Arkham Origins players have restored its multiplayer mode years after it went offline

In late 2016, Warner Bros. Games announced "the online services portion of Batman: Arkham Origins will be retired". And that was it for Arkham Origins' multiplayer. It's tough to say it was hugely missed, but it did have an intriguing concept. Two teams of Joker and Bane goons fought each other, with the chance to play as their gang's leader if they performed well, Star Wars: Battlefront-style. Meanwhile another player got to be a predator in the shadows as Batman (with or without Robin).

That said, many of the players who complained about its loss on the Steam forums seem to be achievement hunters frustrated they've been unable to snag all the multiplayer achievements since 2016. Either way, modders were motivated enough to bring it back. You can download a mod that restores the multiplayer, and adds some singleplayer skins to challenge mode and free roam, from Nexusmods.

If you don't care about the skins, another way to restore the multiplayer is to go to your Steam\steamapps\common\Batman Arkham Origins\Online\BmGame\Config directory and edit the DefaultWBIDVars.ini file. Find where it says BaseUrl="https://ozzypc-wbid.live.ws.fireteam.net/" and delete the "s" out of the URL so it starts "http://". That's it, that's all you have to do.

This will mean you're not connecting to a secure site—that's what the "s" stands for—so exercise caution. If you're looking for other players to coordinate with, the Batman Arkham Discord server is where they're currently gathering.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.