I wasn't sure if I should get the game at launch or wait till a price drop, but after I accidentaly stumbled upon a thumbnail on youtube which showed the knight unmasked the decision was quickly made, lol. And I already had very strong suspicions on who it might be just from watching the trailers, and it turned out to be true, so that spoiler wasn't that big of a deal. But still, I then just said fk it and read the whole plot synopsis. It was okay overall I guess, but nothing really great. Kinda like the dark knight rises finale which was good, but not the big awesome ending everybody was expecting from the end of the trilogy. Knowing the whole story doesn't really ruined the game for good for me, but now I can easily wait till it is much cheaper. I also probably wouldn't have read up on the whole story if I was really hyped for the game in the first place.^^

And considering that I still haven't even finished all the stuff in the second area in WItcher 3, buying another open world game isn't such a good idea right now anyway. xD Guess I put that money into usf4 and dmc 4 hd.

I think you can use them from the get-go.

Amen, brother.

Stew Scanlon

Yup. And of the two released open-world games, Origins is actually better. Tighter plotting, better writing, better character designs. Too bad that it was viewed as a simple retread and Rocksteady go out of their way to shit all over it.

Edit: ayyy, looks like @mustainium is with me on this. High five!

i havent played origins yet, but i did 3 star on all challenges plus all riddler trophies. I loved the story in AC more so than Asylum. You all make it sound like origins is the best story. i feel like i have to beat that before midnight tonight!

I've already changed my tune. I'm hyped!

"Best game of the console generation" 20 months into the console generation is fucking hysterical.

7 on Gamespot, hm? Yeah. Okay, I can see that. It's another one of those, even if it is well made.

@twolines said:

I imagine it boils down to whether or not you're tired of Batman yet. I'm not tired of Arkham games yet; I even liked Origin(s?) despite being really salty to the changes in Freeflow. More of the same is exactly what I'm looking for in this case, but I understand why others might be turned off by that (as it seems Van Ord was).

I'm more curious to know how Rocksteady was supposed to improve upon the Arkham formula for their finale. The gameplay was pretty much perfect from the first outing. I can't imagine these games playing any differently, or any better.

7/10 from Gamespot?

That is almost... a bad review.

It is shit that the only reviews out there are for the Ps4 version. Why has it become the norm to send out only one version of a game ahead of release? This does not make me preorder the game for that specific console, but rather wait until the game is released and reviews for both Ps4 and Xbox are available. Sure, I have a Ps4, but I also have an Xbox, and I would like to see how that version holds up before I decide what console to buy it for. Do they do this to boost sales of the Ps4 version?

@victork: I don't know if this is the case for AK, specifically, but Jeff mentioned on a bombcast once that publishers often only send out one version early for review for a variety of different reasons. It could be the most polished version or just the one that was furthest along in its publishing track and easiest to distribute.

nah. gamespot doesnt do the 3 point scale places like ign does so 7 means good.

That's good to hear. I played maybe 5 hours of Origins and I think I was suffering from Batman fatigue and set it down for a while. Hearing random complaints (and Rocksteady's comments) about the game made picking it back up feel unnecessary. I'll give it another shot.

While I enjoyed it, I never felt like Arkham City took much advantage of the open world. Without chase sequences, large-scale outdoor battles, non-combative NPCs, or vehicles, the city felt lifeless and unnecessary. I would generally just zip to my next objective, beat up some thugs on a building's steps, and proceed to the tighter, more varied indoor and underground maps. Occasionally, I would engage in a puzzle or random event, but I don't recall any being very interesting. Where the Asylum took advantage of every inch of space and felt designed around the specific gameplay needs, it seemed like Rocksteady designed the City first and then started filling it up with extra features that would flesh out the map.

I'm hoping that there are some fun chase sequences and battles that take advantage of the open world with the addition of the batmobile/bat-tank.

I would probably be in complete agreement with you about Origins if there weren't multiple progress-impeding bugs and if the combat had been just a little tighter. At high level play, there were some significant issues with Batman's targeting, evading, and countering--just some light jank and inconsistency--that hadn't been present to the same degree in Asylum or City.

I think I only encountered one rough bug in Origins so I probably got lucky. I'm tempted to play through the Arkhams now.

I can get on this bandwagon, although I haven't played Origins.

In a few years when you have the urge to play another batman game maybe give orgins a try. its not bad

My only experience with the Batman games was the Arkham Asylum demo 6 years ago... I'm super pumped for this.

The only problem with Origins is the same problem with AC brotherhood, franchise fatigue. Otherwise both stand out as one of the best games in the series they represented. Boss fights in Origins are actually fun, and there weren't as many bad platforming missions (only one i played actually), and the story was good.

I think it took me a year or 2 to finally play brotherhood and ending up loving that game, and I didn't play origins for a year after a bought it. Only played it because arkham knight caught my attention again.

Too bad it looks like these reviews won't be reflective of the PC version, I feel I should have just got the ps4 version.

I never encountered any bugs, to be honest, and I do think them announcing they weren't going to fix some of it was pretty bad. But at the same time, there are certain things about game development that the general public finds hard to fathom, and it definitely is possible that it just wasn't worth it for them to spend time and money fixing something that a small minority of players had seen. I know they fixed that vent thing, which was apparently present for everyone, so at least there's that.

I didn't notice a whole lot of jank, but Batman's combat has never been particularly challenging to begin with. After getting 1000/1000 in Asylum, I never bothered with many of the challenge stuff, largely because they introduced that "campaign" thing that would make you replay maps over and over.

At the very least, Origins didn't have every single NPC talking about how Catwoman and Harley Quinn are "bitches" that they want to fuck.

Really excited. Like I said though, most people here suffer from confirmation bias and lacking self awareness.

I can't imagine feeling fatigued by non annual franchises as a lot of people here seem to, and the Giant Bomb staff. I played plenty of games in between each Arkham game, and a lot since the last one. I think I can handle one of those right now.

Consider yourself among the lucky then. I had checkpoints not trigger, entire mission-critical objectives fail to load. And I hit a doozy of a game-breaker in the game's final sequence with the Joker that forced me to restart the entire game from square one. They fixed some of the really big issues, but I think--on consoles at least--there are still side quests that can (but won't always) lock your progress. It's silly.

Money's not exactly tight, but it's tighter than usual, so I'm sitting here hovering over pre-ordering on PS4 to get the pre-load started, wondering how late this Quick Look scheduled for a half hour ago is going to be. :(

Everything I've read in the reviews though makes me fairly confident I'll love taking a break from Witcher 3 to plow through this.

Anyone else seeing the Quick Look scheduled for YESTERDAY?

The quick look is up.

@xseanzx: Does it have its own page yet? I prefer to download the file. Nevermind. Found it through the wiki page.

30 Fps locked PC version. Looks like a hack job on that end. It's unlockable, but that is pretty much always a very bad sign.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1068628

I guess that most of the reviewers have either played the new Batman game on the console or they have been lucky with their pc setups since there are a fair number of people on steam atm who are somewhat disappointed with the choppiness of the game. Which seems to dip into low fps especially when you are driving around in the bat mobile. Not to mention the fact that the game is locked to 30 fps on pc´s (though you can tweak the ini files).

The game has 287 reviews on steam (user rating is mixed). Once again it seems that people with amd based graphics cards are having a hard time with the game. Especially as it seems that they changed the requirements for graphics cards memory from 2 gigabytes to 3 gigabytes for amd based cards.