So long as the masses keep lapping up subpar ports, the publishers couldn't care less. People with little to no standards and poor self-control are why those of us who are still sane can't have nice things anymore.
@@Shieftaini don’t feel like that’s gonna fix anything with silent boycotting. Corporate executives are out of touch and will blame anything else other than the actual issue. With gaming journalism only going to report on these issues if customers are dealing with it, it’s really up to the average joe to play the role of the reviewer nowadays.
@@Shieftain Finally somebody who gets it. It's really painful to know my chosen recreation activity is largely inhabited by drooling consumers who can't stop themselves from buying absolute garbage.
@@leithaziz2716 yeah the elden ring pc port sucks, but I’m honestly glad that FromSoftware put effort into Armored Core VI. Which you can’t say for other Japanese developers shitting out bad ports that get defended by the same kind of fanboys.
What happened to WB? Seriously? Who thought this was acceptable? Who thought Gotham Knights was acgeptable? Who thought ruining Rocksteady by making their next game a games as service title? The executives clearly don't care about creativity, or their customers.
My man, WB has been doing half-*ssed ports for some time now. Arkham Origins (great game) is still pretty buggy, Arkham Knight on PC launch, handled by Iron Galaxy, was unplayable, and all the MK Switch ports have been terrible.
They know that a lot of people just don't notice or don't care about this sort of thing. I had a look at the Switch subreddit a few days ago when people started pointing out how bad these ports were, and there were a not-insignificant amount of people defending them, saying that the issues were "blown out of proportion" and they'd been playing it just fine.
You mean like every corporate overlord publisher for games? They're all like this. None of them care about making games or creativity, they care about making money. They know people will give them money regardless of the minimal amount of work. You care, I care, and a few others care, but *most* don't. And that's who they care about.
Yeah, QA gets thrown under the bus far to often. Remember how the CEO of CDPR blamed them for CP2077's poor launch as if the fucking QA team somehow missed the boatload of bugs on every platform and gave CDPR the thumbs up lol.
@@devilmikey00 It's not like QA sign off on the golden master and ship it out with no one else in the company seeing it. Every department knew that game was broken.
As someone who played Asylum and City on a dual core 1.3 ghz processor and an Integrated GPU on fairly high settings and got mostly stable 30fps, something is VERY wrong with these ports. Arkham games have always been known for their optimization, sans Knight on PC, but the fact that these aren't even running at 30 on switch is absurd, ludicrous even.
I agree for the PS3 generation, but everything after that point has felt awful. For example, even the PS4 remaster of Asylum and City are locked to 30fps with horrid input latency. They should have just made it an HD port instead, to simply bring it up to the PC version. Only adding extra visual effects if the console could handle it.
I played City on an old gaming laptop with a first gen core cpu with 2 cores, hyperthreated, 4 GB ram and Radeon mobile 5730 (higher clocked 5650) and it almost never dropped below 45, staying around 60. City ran around 45, in very rare occasions (very far city views with falling snow) dropping to around 30 fps, and that was on x86 with Windows 7 running in the background, off a 5400 rpm hdd. Something's seriously wrong here.
@@gamble777888 it's a quad processor. But the gpu, which is the main thing holding it back, SHOULDN'T be producing this result, heck, the stuttering shouldn't be happening bevause of the multicore
This really should have been a next gen Nintendo release. They could have just given us the WiiU version of Origins instead of Knight and then have that be a nice standalone remaster down the line.
They won't give us origins. People has been asking for an Origins port for ages. But Origins will continue to the be unloved stepchild of the franchise.
Hilarious a game a decade old needs to be ported to the "next gen" system....nintendo needs to stop using last generation phone hardware for their consoles. Its embarassing
I think everyone knew this as soon as it was accounted on the switch a disastrously under powered console, for hecks sake even the trailer for it was almost in stop motion I rememebr watching it lol
I remember the suffering 😢... Same with MGSV tpp, but fortunately I bought an Arkham knight PS4 bundle when the game launched and played all those games and had a much better experience !
