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Arkham Knight is a fantastic game if reviews and player comments are any indication. But when a fantastic game is clouded by bad press, it makes you wonder what it will be remembered for a few years from now. Will we look back at Arkham Knight as a fantastic conclusion to the series, or will we be left reminiscing about the bad and not the good? Arkham Knight does its fair share of things right, but when a game is so good, it makes the things it doesn’t do right sometimes hurt even more. Here are the ways Arkham Knight left us feeling slightly disappointed before the disc was even in our hands.
An unrealistic first release date
Arkham Knight was originally announced to be released on October 14, 2014, but was shortly pushed back 8 months, and then a few more weeks, until it finally landed on its June 23 release date. Now, I’m not against a good delay. Sure, they’re disappointing in the moment, but as we all know, a delay means a good game could become phenomenal in a just a few short weeks or months. What was disappointing about this particular delay, however, was that it felt like it was clear that Warner Bros and Rocksteady knew when they announced the original date that the game wasn’t going to be ready for an October release. Delays are fine, but this felt like an all-out lowball by simply setting players up for a fall release, probably to make stockholders happy, only to delay it more than half a year away.
A whopping $40 season pass
Some of us have spoken about it before (okay, it was me), but when I was offered the option to purchase the season pass while I picked up my copy of Arkham Knight, I was reminded just how much $40 for this additional content is. Paying north of $100 just to access all the content included in the game is a lot. Is that $40 really going to carry equivalent value of 2/3 of the main game? I will shuffle through the DLC as it is released and pick up what seems appealing, but asking me to cough up $40 at the start for content that could’ve ended up on the disc is a little much.
Locking away exclusive content
There were so many ways to purchase Arkham Knight that at points, it just felt like a cash grab – despite a few of them actually not really working out. Beyond just the Collector’s Edition, Limited Edition, and the Serious Edition comic bundle, there were also just the various retail versions of the game that come with exclusive content at each of the stores – GameStop, Best Buy, Walmart, Amazon, and Steam. With close to a dozen version out there available (each with its own “exclusive content”) it makes it downright difficult for players to ever really play the whole game, if they so wish to.
A malfunctioning PC version
While this technically happened AT launch, Arkham Knight showed up to many players on PC as basically unplayable. Users have reported problems with stuttering frame rate, audio and video glitches, and other problems leading to an array of negative reviews on the Steam store. Arkham Knight was ported to PC by a 12-member team at Iron Galaxy Studios and appears to have been released unfinished. Even further, the game was locked at 30 FPS, despite a video from Nvidia showing the game off at 60 FPS – is this fair? Situations like this can leave a long-lasting and bitter taste in player’s mouths, which is unfortunate for the supposed end to such an epic Batman series.
