Warner Bros Allegedly Knew About the Arkham Knight PC Issues "For Months"

[Lightspeaker]

I was somewhat prepared to give WB itself the benefit of the doubt on this originally, and even some appreciation for the fact they outright pulled the game rather than just promising to patch it. Specifically I was laying the blame more on Rocksteady and Iron Galaxy either being incredibly lazy about their testing and only testing on very specific high-end rigs which they had few problems with (by all accounts some people are getting it working okay so its possible) or them simply pulling the wool over WB's eyes. I still think its POSSIBLE that it was simple miscommunication all the way up the line.

But if the WB execs responsible did actually know and went ahead anyway...screw them. It is absolutely unacceptable.

 

[EndlessSporadic]

As someone who worked in the the game industry as a QA person I can confirm that what these "sources" say is 100% true, though whether it specifically applies to this game is another issue. Often times optimization bugs are left for later in development, and by the time all core features are in the game it is often cutting it very close to the final deadline. Management will restrict the type of bugs that get accepted and performance bugs are often closed as "will not fix" due to the amount of effort required to fix them. Game has poor performance on a specific medium-range card? More often than not they won't invest a bunch of time into a bug that only affects less than 0.05% of the user-base. Given the time the developers totally want to fix the issues, but often times that conflicts with management or publisher goals.

So to those of you who are blaming QA, and to a lesser extent Rocksteady, please don't. QA gets a lot of undeserved flak. I assure you all of these bugs were known and the developers wanted to fix them but something higher up prevented them from doing so.

 

[Arcane Azmadi]

The sources claim that Warner Bros decided to make the game available because they felt it was "good enough."

I don't give a shit what Obi-Wan Kenobi said, you need to do more than "trust your feelings". Because your feelings are WRONG.

 

[subskipper]

I trust Joker to babysit my child more than i trust Kotaku to be honest. That said, the scenario is certainly plausible considering that it's a large publisher. Hopefully the whole Arkham Knight debacle will lead to some changes in the industry. For the better.

Also, did I mention I don't trust Kotaku? If I failed to do so, I just want to make really clear that I in no way shape or form trust anything Kotaku writes. Lizzy is awesome though.

 

[Kenjitsuka]

"including remedying the 30fps cap"
Actually, this is just "adding the option to remove the cap to an ingame menu".
Removing the cap is easy, getting the game consistenly above or near 30 fps though!!!

Anyway, this isn't really news: the game is so extremely fundamentally broken that it's literally impossible they did NOT know all of it very, very far in advance!!!!

 

[Ralancian]

I think it's perfectly reasonable to assume someone knew of the issues and the extent of them. However the real question is did anyone in a position who could act upon them actually know? Knowing how software projects run in other industries somehow I doubt it. The problem is the decision makers tend to pretty separate from the people who actually understand what's going on.

 

[BoredRolePlayer]

Not to defend Warner Brothers, but there is a certain point you have to cutout fixing bugs seeing how it has a chance making more bugs (backwards flying dragon in skyrim). They should have pushed it back, but all that marketing money would be more harm then good. It's a tight rope to walk but I think this is a ball drop.

 

[Quellist]

On the one hand I don't especially trust anonymous sources but on the other it's hard to believe they didn't have any idea how bad AK was.

If this is true i'd love to get the name of whoever it was at WB that said its "Good Enough". So I imagine would many other PC gamers

 

[Charli]

Well yeah of course someone knew and someone made the executive decision to ignore them. This isn't news, otherwise people wouldn't be so angry. SOMEONE made and playtested the PC port, you'd have to be brain dead to have not seen the issues.

 

[VladG]

As someone who worked in QA for a major publisher, I can pretty much guarantee they knew about all of the issues. When they know but don't want to fix them for launch.. it's called a "known shippable" bug/issue. That pretty much says it all.

Have no doubt that without Steam's new refund policy WB wouldn't give two tosses, either.

 

[VladG]

I think they may of known of a few, but not all of them. I don't think they will have of known just how bad the glitches and bugs were.

Also, Kotaku? Yeh. Some of you people are gullible as hell xD

They would have known at least 80-90% of issues, and certainly all of the major ones. These kinds of issues are marked as "known shippable" during the testing process. That should tell you everything you need to know.

 

[jlchavis0844]

well this from Kotaku and the info is from anonymous sources so one should take this a face value. That being said what the sources are saying sounds plausible.

Warner Bros might have known the this version of game had many problem, then arrogantly thought "that's good enough", and releasing it because money. That is the worst case scenario but I would not have put it past Warner Bros to have done this.

At best the management of Warner Bros was highly incompetent. Even then someone who is part of Warner Bros must have an knew it was in poor state since they did not give out any review copies for the pc version.

well Either way they look bad for releasing game in such a poor state.

Thanks for the reminder on why I don't watch this smarmy twat any more. Almost everything he says is correct except for the part about Origins being shit. The game, despite the bugs, is not shit. It's actually quite a good game with a shitty port. Just like Arkham Knight, though AK has a better mechanics. Sterling is a good example of the internet itself. Mostly right, entirely too shitty to take seriously.