Console gamers have been enjoying their time exploring Gotham City as the caped crusader in Batman: Arkham Knight since the game launched last Tuesday. For the most part, minus the PS4 leaderboards being broken, the console versions of the game have released without a hitch, enjoying substantial acclaim across the board. Unfortunately, PC gamers wanting to play Batman: Arkham Knight haven't been so lucky.

When it first launched, the PC version of Arkham Knight experienced framerate drops, audio glitches, and more, resulting in a lot of upset fans that were looking forward to playing one of 2015's most anticipated games. While Batman: Arkham Knight on PC isn't out of the woods just yet, a fully functional Arkham Knight on PC is in sight, as the first patch has been released and Rocksteady Studios themselves will be leading the charge to improve the game until it is completely fixed.

PC gamers that still own Batman: Arkham Knight will notice the following improvements to the game after downloading the new patch, courtesy of the official patch notes:

  • 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

This is much better news than the initial PC fix suggestion, which resulted in such a heavy amount of backlash that the publisher pulled the game from sale and began offering full refunds. However, while this is certainly a step in the right direction, WB Games stopped short of announcing when exactly work on improving the PC version of the game will be finished. As explained in a community post, "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."

In the meantime, WB Games has also announced the problem areas that they will be focusing on the most with the upcoming patches and updates. As explained by Rocksteady, this will include supporting a frame rate above 30fps, improving overall performance, fixing the low resolution texture bug, adding more options to the graphics settings menu, and more.

The reason that the PC version of Arkham Knight is in such dire straits is that Rocksteady themselves did not handle development on the port. This is common practice in the gaming industry, with the main studio focusing on development for specific platforms with ports to other systems outsourced to another studio. However, WB Games seems to be having a serious problem finding quality developers to handle the PC ports of their biggest games as of late.

After all, it was just a couple of months ago that the PC version of Mortal Kombat X, which was handled by High Voltage Software and not NetherRealm Studios, was hit with a patch that completely erased players' save data. To make matters worse, this patch was released with the intent to fix the online multiplayer issues with Mortal Kombat X on PC, but really it only served to make an already shoddy port that much shoddier.

Batman: Arkham Knight is currently available for PS4 and Xbox One. The PC version will be made available for purchase yet again once Rocksteady brings the game to an acceptable level of quality.

Source: WB Games