Arkham Knight Relaunch Oct 28

[JasonPratt]

And so today it begins. Or ends. Or something.

At this moment, Steam is downloading a 2.4 Gig update to Batman: Arkham Knight. Which, somewhat coincidentally, is interfering with my ability to finish playing my probably-final-playthrough-for-a-while of ArkKnight. Maybe I should go play Alien: Isolation as I've been threatening myself to do for a while, instead.  >:D

The pre-pre-release press release, with some Sabrecommentary...

At 10 am PDT, Oct. 28th, Batman: Arkham Knight will be re-released for the PC platform. At the same time we'll also be releasing a patch that brings the PC version fully up-to-date with content that has been released for console (with the exception of console exclusives).

This means that next week, all PC players will have access to Photo Mode, Big Head Mode, Batman: Arkham Asylum Batman Skin, and character selection in combat AR challenges. Season Pass holders will have access to all content released since launch, including:

AR Challenges
•   Crime Fighter Challenge Pack #1
o   Financial Crash
o   Deconstruction
o   Assault on GCPD
o   Teen Titan
o   Cat's Conundrum
o   Newton's Cradle

•   Crime Fighter Challenge Pack #2
o   High Interest
o   Uncontainable
o   Sky High
o   Feline Frenzy
o   Armored Assault
o   Flying Grayson

•   Crime Fighter Challenge Pack #3
o   Chemical Reaction
o   Stage Fright
o   Cauldron Speedway TT
o   Guardians
o   Precinct
o   Vertigo

Batmobile Race Tracks
•   Batman Classic TV Series Batmobile Track #1: Batcave Set
•   Batman Classic TV Series Batmobile Track #2: Penguin's Dockyard
•   1989 Movie Batmobile Track #1: Cobblepot's Causeway
•   1989 Movie Batmobile Track #2: Joker Parade
•   2008 Tumbler Batmobile Track #1: Ashes
•   2008 Tumbler Batmobile Track #2: Cataclysm

Arkham Episodes Story Packs
•   Batgirl: A Matter of Family
•   Red Hood Story Pack
•   Harley Quinn Story Pack
•   GCPD Lockdown starring Nightwing

Skins & Batmobiles
•   Batman Flashpoint Skin
•   Arkham Origins Batman Skin
•   Iconic Gray & Black Batman Skin
•   1990s Catwoman Skin
•   1970s Batman Skin
•   One Year Later Robin Skin
•   1989 Movie Batman Skin
•   1st Appearance Batman Skin
•   Dark Knight Returns Batman Skin
•   Batman Beyond Skin
•   Original Arkham Nightwing Skin
•   Original Arkham Batman Skin
•   Classic TV Series Catwoman Skin
•   Classic TV Series Robin Skin
•   1989 Movie Batmobile
•   2008 Tumbler Batmobile
•   1960s TV series Batmobile
•   Prototype Batmobile
•   1970s Batmobile Skin

We want to give particular thanks to the members of the PC community who took the time to give us clear, detailed feedback and bug reporting.

Now, get out there and Be The Batman!

- Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment

Personally I don't care all that much for the AR challenges, but maybe a lot of people do. Still, they were part of my Season Pass.

The skins are only of use to me if I can use them in the campaign, and to its credit ArkKnight has allowed alternate Batman skins (and alternate Nightwing and Robin skins) to be activated in campaign even on the first playthrough, unlike previous Arkham games (except for Blackgate which not only allowed alternate Batman skins on the original playthrough but granted some of them special bonuses.) Naturally these don't affect the pre-rendered scenes, so there will always be some discontinuity going this route, and only the 'official' skins can suffer damage. In fact, a minor bug reverts a damaged skin back to being undamaged and, apparently, invulnerable, if a game ever saves in the campaign while wearing an alternate suit -- although maybe that bug has been fixed now. Anyway, a trivial matter. The new skins are a nice option, but only available for anyone who bought them already by Season Pass or otherwise.

