Did you pick up either Mortal Kombat X or Batman: Arkham Knight for your PC? Or perhaps even grab both? If your answer was no, then good. You made wise decisions, even though both games are pretty great in their respective ways. You’re better off without them, as Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment is dropping the ball on its ports of PC games.
The problem is, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment isn’t showing the PC versions of popular games like Mortal Kombat X and Batman: Arkham Knight the same attention as the console releases. Honestly, it’s inexcusable. These are AAA, big name games. People waited and salivated over these titles. Pre-orders were made. And, given the nature of PCs, both titles should have performed as well as, if not better than, the console releases.
With Mortal Kombat X , it was due to High Voltage Games being tapped for the PC port. It’s a studio known for problems with its final products, and the fighter is no exception. It had a pre-loading problem. It would crash. There were frame rate issues. A patch designed to fix problems ended up deleting save data with no hope of salvation. Even to this day, it’s inferior when compared to the PS4 and Xbox One iterations. It’s unacceptable.
A similar problem has happened with Batman: Arkham Knight . Warner Bros. and Rocksteady revealed that Iron Galaxy Studios was responsible for this version of the game. The game is capped at 30fps, but often dips quite lower. It hogs resources. Textures don’t load properly. There are handling issues with the Batmobile. The console versions don’t have these issues to this degree, and it’s wrong that such a highly anticipated release would be flubbed.
Clearly, Warner Bros. has an issue when it comes to hiring companies to perform ports of games designed for consoles to PCs. It isn’t investigating these developers to determine if they’re up to the task. While Iron Galaxy could handle BioShock Infinite , clearly there were problems putting together Batman: Arkham Knight that should have been caught. And every company should know by now that High Voltage can’t be trusted with important releases like Mortal Kombat X . There are reputations to uphold and customers to impress, and Warner Bros. clearly isn’t taking them into consideration.
These two releases have become a cautionary tale, and that’s heartbreaking. Anyone who would ever be interested in a PC version of a Warner Bros. game should take heed. Look at what happened to people who picked up Mortal Kombat X and Batman: Arkham Knight . See how long it has taken and is taking for games to be fixed? Save your money or only go with a console release.