I don’t understand why they would’ve even attempted to port Arkham Knight on switch. If the idea was to sell a trilogy I think porting Arkham Origins instead of Knight would’ve been a better choice, plus it would give origins a chance to finally get some love for once.
I mean they've ported a number of demanding PS4 titles successfully on Switch. Dying Light, Witcher 3, Hogwarts, Doom Eternal, etc. They could have done it here as well but they were just lazy.
@@pixelmentia They all had effort, care, and probably most importantly, money behind them to make genuinely good versions of those games though. I bet the goal of this was to crap it out as cheap as possible.
Im glad you covered this one Oliver. Your brand of blunt constructive criticism was perfect. I was interested in the trilogy when it was announced, and am baffled at how bad it came out
With some inside knowledge: The original was developed specifically for PS4 and XBONE with 8GB of shared memory. The base video memory data set with a modest texture cache just about fit on those consoles. When it was ported over to PC a minimum VRAM requirement of 4GB should have been applied AND Nvidia even smashed through that with GameWorks volumetric smoke that had a 700MB texture. The problem for the Switch is that its got 4GB i.e half of the original consoles and you cant easily get memory back from the executable, meshes, animation etc: the memory reductions have to largely come from textures hence the terrible textures. As for the performance the rendering was completely multithreaded (a large mod to ue3 - alongside moving it to prelim version of dx12(dx11x) and gnm) and the same goes for the rest of the CPU work. It completely flooded the 8 cores of the ps4 and xbone. It was never going to run well on the Switch CPU without cutting a lot but how would you cut out physics/ai etc without a major change to gameplay. Essentially I feel sorry for the developers here - this port was doomed.
On original PC on Nvidia try -disablemtr to turn off dx11 multithreading - the gfx driver possibly wasnt so happy with deferred command lists on certain configurations it seemed.
Just curious (as a layman), why did this port fail so spectacularly, when doom eternal was such a seamless port, despite undoubtedly being the more impressive game?
@@Superboologan1Because the cutbacks in Doom Eternal were mostly on the GPU. You can always make the graphics worse until it fits. Arkham Knight was limited by memory and CPU, and it's really hard to lower demands for those without changing gameplay. You don't want less enemies or simpler physics since that would make the gameplay worse. Also you can't really compare DE and AK. Different types of games, different engines, made with different goals and in different times for different consoles.
@@doubleog6149 Wrong. Riddler puzzles are my favorite content in the Arkham games, especially in City and Knight. A lot of work went into those puzzles and Knight had more Riddler content than any prior game so you know they were popular with the fans according to Rocksteady's market research. Riddler content is also one of the reasons Origins gets rated so poorly. Bad / little Riddler content.
@@destroyermcw626you know that game is also on Xbox 360 and PS3? Switch can easily handle batman Arkham origins because the switch is more powerful than 7th generation consoles and Wii U.
This is way deeper than just a case of Switch being underpowered. Other 8th-gen ports like Doom 2016/Eternal and Witcher 3 look and run far better. I feel like they just didn't put the time into this port that it needed. Heck, even Hogwart's Legacy runs far smoother than this.
I'm honestly really glad they went with the original versions of Asylum and City and not the ones from Return to Arkham. Was not a fan of how that handled the cutscenes and character models. Made everything look overly bright for no reason.
@@haxeltheplug1913 The cutscene brightness in RTA is different from the in-game brightness for some reason so even if I did, I would have to keep configuring it after every cutscene. Also that still wouldn't account for the lighting and character model changes in the cutscenes which in my opinion, make them look significantly worse than in the original.
Shouldn't this be illegal to sell a broken product at full price. Not to mention exploiting customers without any ramifications. We badly need a Quality Check Government Authority to verify such easily detectable unfinished ports for consoles & at recommended specs for PC.