Ditto the new Batmobile skins, which as far as I can tell cannot be played in campaign, and so which are nearly worthless to me: they can only be played as such on a few tracks specifically locked to those designs. Annoying, but understandable considering how intricately the Battank is designed and operated in-game.

Consequently, the things I mainly care about are finally getting the story packs unlocked (one of which, Harley's campaign, already being unlocked with the Steam pre-purchase.)


Note that in this Oct 24 press release, absolutely nothing is said about offering some kind of restitution to people who pre-purchased the game, or bought it in such a state that WB decided to pull it from sales until now.

But in fact there is a restitution plan, too. And it's somewhat reasonable. Why it wasn't mentioned until this morning, who knows. It's hard not to be suspicious that there has been an outcry this week against them offering NO restitution, which they decided to fix post hoc. Anyway, it's only available for Steam users, although perhaps other restitution plans are available for other media as appropriate.

Greetings Batman: Arkham Fans! 

The PC version of Batman: Arkham Knight is back up and available today!   We are genuinely thankful to the Batman: Arkham fans, the Steam Batman: Arkham Community, and the PC Players who have patiently waited for this day. As a show of our appreciation to our fans in this process, we are pleased to announce three community focused programs to help us commemorate the re-launch of the game. 

To kick things off, we will be giving away FREE digital copies of games from the Batman: Arkham library. This means we will be giving away copies of Batman: Arkham Asylum GOTY, Batman: Arkham City GOTY, Batman: Arkham Origins, and Batman: Arkham Origins Blackgate.  The Batman: Arkham library of games will be given to everyone who has already purchased or will purchase Batman: Arkham Knight for PC prior to 11:59 pm PDT, November 16, 2015. We're actively working with our partners at Valve to make this happen as soon as we can, so watch your Steam Library.  We are aiming to deliver all of the games by December.   

Seeing as our community was a great help in getting the game up and running, Rocksteady will be creating a new "Community Challenge Pack" that will be given free to owners of the Batman: Arkham Knight game in January 2016.  As thanks to the Steam Community, PC players will have access to the maps for a week before they hit the consoles.  Stay tuned for more details on this in the Batman: Arkham Community and Social Channels.

Finally, we are thrilled to announce that we are working with Valve and the Team Fortress 2 team for a special cross-game promotion.  Through November 16, 2015, Valve will be running a contest for the Steam community to create Batman: Arkham themed cosmetic items for Team Fortress 2.  The winning items will be given out to those who purchased Batman: Arkham Knight on Steam before the end of the contest.  You can check out the official TF2 blog for all the contest details!
 
To recap, if you own Batman: Arkham Knight for PC or purchase it before November 16, 2015, you will get:
Free digital copies of games from the Batman: Arkham library.
The "Community Challenge Pack" DLC.
The Batman: Arkham inspired Team Fortress 2 items created by the Batman: Arkham community.
 
Thanks again for your feedback and support. 

- Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment

The TF2 items inspired by BatArk games, mean nothing to me, nor to anyone who doesn't play TF2.

I don't know what a "Community Challenge Pack" is even supposed to be, but it sounds like it has something to do with AR missions, and so I don't care. (Or achievements, and so I extra-don't-care.)

The big selling point is getting free copies of all four previous BatArk games (which I find a bit amusing since WBIE has constantly promoted ArkKnight as being the end of a trilogy.)

Now, that's admittedly a relatively big deal, although since WBIE is willing to sell the things at 70% discount or more during the next few months (twice or three times), not so much really. Still, getting maybe $20 (sale) worth of free high quality games is nothing to sneeze at.

Unless like me you either already own the games, and/or don't want to inflict the buggy Origins on your PC.

So in fact, I will get nothing other than a game I'm leery about actually damaging my machine, or at best being annoyingly broken (so which I play on PS3 where I already own it anyway), worth maybe $5 on sale (maybe less), as recompense for pre-ordering a $60+ game so poorly ported to PC that they themselves pulled it from the store for several whole months.

If I had been one of the people whose version of ArkKnight was so broken as to be unplayable, I'd be pretty torqued about that. As it is, I could always play it a bit nerfed but smoothly enough on my 2001 Monolith of a machine, so this only annoys me a bit. Enough to write this much commentary on it I guess.


