The PC version of Batman: Arkham Knight was in such a horrid state at launch that publisher Warner Bros. Interactive took the extremely unusual step of suspending sales just a couple of days after it hit Steam. Developer Rocksteady is "working like crazy" to fix the game, and Nvidia recently revealed that it's helping man the pumps too. And not just with driver-related work either: Tom Petersen, a "distinguished engineer" at Nvidia, told MMORPG.com that its GameWorks and QA teams are "fixing a ton of things, that are not necessarily related to us."
"They made a few mistakes in getting the game out, it wasn't fully performance-optimized for PC. So now we're deploying our QA resources and our engineers to make that game as good as it can possibly be," Petersen said. "And I gotta tell you, on the releases I've seen, it is a fantastic game. It plays great, it's a ton of fun, the effects are amazing, and I'm pretty sure when Warner Bros. makes it available on Steam again, that people are going to be delighted."
Petersen framed Nvidia's role in de-disaster-ifying Arkham Knight as part of its broader effort to support gaming on the PC, and implied that it would do the same for other games released in similarly shoddy condition. "When a huge title like that comes out [and] it's got problems, we're going to dive on it. We're going to apply our resources. And it's the same guys, it's the GameWorks guys, it's the QA guys, that are getting in there and looking at the port and trying to figure out what's going on," he continued. "We're fixing a ton of things that are not necessarily related to us. Some may be related to our driver, maybe not, but at the end of the day, the game is the focus, and we're going to make it good."
More help is always welcome when it comes to cleaning up a software shuttle crash, but there's something embarrassing, ugly even, in how much help Warner has had to enlist to finish the PC port. And yes, "finish," not fix: If, more than a month after you pulled your game from stores, you still can't say when it will be re-released, then it was clearly never ready to be put out in the first place.
