Rumour: Warner Bros. knew Arkham Knight wasn't right on PC

Sources close to the project say the publisher knew in advance that the game had issues.

When the PC version of Batman: Arkham Knight launched in a sorry state, there were many who wondered how exactly the game had made it to market in the state that it did. Well, according to sources close to Kotaku, the publisher knew that all was not well with Rocksteady's trilogy closer well before the game's launch in June.

"I will say that it's pretty rich for WB to act like they had no idea the game was in such a horrible state," said one QA tester who had apparently worked on Arkham Knight for "years".

"It's been like this for months and all the problems we see now were the exact same, unchanged, almost a year ago."

Later in the report the same person said: "Getting it to work on consoles was impossible for months. That's part of why the game got delayed so many times, they were totally unprepared for how hard it was on next-gen consoles."

A second source, not a QA tester but someone still allegedly close to the project, said that the QA teams were told to focus on console issues, repeating the point that Rocksteady had underestimated how difficult development would be on the Xbox One and PS4.

Apparently they were told that "testers should focus time on finding console bugs." According to the source only 10% of the 100-strong team were working on the PC version.

The second source also told the site the bug-checking was done at 720p resolutions, but with many players on PC pushing it up 1080p, there's an obvious disparity there. The report also states that Rocksteady didn't want to use traditional PC testing companies because they wanted to protect the game's story from leaking.

Obviously we can't accurately assess the veracity of these claims, but it's certainly hard to imagine that the publisher and studio didn't know that there were issues with Batman: Arkham Knight on PC.

The fact remains that the PC version of the game is still not back on sale, and Rocksteady are working like crazy to get it back shipshape. It's a shame really, because when we played the console version of the game, we thought it was absolutely brilliant.