Finally from this afternoon:

Hi everyone! I'm going to jump in and help out Yorick as a second pair of eyes and ears for you all.

With the game now available for sale, I wanted to provide a status update since the release of the September patch.

As we confirmed earlier today, the PC version of the game now supports all add-on content that has been released thus far for console. The configurations for this content are being updated now and we expect everything to be available in the next few hours. We'll confirm when this process is completed.

We are still working with our GPU partners to add full support for SLI and Crossfire. In addition, we are working with these partners to address stability issues on certain cards related to the latest drivers.

After extensive testing, a hard drive paging issue with some GPUs on Windows 7 may occur after extended gameplay sessions. If you encounter this, simply re-launching the game will resolve the issue.

For Windows 10 users, we've found that having at least 12GB of system RAM on a PC allows the game to operate without paging and provides a smoother gameplay experience.

That will be variably interesting / annoying to different people for different reasons; but for me, the main thing is that they STILL HAVEN'T FIXED SLI PROBLEMS! Meaning when I fire up the game in a minute, I'll still only be playing on one GPU, not both. Sigh.

[Grim.Reaper]

Mine is downloading a 10+ GB update, odd that mine is different...

[JasonPratt]

I was about to say, after the 2.4 Gig update, which I saw finishing as I typed (thus the strategy of my delay became apparent ;) ), something else even larger was dling. That turned out to be a 7.5 Gig patch.

I expect that the actual patch was 2.4 Gigs, and the second thing picks up all spares that should have been released already through my Season Pass. I'm guessing that'll be you, too, GR.

[Rayfer]

From Rock/Paper/Shotgun, a less than glowing look at the re-release.  http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/10/29/batman-arkham-knight-problems/#more-324751

[JasonPratt]

A couple of slight updates (to my original post, not to the recent updates):

1.) The bug where the main suit goes back to being pristine and invulnerable (to cosmetic damage, not to player damage), has been fixed. Main suit Batman (and main Bat-tank) looks proportionately worn again.

2.) They did offer a special paint-job playable in campaign for the Bat-tank. Oddly, it isn't a paintjob based on the 60s car, which... would have not looked obvious enough as a homage? Instead, it's based on the 70s grey-and-blue Batsuit.

At a certain point in the campaign (coming up soon now in my final-ish playthrough), I fully expect to be switching over to that for a while, since the car won't be around long enough afterward to accrue much wear anyway.

[JasonPratt]

Oh, and two new Catwoman skins are now available, probably able to be activated in campaign (like the alt-Robin and alt-Nightwing skins). One is, for the first time in the Arkham series, 60s TV Catwoman.

Too bad I'm already past that point in campaign; but if they eventually solve their SLI problems, and if having both my GPUs active makes a significant difference in how the game looks, I may be slightly tempted to replay the campaign again, and if so I fully expect I'll activate the 60s Cat skin for the novelty of watching JuLee Neweather kick ass and saunter around.

[Arctic Blast]

Curious to see if they get any real sales on this at this point.

Personally, I'm done. One refunded purchase is enough.

[JasonPratt]

Finished the main campaign again this weekend; didn't play Harley's minicampaign again (can't stand the voice actress, or at least her efforts, this time.)

Quickly played through the Red Hood linked missions, a couple of Predator and a couple of gang fight stages loosely linked with a story. Guess the Black Mask won't be returning if WB ever gets someone else than Rocksteady to make a sequel. ;)

Also started and finished the brief Batgirl campaign, which is a whole open-world experience (though of course fairly small). Decent mission and 'world' design, the Batgirl suit is boss as hell even if her capabilities are very watered down. Fun to see Harley in her classic Paul Dini design (for the only time in the Arkham games, though the suit itself has shown up once or twice). Features the only legitimate Joker brawl in all five games.

Haven't played the final minicampaign (featuring Nightwing) yet.

