sweetz

@thorniergravy: Eye of Providence. If you're not from the US, I can understand not being familiar with it. If you are from the US, sheesh man, how can you look at a dollar bill and not want to know what the heck that is, such that you would have already educated yourself about it.

"End of an era" seems a little dramatic for moving floors in their office.

I've been presuming that they're getting a space more suited to their needs (like maybe a better studio area). So if this intent is that the move heralds a new, better era, that's good.

On the other hand, while I certainly don't consume every piece of GB content and could have missed something, I haven't heard any of the guys saying anything overtly positive about the move - they just sort of acknowledge that they are moving.

Now I'm worried. Maybe they're getting an even crappier space?

@coldhands0802: I'm a fan of the series and yet I agree. The way in which those games soldiered on without meaningful improvement is, I think, emblematic of why Japanese games would decline in the generation to follow.

I was weirdly addicted to those games - or at least buying them. The only PS2-era game I actually finished was the original Armored Core 2; I don't think I put more than 4 hours in any of the following games, yet I kept buying them all the way up to Nine Breaker out of some weird sense of dedication. Only graduating from college in 2004 and having less time for games broke me of that.

Something I wanted to mention in regards to the Shadow Complex port and Dan mentioning there being a ton of crappy Metroidvanias on Steam in the intervening years: while there have been quite a few Metroidvanias since Shadow Complex, I really can't think of many bad ones. I find that, oddly enough, entries into that genre are almost always solid.

Castlevania: Mirrors of Fate (PC port) is probably the "worst" one I've played and I'd still give that at least a 3/5.

I think a big reason that these games are often good is because they require more planning than a straight up platformer. They also can't go down the almost always disappointing route of procedural (read: random) generation since the levels need to be laid out in a specific manner keeping in mind the abilities the player will have when he reaches them. I think by nature of these games requiring a more thoughtful design, they end up being better games.

I'd like to ask @danryckert what he would point out as bad examples of the genre. There are definitely some games that show up under the Metroidvania tag on Steam that I've never heard of (and I'm betting Dan hasn't either) that have bad reviews, but they appear to be the exception rather than the norm.

PS. I never had a 360 (I was mainly PC with a PS3 pretty much only for Uncharted and Ratchet & Clank games) and Shadow Complex is one of the few things I really regretted missing out on. I was incredibly pleased to hear it was finally coming out (even if it is a thinly veiled way for Epic to get people to download their own digital distribution client - because we really needed yet another one of those). I played it a bunch over the weekend and it still seems fantastic to me. The jumping is a little wonky like Jeff said, but hardly game breaking.

I (re)played through the entirety of the Dark Forces/Jedi Knight series roughly 2 years ago, and I personally found that Dark Forces held up better than any of them.

I loved Jedi Knight back in the day, but by modern standards, the floaty, imprecise saber combat just sucks so much. I came to the conclusion that the brawler-style combo system that Force Unleashed used is indeed a better way to handle saber combat. Jedi Knight also has a lot unpleasant jumping puzzles and a surprising amount of simply walking from point A to point B. The levels are huge, but also relatively featureless.

The saber combat still doesn't feel all that great in Outcast and Academy and they both left with a bit a "meh" feeling. Academy still feels like an expansion pack made by a "B" team and has some good levels, but also some really bad ones (like the speeder bike level). Outcast is second in my ranking, but still a little underwhelming.

Dark Forces however, is amazingly still a solid first person shooter. The levels are all incredible set pieces and the varied weapons are still fun to use.

@efesell: Did people make these same arguments when Crysis came out, because no single GPU available at the time it came out could run it as well as Batman runs on a 970 or above. Did you people saying it was horribly unoptimized, or did they just accept that it needed more power for it's level of fidelity?

I don't know what a reasonable expectation is for performance because Arkham Knight is one of the best looking games I've ever seen. I can't run Witcher 3 or MGSV or GTA5 at a solid 60fps all the time either and I would argue they don't push as much detail as Batman does as it's best moments. People just want the world for nothing now because of the last 5 years of graphics stagnation.

@danm_999:Eh I'm starting to smell a little disingenuousness from their reports. Watch the attached video. What they call "stutter" is momentary drop to 56fps. That's not stutter and if you look at the video it's barely perceptible and not disruptive to gameplay at all. They're just playing it up for negativity because unfortunately that's what generate hits. They make claims but their own evidence they provide doesn't back it up. I've spent plenty of time with the game and I was satisfied with how it performed throughout.

