Batman: Arkham Knight on PC pulled from Steam (and a possible fix?)

Apparently, a bunch of folks are having a terrible time getting Batman: Arkham Knight for PC to work. It’s glitchy and unplayable to most. As a result, WB had it pulled from Steam until they could fix the bugs. They are also offering refunds.

Dear Batman: Arkham Knight PC owners,

We want to apologize to those of you who are experiencing performance issues with Batman: Arkham Knight on PC. We take these issues very seriously and have therefore decided to suspend future game sales of the PC version while we work to address these issues to satisfy our quality standards. We greatly value our customers and know that while there are a significant amount of players who are enjoying the game on PC, we want to do whatever we can to make the experience better for PC players overall.

Thank you to those players who have already given valuable feedback. We are continuously monitoring all threads posted in the Official Batman: Arkham Knight Community and Steam forums, as well as any issues logged with our Customer Support (http://support.wbgames.com/). If you purchased your copy of the game and are not satisfied with your experience, then we ask for your patience while these issues are resolved. If desired, you can request a refund at https://help.steampowered.com (Steam refund policies can be found here: http://store.steampowered.com/steam_refunds) or the retail location where you purchased the game.

The Batman: Arkham fans have continually supported the franchise to its current height of success, and we want to thank you for your patience as we work to deliver an updated version of Batman: Arkham Knight on PC so you can all enjoy the final chapter of the Batman: Arkham series as it was meant to be played.

I got the game for free with the laptop I just bought that has an Nvidia card that happened to be running a promotion. I encountered a bit of glitchiness when I first launched it, but I overcame that fairly quickly. Judging by reports, what I encountered may not be the only real issue at hand. Only a fraction of people seem to be complaining about what I was seeing. But what I did was fairly easy and fairly repeatable, from what I can tell.

The specific behaviour I saw was that when you launch the game, it would immediately minimize itself. Once minimized, if you click on the icon to bring it back up to the foreground, it would hiccup repeatedly to a black screen, exactly like this:

The solution for me was to use a gamepad, launch the game, hit Ctrl-Alt-Del to get to the security options in Windows. Choose Task Manager. You may have to do this more than once to get it to bring Task Manager to focus.

As soon as I managed that feat, suddenly the game in the background was running smoothly, with the Windows task bar and Task Manager in the foreground! Every time I clicked back onto the Batman window, though, it would revert to its buggy behaviour. So, I moved Task Manager out of the way, picked up my gamepad, and went into the graphics options, and tried selecting my current screen resolution (1920×1080), Windowed Borderless mode. Then I dared to click back into Batman — and it worked! It also works for subsequent launches. The issue appears to be with the fullscreen, and possibly with some bad window management as a result. It might be possible to induce this specific display mode through the command line launch options or some INI file, but I haven’t gone digging.

Seriously, if this turns out to fix all your problems, then it’s a shoddy implementation of windowing on Rocksteady’s third party PC porter’s fault, which should have been easily caught and (hopefully) easily fixed in QA — you DID do QA, right? It also only appears to happen with certain Nvidia cards, from all reports I’ve seen. And I’ve seen a number that report that over time, the game will eventually start crashing. I’ve only played through the first Batmobile AR mission, so I can’t tell if that’ll happen, but long-running games eventually crashing sounds a lot like memory management issues to me — some garbage collection isn’t being done, or something.

I still can’t get over the fact that this is a Batman game where you shoot tanks with missiles though. And where the first car you have to fire on actually does have a person in it, you make it flip, and it’s only through the grace of plot that the dude — a banged up wreck after being in a horrific missile-induced rollover — climbs out for you to interrogate.

Batman: Arkham Knight on PC pulled from Steam (and a possible fix?)
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Rush Limbaugh as The Penguin explains the Bat-Conspiracy against Romney

You have to admit, Oswald Cobblepot is actually significantly more sane-sounding than this normally. Jimmy Kimmel pretty much picked the perfect clips to show how ridiculous Limbaugh’s accusations are, because the clips of Bane are from an episode that first aired September 10, 1994. If there was a secret plot to make Mitt Romney look stupid and evil, it would have had to hatch eighteen years ago.

This evil villain was even in Batman and Robin, which I’m sure you’ve all scrubbed from your memories for Bane being such an ineffectual villain and for the existence of Bat-nipples. And yet somehow this was a plot against Romney — despite the fact that, when the first trailers for The Dark Knight Rises were showing up, we still thought Newt Fucking Gingrich was going to be Obama’s opponent.

Anyway, it’s ridiculous to say anything in the Batman mythology is politically tilted against Republicans in any way, frankly — it’s one long capitalist power fantasy. It’s Objectivism writ large, where the rich make the rules and personally destroy through physical violence and psychological terrorism any deviance from the script. Not that those fantastic elements don’t make for an entertaining story, mind you. I love the hell out of the Batman mythology, to be perfectly frank, even despite (and in some cases because of) it being so diametrically opposed to many of my own personal ideologies.

(Yes, I’ve heard about the theatre shooting. That’ll be a different post, please and thanks.)

Rush Limbaugh as The Penguin explains the Bat-Conspiracy against Romney

Indie film does Catwoman fight scene as good as Arkham City

Back home, and already missing Minneapolis and the wonderful people therein. Got in at 1:30am last night, had to work in the morning, so I didn’t have time to schedule anything for this morning. I’ll post now the two items I’d prepared on the plane last night.

If you haven’t had a chance to play Batman: Arkham City, you really should. The combat, exploration, plot, graphics, controls, basically everything is perfect. Except… there’s one little problem I have with it. The blatant oversexualization of, and sexist slurs cast by thugs about, Catwoman. I’ll need to post something about it some day, probably the next time I play the game and hear a random thug mention “having fun with” her. The non-consensual kind of fun.

So, seeing a choreographed fight aimed at mimicking Catwoman’s fighting style in Arkham City, sans the extra sexist nonsense, e.g. the “catcalls” or ludicrously unzipped-to-her-navel catsuit (how’s that supposed to block out all the visible flesh as a matter of practicality when she’s trying to lurk in shadows exactly!?), was pretty nice. Many kudos to the Thousand Pounds Action Company for kicking so much ass. Video below the fold.
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Indie film does Catwoman fight scene as good as Arkham City