As Windows Central reports, Batman: Arkham Knight finally made it back to the Steam Store earlier this week after being removed in June, just a few days after its launch. Gamers were confronted by serious performance issues and bugs that often made it impossible to progress.
Publisher Warner Bros. gave lead developer Rocksteady Studios four months to patch the title up before relaunching it this week at a price of $49.99. It didn’t take long before reports started coming in of the game still being unplayable and the studio has now admitted there are some issues it won’t be able to fix. After previously giving away copies of older Batman games to players who own Arkham Knight, Warner Bros. announced on Steam yesterday that they will now be able to claim a full refund until the end of 2015.
The company said: “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.”
Those “issues” include frame tearing, random stuttering, complete freezes and frame rates that can vary wildly between scenes, plummeting to a crawl even on high-end hardware. Warner Bros. admits it hasn’t been able to fix one of the main causes of the problems, a hard drive paging bug that progressively slows the game down in “extended gameplay sessions” on Windows 7. The company has advised Windows 10 users they can avoid the bug but only if they have a computer with a sizeable 12GB of RAM or more.
Batman: Arkham Knight has received several patches since its June launch but problems have continued to persist for many players. The hotly-anticipated title has disappointed scores of mouse and keyboard gamers while their console counterparts continue playing with none of the issues that have plagued the PC port.