810p for Arkham Knight is deeeeeply stupid if you think about it, Switch has just 25,6 gb/s of memory bandwidth, i rather aim for a "enough" 720p with FRS2 on quality or balanced mode and done, it would be WAY BETTER than a stuttery 20 fps experience...
This. My hats off to Panic Button for that superb Switch port of DOOM 2016 & DOOM Eternal. 👍👍👍👍👍👍 Both games visual identity largely remains recognizeable, and it has rock solid 30FPS with little to no dips in performance.
Weren't companies like Capcom the one to voice their concern to Nintendo that 2GB ram isn't enough for RE Engine to run that ultimately pushes Nintendo to have 4GB ram instead?
Yup. And they also had the opportunity to use an enhanced Nvidia Tegra X1 chip (X1 +) or even wait a little for the X2 but nope, they went for the cheapest hardware possible to maximize profits. Screw the developers and screw the consumers.
@@J.A.Z-TheMortalThe X1 made sense because it was already being commercially produced and would therefore be cheaper and easily to actually get. They had to get something out in the face of the Wii U failing and faltering 3DS sales, so waiting for something new made little sense. Given the struggles in the tech industry in the few years following the Switch launch regarding chip availability, it's pretty clear they made the right call.
@@J.A.Z-TheMortalNintendo always went with that strategy. Cost effective and mass produced old but reliable technology. Oddly enough it works for them now knowing they don't sell the Switch at a lost.
@@moister3727Nintendo only started doing this with the Wii. Every console before the Wii had basically state of the art hardware and technology. The Nintendo 64 was doing 3D graphics that weren’t possible on any other console but was expensive to make cartridges. The GameCube was significantly more powerful than the PS2 but was limited by its mini disc capacity. The Wii was basically a GameCube with motion controls and low capacity discs. The only thing that is consistent with Nintendo is that they still haven’t figured out cheap modern storage mediums for games.
Even for the Switch, it still feels like much more could have been done here. The fact that the games from the LAST TWO gens don't fear much better than Arkham Knight, says alot. I can't help but notice the launch is right in time for the holiday season, where Switch software goes into overdrive. There's no way you can convince me that developers weren't under pressure to get this game out.
How aren't the first two games running at 60fps... My low end PC back then could run the games at medium high options at 60fps, they were so well optimized
Seems like they should have made way more compromises to the world detail. Like, would it be ideal to cut the rain particles entirely? No, but when performance is this bad, that kind of cut would be preferable.
Was it hard to stay awake playing this disaster of a game at 3:53 AM? (note 2:48 into the video). You do a great job on these reviews. Thank you for staying up so late for us :)
He's playing on Richard's account, and they are in different timezones. With that said, Oliver is clearly a super dedicated and hard worker, and we are lucky to have him.
I can accept low res textures, shadows and effects, even less polygons to achieve a good gameplay but that horrible performance kills my desire to buy it. What makes me angrier is that I cannot buy them separately. Also, it was supposed to be a good port because they delay it 2 months to work on it, but we all know it was because October was full of good releases.
WB should just have ported Asylum and City with Origins, even if it had a different developer, that would have been much better and Origins would have gotten some traction again, maybe even leading to a remastered version for PS4, but no WB just had to put the most demanding game of the franchise on the underpowered Switch and called it a day, now they're also going to port Gotham Knights to the Switch as well
I could probably enjoy Asylum and City well enough, especially in portable mode, but knight is a bit too far. It's playable, but it would be rough. Glad I got these on my steam deck if wanted. I've been playing Origins on Deck and it's been running fine so far and looks great.
Thanks for the break down on this title. My suspicion was that this game was suffering from more than just coming out on older hardware, but there were far more problems at hand. It is not just that they made and released an unacceptable port of a demanding game (or set of games); it looks like they made really drastic cuts that go well beyond the what would have been needed to bring the game out on the switch. The developers may have still needed more time or resources, but pushed ahead anyway and there is no other way to put it than that this is a bafflingly bad port.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't there some Switch games where the cartridge and or e-Store purchase just downloads a client of some sort where the game is streamed and the actual processing happens on some sort of server? If thats a thing, then why not do it for Arkham Knight? We all know good and hell well the Switch couldnt run even a 480p super low LOD version of AK so why in the heck didn't they have it be streamed on some moderately powerful PC? *EDIT: I googled it, "Cloud Version." Why didn't WB just do that?!!?!
