After all the content released and revealed so far, hopeful owners of the PC port of Arkham Knight have to be gnawing their fingernails away in anticipation. Luckily, Warner Bros. has finally given a specific enough range of time in which to expect its return to retail: the end of October. At least now, fans can be justified in their complaints if the game isn’t available for purchase by then.
The plan, as stated by Warner Bros., is to have the port running at a level comparable to the console versions by that time, and players can even expect “support for all [downloadable content] that has been released for the console versions [to] be in place.” This is a fairly tall order, even considering the improvements made since its release in June. Readers will recall that the game’s PC version was a port handled by an outside development studio and it lacked any discernible optimization for most existing hardware in the average player’s PC. The result was a game with frequent crashes, a framerate capping out at 30fps, frequent crashes, loading times of asinine length, and frequent crashes, not to mention how much the damn thing crashed.
Since then, Warner Bros. has been hard at work patching up and fixing the port, scrambling to undo the damage they failed to catch before it was done. In July was a wave of small patches making a range of minor and major changes and fixes, then more drastic patches in August, and finally the interim patch in September that was promised on the onset of Warner Bros. endeavor. These, along with the work being done between now and the end of this month, hope to be sufficient in bringing the game up to par with the standard set by the console versions.
Stay alert and check back here for the exact date, which will be reported here as soon as it’s made available. So no PC version until that time, whenever it is.