Arkham Knight Ruptures a Huge Divide Between Console and PC Gamers

Batman Arkham Knight was released on June 22nd, and if you have followed any of the vast media outlets out there that at least somewhat covers video games, you would have heard something like this…

After Arkham Knight, Batman has been perfected — and the end result is the best game of this console generation.

Or this…

It’s going to be remembered for a long time to come. A masterpiece.

Throughout the whole launch Arkham Knight received stellar reviews, with it being deemed as one of the best video games to not only be made this year, but forever in the history of gaming. Critics love the game. It holds a score of 91 on Metacritic, while 9’s and 10’s rained down for Gotham’s unwanted but much needed hero with the lowest score coming at only a 7… which still makes it a reasonably great game.

So with all this rave, Rocksteady and Warner Bros. seemingly should have had a perfect release. With it holding such high acclaim, and an action packed trailer with a rocking track from Muse, along with the already high amount pre-order sales, what could go wrong?

Well, what went wrong was that all the magic was delivered to the consoles, and that all those high scores were for your friendly neighborhood PlayStation. PC players on the other hand, got led into a completely different, and unexpected hell, where they received about as bad a port as they could imagine.

Instead of the perfect release, what Rocksteady and Warner Bros managed to do was outrage thousands upon thousands of gamers, and instilling the dreaded sense of yet another failed PC port into PC players. If you check the reviews on Steam you will get a good sense how gigantic the gap is between the two ports.

Batman Arkham Knight was the best selling game for a long time on Steam, and that was even before the release. Now it is probably the game that most takes advantage of Valve’s new refund policy, with everyone trying to get their hard earned $60 back. And who could blame them, I mean, you try saving Gotham from Scarecrow in these conditions.

Not only does this add onto the long list of bad PC ports, but this also brings up the question again of what are these companies thinking when it comes to PC gamers? Are they just deeming that a higher percentage of their game is played on console, so they completely throw aside the PC port? Shouldn’t they have noticed these problems before the release? They had to have appeared, but did the developers just go “Screw it, just release the damn thing!”?

It’s a problem that puts a bad taste in the mouths of PC gamers. They surely don’t throw a GTX 970 in their rig so that they can play your game capped at 30 fps. Some gamers are even upgrading or switching over to PC’s so that they could play as their favorite superhero in the highest amount of detail, but instead they got disappointing and unplayable version of the game.

There has been a big problem with AAA titles and their ports their onto the PC, and Batman Arkham Knight is just another chapter in the sad and dreary book. Not only is the story sad for gamers but also these companies, because although the market for the console is huge, developers will be missing out on a colossal chunk of revenue that could be made from the massive PC community. 

With the reputation that has been made recently with bad ports, the tempers of PC gamers are getting shorter and shorter. Hopefully with all the amazing experiences that Arkham Knight has to offer, it will get patched up to be on par with past Arkham games so that PC players can share the same experience of those who gave it a 10. And with that said, let’s all pray that with Batman’s last ride, he can smack some sense into these developers so that no more issues like these arise again.