There is something about these games (putting aside Arkham Knight) that seem to be difficult to port. Even the Wii U version of city had frame time issues that were head scratchers for the time given it was an existing game that wouldn't be doing anything the Wii U couldn't handle. It would be easy to fault the skill of the porting houses but when you collectively look at multiple studios having trouble with these games even now I would love an honest conversation from developers about it. This latest release disappoints me even though I was never it's audience, as I don't feel I need a switch version myself. It is, however, as a series just an all time favorite that I want preserved and accessible to as many people as possible, so it's a real bummer.
You forgot to mention whether or not Harley Quinn's behind wobbles in the Switch version of Arkham Knight, or if she firmed it up. You disappoint me greatly, Digital Foundry.
Its a real shame. Asylum and City should have performed flawlessly, potentially even better with FSR2 and other techniques used nowadays on Switch. Knight would have been a tough nut to crack for the aging mobile hardware. Nice review.
I don't think FSR 2 would've done anything beneficial here. Looks like a heavy CPU bottleneck that's only able to be resolved with a complete redesign of the games rather than a port where settings are cut back so far with very little effects to overall playability.
The switch is mainly target at casual gamers. The type that do short burst gaming when they are outdoor. For this kind of consumers what the switch can do and deliver is already acceptable and enough for the switch owners already. Its mainly the consoles and pc gamers who are doing unfair comparisons and whining the loudest on the internet.
They could have swapped Arkham Knight out for Arkham Origins and focussed on polishing all of those. Then if they wanted to add Knight, wait for Switch 2. Some ports are just too big to fit into the small shoes that are Switch 1
Nintendo is just not interested in releasing current gen hardware in their consoles. The Switch was already way, way behind base PS4 and XOne with its measly 256 GPU cores and a mobile quadcore processor clocking at less than a GHZ. 4 GB of old DDR4 Ram with only 1600 Mhz clock speed is also very low and behind last gen. There are phones with more power than the Switch. They just shouldn't try to port last gen AAA games to the Switch.
@@memento81 Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal and a lot of other game ports would like to have a talk with you, the fact that arkham is a code mess that was released with no effort behind it as a cash cow is not the device's fault and it wouldn't have mattered if it was more powerful.
@@GemmstoneAthat comparison doesn’t work. You can’t use games that are built on different engines/tech to another. Even on the same engine there’s so much going on in the background it doesn’t work. I didn’t know this either until I got into game dev.
@@inshal6420 My guy, the location system in the map doesn't even work, yes, you're right that you can't compare engines, Unreal is so damn bloated for example, but that doesn't mean that this specific port wasn't released as a cash cow without effort, there's so many games that were ported that even if you don't like how they look, they at least work (ie. The Witcher 3) and are playable, this is not. and again, if the switch was 2 or 3 times more powerfull, it wouldn't have mattered.
I recently installed Batman: Arkham Asylum on my 13700k to see how it would play on the Intel UHD Graphics 770. It played great at 1440p max settings at a locked 60fps. There are a LOT of older games that will play on integrated graphics these days.
@@WH250398Ryzen APU's are nearly on par with a GTX 1050. By the time GTA 6 comes out on PC, I wouldn't be surprised to see Mini PCs being able to run it surprisingly well.
