HiGame

The fallout and clean-up over Arkham Knight have continued — a recent PC patch has addressed some issues with the game — but a new report today suggests that far from being caught off-guard by the terrible PC version, Warner Brothers was fully aware of the cesspool of code it was dealing with. The problems, according to anonymous sources, were a combination of steep learning curves, outsourced work, and precautions Rocksteady took to safeguard against story leaks.

According to Kotaku, who spoke to the sources, the same dev teams responsible for writing the primary game code were also responsible for squashing bugs, which meant it was nearly impossible for the team to fix and code simultaneously. Attention didn’t turn to bug-squashing until the game was all-but finished, badly delaying the process. In addition, the console version of the game was apparently broken for months with top priority given to banging that code into shippable shape.

The new consoles were supposed to be easier to work on than previous versions, but that apparently wasn’t much help to Rocksteady. Either because of the game’s ambitious visuals, Batmobile inclusion, or a simple lack of familiarity with the hardware, the console version of Batman went months over schedule and this may have impacted the resources available to bug-fix the PC version. Primary development was handled by an outside studio, and Kotaku notes that these developments tend to lead to lower-quality PC releases as a whole. Small studios, it seems, are often overwhelmed by the difficulty of developing complicated projects and take the work on in the hopes of getting their own independent projects funded at a later date.

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