Arkham Knight Batpatch Released, And Future Batplans

I would have preferred it if Warner Bros. had decided not to release Batman: Arkham Knight [official site] in a wonky state rather than chuck it out then quickly pull it from sale and throw people who've just finished a game back to crunching. But they're the publisher we need right now, not the one we deserve (and by "need" I mean "personally benefit from").

Saturday brought the release of a small patch for the Batgame, along with a list of what developers Rocksteady (who're leading patch development, not the folks who ported it) plan to tackle next. It's a list of fairly important things.

Rocksteady say that they are toiling away on the big stuff but will also smaller interim patches. Here's what Saturday's did:

"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"

As work continues, they plan to tackle this list o' problems:

"Support for frame rates above 30FPS in the graphics settings menu
Fix for low resolution texture bug
Improve overall performance and framerate hitches
Add more options to the graphics settings menu
Improvements to hard drive streaming and hitches
Address full screen rendering bug on gaming laptops
Improvements to system memory and VRAM usage
NVIDIA SLI bug fixes
Enabling AMD Crossfire
NVIDIA and AMD updated drivers"

Though folks who bought Arkham Knight before it was pulled can still keep playing, our Adam is putting off telling us all Wot He Thinks until it's back out in a better state.

I've seen a fair few folks grumbling that the game's testers dropped the ball, but I suspect that's not the case. I've heard far, far too many stories from quality assurance folks on other games at countless companies who found bugs and problems galore but folks above them decided they weren't important enough to delay release. Don't jump to blaming the people at the bottom. The fish stinks from the head down, yeah?