Warner Bros., publisher of Batman: Arkham Knight, allegedly knew about the problems with the PC version of the game for months and did not fix them in time for release, sources tell Kotaku.
Speaking on the condition of anonymity, two sources spoke to Kotaku and said that Warner Bros. had known about the issues facing the PC version of Arkham Knight, but chose to ship the game in that state because it believed the problems weren’t severe enough to warrant delaying the game.
“I will say that it’s pretty rich for WB to act like they had no idea the game was in such a horrible state,” said one quality assurance tester who worked on the game for years. “It’s been like this for months and all the problems we see now were the exact same, unchanged, almost a year ago.”
“Getting it to work on consoles was impossible for months,” said the same tester source. “That’s part of why the game got delayed so many times, they were totally unprepared for how hard it was on next-gen consoles.”
The other source, who did not work in QA, but was close to Arkham Knight’s production agreed with the tester’s quotes.
“Testing a game this big is very different from linear or smaller games,” the tester continued. “You usually get a mission, chapter or area of the map, or pick one yourself, and just go to town. You bug everything you see. We had some testers bugging more than 100 bugs per day. Devs would fix what they could but they were juggling that with actually finishing the game so they were insanely slow. Only when the game was done and no new features had to be built could they actually buckle down. Once that happens they also restrict what you can or can’t bug, to ensure that they can catch up.”
Reports of issues with the PC version of Arkham Knight surfaced immediately after its release. Since then, Warner Bros. and Rocksteady have suspended sales of the PC version while they work on fixing the bugs, performance issues, etc.
Check out the full report from Kotaku here.
