The Reviews Are In And They Are Not Surprising.

https://www.metacritic.com/game/playstation-5/gotham-knights/critic-reviews

Basically, Knights is the latest loot fest game with not much in it. Think of it as if The Avengers game got a Batman DLC released. That's basically is what Knights is. And of course there is the inexcusable 30fps on consoles debacle. Very disappointing, since I was excited for this game when the first trailer dropped and they showed that Mr. Freeze gameplay trailer. But It seems like every delay made the game worse, and here we are.

At least the price will drop for those interested still, and it will be on GamePass and PS Plus within months.

I can’t say I care much about the 30fps freak out but it does just seem kinda bland.

I'll reserve judgement until Digital Foundry looks at the PC version. Not that my expectations were very high to begin with, but I'll take an okay Batman game at a grey market price if the PC version runs well. I mean, this game isn't using Unreal 3, let alone stretching it to it's limits. ...right?

The PC version will run better, but it can't fix the bland gameplay, uninspired art direction, and lifeless feeling of the city.

I think going forward, we are going to start seeing a lot more 'locked 30fps' games on consoles. It's just the nature of the beast.

The 30FPS still seems odd, cause something like Forbidden West, while admittedly console exclusive, looks gorgeous and runs at 60FPS with a gigantic open world on top of it and also still came out on PS4. I can't say I'd be surprised if 30FPS would become more frequent again whatever the case though. Super disappointed, for sure, but not sadly surprised.

That said, looking at the reviews, the framerate not being up to snuff doesn't seem to be the only issue. Maybe still worth trying at some point, but not for full price.

It's inevitable. Unfortunately, the last 2 years where nearly every game has a been a cross generation release has created some warped expectations about console gaming this generation. Obviously, games designed to accommodate the PS4 and Xbox One would have little issue running at 60 FPS on PS5 and XSX, so 2 years of basically every game supporting 60 FPS on these consoles seems to have created the expectation among some that 60 FPS is now a standard for this generation of consoles.

The reality, of course, is that we have at least 5 more years with these consoles and developers are going to continue pushing advanced rendering, simulation, and visual fidelity. As cross generation development fades away and the current generation consoles become the baseline development target, games are going to be pushing the hardware much harder. I still think 60 FPS options will remain more common than previous generations, but the days of every console game (or even most games) supporting 60 FPS are coming to an end.

Fidelity uber alles. Once graphics stop getting sharper, they'll get to work on framerate.

The 30 fps part is certainly the least of the issues people are talking about. I still use my Switch as a home console pretty regularly, and a lot of the major releases (MonHun, Zelda) for that still run at 30.

But the boring gameplay and seemingly awful traversal mechanics are what are going to prevent me from playing this.

That's not happening this generation, probably not in the next either. Video game rendering is still advancing and will continue to do so. Simulation is becoming the future, so instead of faking things like lighting and reflections, they can now be done as a simulation with things like Ray Tracing. This will move into others areas of rendering beyond just lighting. Video game rendering technology isn't peaking anytime soon.

I think I've played all the major PS5 releases thus far on Fidelity modes anyway, so just make sure that 30 is solid and I'm fine with it.

@noboners: Except in this thread, where it's all anyone wants to talk about. Even if it's just to say that they don't care about it.

Truly the "Let's go Cena/Cena sucks" chant of the Giant Bomb forum.

@undeadpool: oh yeah I'm realizing I left out some words in my post that made it confusing. I meant it as "everyone's talking about the 30 fps but that's what I'm least concerned about."

Either way I was pretty surprised by that being the biggest topic of discussion in this thread.

Fair dues!
Seeing screenshots, and as someone who played WAY TOO MUCH of that Avengers game: this looks like that with a DC coat of paint.

This just makes me want to finally play Arkham Origins.

I like Origins. It's dumb but still solid and there's a story beat I really like.

@csl316: You've been missing out on arguably the best story in the whole Arkham series with Origins. Forget those early negative stuff they were saying about the game when it came out. Almost everyone of them has since changed their tune and now give Origins its props.

I personally have Origins as the second best game behind Asylum in the series.

I’m the “think about how much you spend in one night at a bar/restaurant/movie theater!!” guy when it comes to the pricing conversation in video games, though I also admittedly know the feeling of “I spent $30 on Game X and only got 8 good hours out of it” but something about this game being $70 doesn’t sit right.

Especially because I’ve seen a not totally rare take going around that it’ll at least be nice to have a Batman-esque game to kill some time with until Ragnarok or Modern Warfare or whatever comes out. From Tam’s preview to some of the blurbs I’ve read, the combat systems are tweaked just enough and communicated ever so slightly abstract in a way that’s gonna confound many of those people.

