight released late last year, the game was given some heavy praise for the console version and some serious repulsion for the PC. The game suffered just about every performance issue in the book: frame rate stutters, full on crashes, FPS drops, and much, much more. Even on the highest end PCs, the game was noted to have frame rate slowdowns to as low as 10 FPS whilst performing standard actions like gliding through the city or riding in the Batmobile. AMD and Nvidia released full new device drivers specifically to help optimize the game, but even so, many of the existing problems continued to persist.
The consumer negativity surrounding Arkham Knight was so poor that Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment had to completely suspend sales for the game while they worked on improving the game’s performance and also offered refunds to those who purchased it. The game was made available again around the end of October, however due to complaints of persistent performance problems, Warner Bros. continued the refund program until the end of 2015 (regardless of when the game was purchased).
The game’s developer, Rocksteady, has since been working on the game’s lingering issues, however it still continues to reside in a subpar state. It is incredibly rare for a game’s sales to be completely suspended, but in the case of Arkham Knight, it was very much warranted. And at least Warner Bros. had the decency to refund those unhappy with the game, though I’m sure many of them would have preferred a game that worked.