[JasonPratt]

Played the final mini-campaign with Nightwing (one brawl, then a new predator map at the Gotham City Police Department). The mini-campaigns can't help but feel like "crippled Batman". ;) But it was fun listening to Grayson riff with the Penguin, and a bit interesting to see the Gotham map (though not reachable) 'dressed' in a rainy overcast high noon lighting.

Overall, I'd say the Batgirl campaign is by far the best of the "Gotham Stories" DLC so far. But neither of the two post-game stories (Red Hood and Nightwing) give much clue about what to think of the full ending of the main game, other than it sure doesn't seem like anyone in the Bat family is mourning anyone (meaning everyone probably figures no one died at the end).

Then I promptly deleted the game from my HD. I might install it again when-if-ever the developers figure out how to make the game work with SLI cards, so I can see the game at maximum bling. But I'm not going to rush to do so.

Still, I thoroughly enjoyed the game both times I played through it, helped no doubt by it not crashing on my system even on its original release.  ::) Well, I didn't enjoy getting all the Riddler nonsense to beat his side of the game completely, which I thought was especially not-well-thought-out this time, but I didn't have to worry about that for the New Game +. The Bat-tank combat sections wore out their welcome at least twice over during both playthroughs, but that didn't impact my overall enjoyment much. Still 90/100 easy.

[Apocalypse 31]

Curious to see if they get any real sales on this at this point.

Personally, I'm done. One refunded purchase is enough.

This

It's called breaking trust. No matter how cheap this game is, and how much I enjoyed the previous titles, I will no longer support the franchise or the business.

[undercovergeek]

ooff!

'We are very sorry that many of our customers continue to be unhappy with the PC version of Batman: Arkham Knight. We worked hard to get the game to live up to the standard you deserve but understand that many of you are still experiencing issues.

Until the end of 2015, we will be offering a full refund on Batman: Arkham Knight PC, regardless of how long you have played the product. You can also return the Season Pass along with the main game (but not separately). For those of you that hold onto the game, we are going to continue to address the issues that we can fix and talk to you about the issues that we cannot fix.


Thank you,

Warner Bros Interactive Entertainment'

[JasonPratt]

I'd say that's a no-risk offer, to check if the title has been fixed enough to work on someone's system! (At least through the end of 2015.)

Of course, the title will surely be going on one or two sales soon, plus one or two deeper temporary discounts during and at the end of those sales, so WB isn't risking losing the full amount for many of anyone who buys-to-try between now and then. But they're risking losing the full amount from people like me who bought early but held on without refunding to see if issues were resolved.

Or not exactly like me, since I never ran into any game-breaking bugs, and I was satisfied enough with less bling for better performance (enough to beat the game twice, plus all DLC once).

But still, I appreciate that offer in principle more than the mostly-useless-to-their-best-supporters consolation gifts for staying the course or rebuying.


That being said, they can talk to me all they want about how they still can't get SLI to work, when most games in the last 10 years can use SLI, including (by all appearances) their previous Arkham titles. But I ain't gonna be impressed by that talk. ;)

[JasonPratt]

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/10/30/batman-arkham-knight-review/

Pretty close to my experience; personally I thought ArkCity was tighter than ArkKnight, but as far as a sweet spot goes, I'd've voted for ArkOrigins with its combination of narrative focus, interesting sidetrails, and overall best boss fights of the series by far. It's also still a crapshoot whether it'll be a buggy mess on any PC, but lots of people have a last-gen console, too (360 or PS3). (Then again, the author seems to be following the "Origins and Blackgate don't exist, this is a TRILOGY Y'ALL" line.  ::) )

[Arctic Blast]

Curious to see if they get any real sales on this at this point.

Personally, I'm done. One refunded purchase is enough.

This

It's called breaking trust. No matter how cheap this game is, and how much I enjoyed the previous titles, I will no longer support the franchise or the business.

Considering that they're now offering refunds for it on PC again because it's still broken for a number of users, I'd say that's a wise decision.

[JasonPratt]

^^ By the same token, for the next couple of months it costs no risk to see if they've fixed it for 'your' computer, only some bother returning the thing if it still doesn't work.