After nearly a full year of delays, the time has finally come to for gamers to start playing Batman: Arkham Knight. The long-awaited final chapter in the Rocksteady series of Batman games arrived hot on the heels of very positive early reviews, but despite the top-quality gameplay, Arkham Knight is a bit of a nightmare for gamers on one platform in particular, PC.

Console gamers had a pretty significant day one patch to deal with, but after downloading and installing that update the game was ready to go on PS4 and Xbox One. The day one experience for PC gamers was far more frustrating. The PC elite took to Twitter, Reddit, and the WB forums and made sure that the developers were aware of the major performance and technical issues.

Rocksteady issued a response yesterday to let PC gamers know that the company is aware of the issues. The response asked users to be patient while the team works on a fix. A follow-up post today offers a few temporary fixes, but none that will make PC gamers very happy.

"We are aware that there are performance issues for some users playing Batman: Arkham Knight on PC. WB Games is working diligently with our development teams, NVIDIA and AMD, to identify and fix the issues as quickly as possible..."

"In the meantime, we wanted to provide recommended, in-game graphical settings for those with minimum and recommend specs hardware. We will provide recommended settings for the Ultra specs as soon as we are able to conduct more tests. At the bottom of this post, you can find additional information that may help alleviate some of the most frequent issues that some players are experiencing. Also, for reference, we have included a list of the minimum, recommended, and ultra hardware requirements."

This is the abridged version, but the full post goes on to detail different updated recommended settings for different gaming rigs. The goal of changing these specs is to allow the game to run on par with the current console generation versions. To achieve that benchmark, the game needs to reach a stable 30 frames per second according to the Rocksteady statement.

PC fans were outraged by the solution, considering that it requires an i7 CPU and a graphics card more powerful than either console. The post went on to ask PC gamers using AMD GPUs to lower the in-game settings even further to help avoid texture pop-in and other issues. As readers might imagine, that didn't make PC players feel much better.

Responses ranged from ranting on Reddit and Steam to demanding refunds for the $60 game and its $40 season pass. After nearly a year of delays and a $100 price tag on day one for fans who want all the content, it is definitely understandable that gamers are unhappy. These kind of problems add a lot of strength to the theory that pre-orders are doing more harm than good for the industry.

Are you experiencing problems with Batman: Arkham Knight? How do you think PC players should be compensated? Let us know in the comments.

Batman: Arkham Knight is now available for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC.

Source: Rocksteady