@@BlueAversion So bad in fact it got pulled from Steam. Although this was more to do with the studio doing an absolute DOGSHIT job at the port. (same people that did TLOU on PC IIRC)
I feel like frame issues are not treated as seriously as glitches or monetization issues on consoles. Performance is extremely important and you're not a "frame snob" for wanting your games to run properly in 2023, when games from over 20 years ago managed to run at a stable 60 on their native hardware. We deserve better
I played it, and I hate it already. And it gets worse. Some areas in the game where there is a Riddler Trophy, its IMPOSSIBLE to get because the game is glitched. One example: the Riddler Trophy on Miagani Island in Bristol thats hidden in the subway car hanging on the track, theres a Riddler Trophy inside it and you cant get it. The game is glitched in a way that prevents you from getting it.
Nintendo should take some responsibility and block sale of this until it’s fixed, if it’s even fixable. The whole point of a console is a seamless experience, people shouldn’t have to make a judgement on whether a *console game* is playable on their hardware.
I used to hate Arkham Knight as I felt the influence of nearly every common complain at the time (Batmobile and predictable antagonist reveal) and joined the bandwagon like everyone else until I was going trough a rough patch in my life in 2018, replayed it and realized maybe that's the point of the game-- Batman gets hammered physically and mentally but he never breaks, never complains and that car isn't a burden, it's an extension of his indomitable willpower, you just can't break him no matter what you do, and the Arkham Knight character while equal in skill, has none of those qualities. I took that as the lesson of the game and it became one of my fav games ever. As for the Switch port, WB should have held this back until the Switch successor. Just pull this for sale like they did with the PC port as there's no way this is doing an already misunderstood game any justice.
I installed Arkham Knight on pc today and played it on max settings 90 fps locked. Geez it looks soo good. It is hard to believe that this game is 8 years old. Honestly if I could get any new game looking that good running locked 90fps then take my money and fck ray tracing.
Arkham on Switch? Arkham Knight took like a year to get patched to work properly on PC and consoles! How the heck did they plan on running this on the equivalent of a toaster?
Imagine selling one of these CEOs a damn luxury car that stalled out, leaked oil all over and had a hole on the muffler. They wouldn't he happy being sold junk but here we are, as they happily sell it.
It looks like you were downloading the other Arkham titles in the background while playing Arkham Knight. In my experience the Switch doesn't handle background downloads well and it makes even the best optimized games freeze up whenever they need to load stuff into memory.
Ultimately this example asks the question; When a game has to be significantly downgraded that it becomes unrecognizable and unplayable, should it be ported at all? Of course the publishers will say yes no matter what, but should they charge full price for a downgraded game that is almost 9 years old? Also, I worked on Arkham Origins and so the "Trilogy" hurts a little :(
Excellent video. It's disappointing that it turned out this way. guess you can't win them all. Shame as I really love this series. Hopefully this can be salvaged by a substantial performance patch. Interesting this is by the same company that ported the first Borderlands collection. I was overall impressed by that conversion, How well is Borderlands 3 running on switch? Are you guys going to cover that one as well?
Arkham Knight is still one of the best looking games I've ever played, nearly 8 years later. Even games with comparable graphical fidelity pale in comparison to Knight's artistic direction, imo. So of course I didn't think the Switch was going to hold a candle to PC or even PS4/XBox One versions. But this somehow managed to look worse than I expected. It looks like a Call of Duty Wii game and performs like Cyberpunk [at launch].
Still confused why Rocksteady didn’t didn’t put Arkham City on the physical cartridge as well. They definitely could have put Asylum and City on one cart and then just made Knight the separate download.
@WH250398 hahaha it's the guy that hates the ps vita. How are you feeling knowing that sony announced the third portable aka playstation portal that proves you were wrong about sony not making a portable againe when they did. You owe me a million apologies that you were wrong that sony is going to make a handheld after the ps vita hahahaha
I simply cannot believe it has been 6 years and we still have not gotten a hardware update. Why don't the game developers stop releasing games on Switch to force Nintendo to release their next console?
Not only are devs not going to force Nintendo to release a new console, they're going to keep making Switch ports for another 6 years after their next console does finally drop, for the same reason they did it with the PS2. They'd be stupid not to develop for something with that big of an install base, outdated or not.