I really wanted to like this game and was a perpetual skeptic of the lukewarm anticipation (even as I also felt the preview footage leaned “off” in an unexplainable way) but more than anything Gotham Knights strikes me as a game that bit off more than it could chew.

Unless you have a good core gaming crew that loves to goof off together this strikes me as a game without a country.

Watching GB and Nextlander playing this, outside of the rough framerate that definitely didn't remain stable at least on Series X, I think the emptiness of the world, the numerous activities and the mess of menus finally hit me in a way that made me realize that I might not even pick this from a sale later on. It just looked boring as hell.

I hope Rocksteady manages to handle Suicide Squad better.

I dunno, the feeling I get just from reading the reviews is that this is one of those "epitome of a 7/10 game" games. Not necessarily terrible, but certainly doesn't stand out among the other big open world clusterfucks being released either.

I feel like pointing out that this game currently has a higher Metacritic score than Saint's Row, another uninspired open world game that borrows heavily from a successful predecessor while trying to do it's own thing. Granted, Saint's Row also had a huge amount of bugs to deal with, but Knights also sounds like it has it's own problems.

@ll_exile_ll said:

Similar sentiments were aimed at Cyberpunk, but I've played that for over 400 hours since launch.

No, they weren't. No one was complaining about Cyberpunk's art direction or the design of the city. That was often lauded as one of the best things about that game. The closest you could maybe get were people complaining about the simulation of the city (pedestrian behavior, police AI, etc.), but one of the biggest appeals of Cyberpunk, even at launch, was just existing in one of the most beautifully crafted Cyberpunk cities seen in a video game. Gotham Knights doesn't have anything like that going for it.

@glots: the menus! They seem really convoluted and filled with RPG mechanics that don't need to be there and...crafting?! Seems like it should be a LOT cleaner.

Every time I read or see something new about this game it doesn't feel good. I don't want to advocate that games continue outright rehashing of old games, and going into this I very much didn't want more of the same old Arkham shit however -- at this point I think I'd rather have just had more of the same Arkham shit.

I went back and played Arkham Origins earlier this year because I never finished it the first time. Its a good game. I'd even rate it above Arkham Knight. And arguably the best story. The detective stuff is not super involved but its at least engaging enough, while giving you a bit more of that flavoring to mix things up. The boss fights we're some of the best in the whole series too. Do you want to fight Deathstroke? Or do you wanna fight Deathstroke in a tank.

Gotham Knights should have at least been Origins good. I'd like to know if this took so long because higher ups just kept tampering with what this game was gonna be. It looks like somewhere along the line they fell short trying to please too many crowds. It may have been better if they just leaned into the GaS and created what Avengers could have been. Instead its like they got stuck between that and the game that single player gamers wanted. Then on top of that, they manage to make the combat worse. Awha? How is that possible? That is likely the deal breaker for me in the long run. I was excited to, at the very least, get some enjoyment out of returning to Gotham and playing that particular combat system.

At best, given my love for the rest of the Arkham games, I'll consider it Game Pass fodder and maybe give it a shot when it shows up there. It already feels like the winds are blowing in that direction. For what its worth, I hope the devs just got screwed by executive indecision and they don't get canned because of this. 9 years is a long time to then go on and flop like it seems to be.

@ll_exile_ll: Yeah; two out of three: the "bland gameplay" and "lifeless city", which is close enough to similar as far as I'm concerned.

But my main point is to relay my own impressions about the game based on what I've seen of it thus far. Like I said earlier, my expectations aren't very high, so I'm not going to play the game until I see it for around $30. But because I'm waiting for that price point, a "bland" and "lifeless" for $30 doesn't seem so bad or need much "fixing" in my opinion; thus me mentioning Cyberpunk because I'd often see "bland" and "lifeless" applied to that game as well despite my enjoyment of the game. ...which makes me question if people actually do the miscellaneous activities in GTA that are seen as "missing" in Cyberpunk, but I digress.

Anyway. About performance, which is my bigger concern: Still waiting on Digital Foundry to do their thing, but going though Steam's forums and seeing some benchmarking videos, one involving a 3090 having a very wide frame rate range, between 80 and 30, maxed out at 2160p, but also seeing CultOfMush getting a decent range of frames at 1440p on his system with the game's auto-detected settings, I'm getting the same "your mileage may vary" vibes that I got from Arkham Knight, which doesn't inspire much confidence until I get more information on the matter because I'm not in the market for a new GPU.