While you guys are angry (perhaps without even actually having played the game yourselves...) somehow I mysteriously managed to play and enjoy the hell out of it and I'm a diehard PC gamer through and through with all the typical expectations. So where does the truth lie?

@efesell: Because it would be the first or only PC game where the minimum requirements aren't sufficient for the experience you really want? Hardly; that's just PC gaming business as usual.

Go look at the system requirements for GTA 5 or the Witcher 3 and tell me whether you think the recommended card there will run it 60fps @ 1080p on high settings. The answer is no for both.

I'm not saying Batman wasn't performing worse than it could have upon release, but I think it's acceptable now, and I've seen far worse performing and far more problematic games in the last 15 years PC gaming, yet never with such high profile a stink being made about it - and I attribute some of that to the current state of gaming press which feeds off negativity in some deplorable ways. That in turn just emboldens people to form this narrative of it being "the worst port ever" when that's simply not the case, not even close.

@danm_999: Ars's article is just referencing Digital Foundry's. DF is the only outlet that actually did their own research and the issues they noted were with 2GB cards - and I don't think it's a reasonable expectation that 2GB is sufficient. The "underpowered" consoles have more than that. It's weird to see Digital Foundry, who really should know better, harp on the 2GB performance so much. It's a forgone conclusion that games would eventually need more than 2GB of video memory, just like there were games you couldn't reasonably run on 1GB and 512MB cards before that... With the level of graphics in the game, 4GB seems like a perfectly reasonable requirement to me.

Again I think people have been spoiled by graphics development in AAA games being constrained by last gen consoles for almost a decade. Now that graphics are finally making a notable leap again, people have forgotten what it's like to actually need a new video card.

DF say there are still some stutters with 4GB cards, except their own video does not demonstrate this, instead showing a rock solid 60fps throughout their test video - at least with nVidia cards. I did not experience stutters on my GTX 970, I see many posts of similarly satisfied people with 970s or 980s. I had a few sustained drops into the 40-50fps range when there was a lot of stuff on screen (some of the later tank battles with literally dozens of tanks on screen), but not the sort of frequent momentary drops I'd classify as a stutter.

@fatalbanana: There are so many games that have dual-GPU problems I don't know what Batman is being singled out. I built an SLI system 3 years ago and will never do that again. It's an endless stream of problems and futzing around. Also, while truly reliable information is hard to come by, it's rumored that the percentage of the PC gaming market with dual-GPU system is minuscule, around 300K users total worldwide - but of course SLI users are vocal because they are exactly the type to be serious enthusiasts and comment on forums, so that can skew perceptions. In any case, I just don't consider the dual-GPU issues noteworthy.

I played the game with 8GB of RAM and didn't experience any notable stuttering. Occasional drops to lower framerates (mid 40s) when a lot was going on, but not stutters. I do, however, have an SSD - which I think should be standard equipment for any PC gamer these days, they are not unreasonably expensive anymore and make a world of difference in many games.

@danm_999: Game runs fine post patch, as several other people have commented. If you can't run it without issue, it's likely that you either have unreasonable expectations for the performance you should get with your hardware, or you have a poorly maintained a PC.

4GB or video memory is not an unreasonable requirement and regarding the statement that consoles have a fraction of the power, note that a developer can dedicate more than 4GB to video memory on the consoles if they need it. Raw GPU compute performance on high end PC video cards is better, but amount of memory still matters a lot and a good percentage of the PC market is on video cards that are WORSE than the consoles in that respect. People have been spoiled by graphics being largely held back by the previous console gen for a long time. It seems they've forgotten what it was like when you needed to buy a new video card to play a new game. Batman is one of the most graphically complex games I've ever seen, I find nothing ridiculous about it needing 4GB of video memory.

I've seen people use Witcher 3 as a basis of comparison as something their system can run fine, and while Witcher 3 is very pretty, it's grassy fields and tight city streets aren't pushing the level of goemetric detail that flying over the Gotham in Arkham Knight does.

I mean look at this man. Yeah the far background is just a skybox, but there's still a metric fuckton of polys, particles, and light sources in this scene. I find the fact this runs 60fps @ 1080p on my GTX 970 to be quite good.

---edit---

Giant Bomb's image rescaling has absolutely murdered my screenshot into a blurry mess. Here's a link to the original on my Steam profile.