OK, I appreciate an update. It's about time we had one. Please understand I'm not attacking your personally and when I refer to WB Games as "you" I'm not talking about you personally, but you as in "WB Games" as your basically the face of it here on the forums. So heres my problem with your update.
The teams have been working hard to address the issues with the PC version of the game. We are happy to confirm that we are now putting the first interim patch into testing. If all goes well, we expect to issue the patch in the next few weeks. We’ll be sure to report back in the next two weeks on how the testing is coming along.
Are you kidding me? The interim patch was reported as being available in August at the end of July. Your telling us that you will have a report about how the patch is doing in two weeks? I'm sorry but that's not acceptable. Nothing about this debacle has been acceptable. I want the fix and I understand I'm at WB's mercy on that but come on!
Of course you reported that the patch will be available in the next few weeks. What you should have said about two weeks ago was: "The patch will be available in September, not August as we originally intended." After a month of silence communicating that your another month out only further enrages us. This is why I told you that transparency has been needed from the start. I don't care if it's a weekly or bi-weekly update. You have GOT to communicate better than this. As a business, people will understand that you make mistakes. Even monumental ones. After a mistake is made, how the company handles it is EVERYTHING. WB Games isn't handling this well.
My next problem comes from the fact that you have absolutely no idea how to make a PC game.
- Reduced frame rate hitches
- Optimized system memory and VRAM usage
- Improved performance on all GPUs (requires the latest drivers)
o Min Spec AMD GPU is once again the Radeon HD 7870 2GB
The first part is all good.
- More Robust In-Game Settings, including:
o Added the ability to change settings for Max FPS to 30/60/90
OK, this is my first problem. No other PC game does this crap. You shouldn't need to toggle this. The **bleep** game engine should be able to cope with changing frame rates on its own. We shouldn't have to choose a sync setting. It's probably too late to do anything about it now as texture draw times / pop-in and other things are tied to the frame rate. This was an absolutely bone head move on the development teams part. This is why you don't hire people who work for EA on Need for Speed games or Iron Galaxy.
o Added toggles for Motion Blur, Chromatic Aberration, and Film Grain
o Added a “High” Texture Resolution value
o Added Texture Filtering option
o Added an Adaptive V-Sync option (NVIDIA only)
o Added VRAM Usage Meter
o Added Mouse Sensitivity Slider & Mouse Smoothing Option
- Fixed low resolution texture bugs
- Fixed hitches when running on mechanical hard drives (HDD)
All good here. These are things that should have been there from the start. You also need to address SLI and Crossfire related problems / performance. There are still multiple rendering bugs present on AMD and NVIDIA hardware. There are other bugs like Batman's suit not taking damage outside of cut scenes. These are things that you really need to address as well.
While our first priority is fixing the issues listed above, the team is continuing to work on the following:
- Skipping the boot up splash screens
- DLC/Season Pass content
- Additional updates such as Photo Mode
Dear god you guys are out of touch with the PC gaming community. You guys need to hire a PC gamer as an advisor. The skipping the boot up splash screen is NOT difficult. Renaming the files fixes the problem. You need to make it where simply hititng the escape key aborts the intro movies. You know, like MANY PC games already do.
While Photomode is a cool idea, this is really something the consoles benefit from more than we do. We can use the print screen feature in Windows to do this. We also have FRAPS and other software for this. So don't spend a lot of time on the Photo mode. I can already load up FRAPS and take screenshots of the game right now.
Some of the DLC content should be relatively easy. You just put the files in there. The skins should be no problem given what they do. Obviously the Batmobiles and challenge tracks are more difficult. While I want this content now, I do understand the dealys. So I'd give the skins priority. Some of them like the Batman Beyond Skin and Dark Knight Returns skin already work for people who have preordered the game. You should just go ahead and enable this for the Season Pass holders on the PC. The whole Batman Family skins pack should be an easy implementation.
The Batgirl DLC and Red Hood mission I can understand taking longer. That's content you'll possibly have plenty of issues with that need a lot of testing.
As you read the forum rage, keep in mind that it was largely preventable. All you need to do is be more transparent about the issues being faced by your developers and give updates like these every couple weeks. A month of silence is not only poor customer service it's steaming dung that fell from a bull's anus.
