After the mess that was Batman: Arkham Origins‘ PC port, which featured a plethora of bugs both superfluous and game-breaking that Warner Bros. were also pretty lazy about fixing in the form of patches, I opted for the PS4 version of Batman: Arkham Knight instead. It turns out that this was a good decision, as the PC version of the game is plagued by a multitude of problems that have caused its Steam rating to drop significantly, along with publisher Warner Bros. stating that they are to remove it from sale until it is fixed.
Unfortunately, while the PC version is a shambolic mess of port, the PS4 version of the game is not without its own array of odd technical issues, either, and while I am under the impression that my personal experiences with the (many) flaws I have come across during my playtime are not representative of the experiences many others are having, as the game has only recently released it’s certainly worth noting as I’ve yet to find anyone else discussing on the ‘net discussing these problems.
For the first two hours or so of my time with Arkham Knight, the game ran smoothly and I came across no problems. However, during the early side-mission Creature of the Night, every time I tried to (minor spoilers here, folks) confront the Man-Bat, my game would freeze and my PS4 would crash. This issue only seemed to occur when I attempted to grapple hook to one particular building whilst pursuing the Man-Bat, forcing the little Bat Symbol to show up in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen as if the game were loading, only for nothing to happen. My PS4 would then freeze up, and while I eventually managed to complete the mission by avoiding that particular building (I stupidly didn’t take a screenshot of it, which perhaps would’ve helped to better illustrate the issue), from there on out my game became a bit of a mess.
The first time I noticed that it was experiencing some, to put it kindly, “technical difficulties” was during cutscenes and sections in which Batman talks to his allies via his odd little Bat-Skype feature tucked away in his gauntlets. During many of these scenes, the audio would play ahead of the action on-screen, making them horrendously out of sync. This became even more annoying during pivotal moments in the game’s story, as I was forced to hear what was going to happen before those events transpired on-screen. This issue has now permeated my experience with Arkham Knight, with these audio problems being present in roughly 75% of any cutscenes I now come across.
But that’s not the only issue – whilst traversing through the open-world environment of Gotham, I found that the game paused to load more and more. At least, that’s what I think it’s doing – no review that I’ve read thus far has stated how Gotham has to load sometimes when you’re exploring it, and I’m assuming that this is something that would definitely be mentioned considering that the city isn’t exactly the largest open-world environment we’ve ever seen no matter how good-looking it is, meaning that on current-gen consoles we should be able to glide through it with ease without having to wait for the game to catch up with us. I’m sceptical that this is something that was intended to happen, though, as during one particular chase scene with the Batmobile, the game froze roughly every 15 seconds until I had completed the mission.
So in short, it seems that I have somehow managed to irreparably break the game during the Man-Bat side-mission. I don’t know how this is technically possible, but it is most certainly an issue and one that has prevented me from enjoying Arkham Knight as much as I would have liked to. It should also be noted that these problems may well exist in the Xbox One version of the game, but as I have not played it I can’t comment on whether or not this is the case.
I’ve reached out to Warner Bros. to find out whether this is a known issue with the game that has been reported by other players, so if you’ve experienced similar problems, feel free to let me know in the comments section.