"This should never have gotten past QA" No, QA almost always finds these issues. The problem is, the decision to fix them isn't up to anyone who cares to have them fixed in favor of meeting their deadline for shipping.
Thank you Oliver. I might have bought this but - oh boy, it looks like playing a title while something else is busy taking priority on the storage medium - the actual visuals look as expected for switch and 'okay' but the pipeline is stretched too thin...The "wow" factor from the OG versions - "Hang on, is this actually playable?" moments missing feel like a compromise too far.
I can't wait to hear you guys analyse the GTA6 trailer. I'm curious to see if you guys think it's capable of running at that fidelity on a PS5/Xbox. The lighting, crowd density, and physics are way beyond anything we've seen on the current gen consoles.
I really disagree with 0:12 I somewhat agree with Arkham City and completely with Asylum yes... Arkham Knight has never been polished on either last gen consoles or PC. My PS4 and Series X does not maintain a stable 30fps and it crashes surprisingly often. The PC port eventually became good although that crashes somewhat often too, sadly the Arkham City PC port is a stuttering mess as well unless you tweak some ini files
You said it best near the end. We know if they had more time/money/competency that the ports would have been a lot better. So in that event if this was really the best they could have done, then it just shouldn’t have been ported. Publishers need to just stop releasing garbage and unfinished games. They are about to cause their own video game crash very soon at this rate.
Excellent analysis, I submitted an email of complaint and requested a full refund. The Trilogy is shocking on the Switch, the first two Asylum and City are in an unacceptable state especially considering age of the games and its not like it's remastered versions either and Knight is basically mostly unplayable! Delayed for months and they STILL pushed this CRAP out to the public!? ABSOLUTELY SHAMEFUL! How this was even green lighted to go gold on switch and then be sold to the public is absolutely disgraceful really! Developers must stop releasing broken/badly performing games... It's like they don't even test them anymore before going gold... No day one patches either to fix issues, the developers should be ashamed of themselves putting out this trilogy in a state like that! It's basically just a quick cheap and nasty cash grab, all this behaviour does is damage trust between gamers and the industry! Sad how bad things are getting now...
Cutting the world into segments with loading times would have been better, if the system can't stream it at all well, why bother. Also the resolution, why not drop to 480p to help a bit, that's still 'dvd' quality.
Man this makes me happy that these games were released on PC many years ago even though the PC version of Arkham Knight itself was a disastrous release but later on the issues were fixed. Thanks to graphical mods you can make the PC version of both Arkham Asylum and Arkham City look better than the originals on PC and they still run a million times better than on the Switch.
Important to note that the PC version of Arkham Knight was never *fully* fixed. I ran into troubles with it that I've never had in any other game, such as it crashing if I ever tried to record using ShadowPlay. Really a shame because IMO it's easily the best game in the series, I just wish it wasn't a buggy, poorly optimized mess.
Arkham knight was never really fixed. We just got hardware powerful enough to brute force it into acceptable territory. You still need 3rd party mods to smooth it out and even then it's not perfect.
What's mind-blowing even further is that Arkham City was on the Wii U, even. My guess is that it ran better there, too. Wouldn't it be funny if they re- released Arkham Origins....and it came out alright?
@@semvisionI stand corrected. Especially since I never owned it. It's just mind boggling why this is like the 3rd time we got a collection that didn't run well, not only on the Switch, but also was from consoles from previous generations. Is it really that hard to do this?
Fantastic work Oliver! Very informative and saddening. Companies will always go after the almighty dollar. I do wonder though at what point will it harm their reputation so much that they learn not to do this?
Wow, after watching multiple review videos of this trilogy most people were saying Asylum and City are good, you are the only person who has rated those as being pretty poor. 9:30 I also think it's a good thing that the Switch versions of Asylum and City were based on the PS3 and 360 versions, those versions looked much better than the Return to Arkham remaster IMO because there was more character in the visuals. Batman for example looks a lot different (and worse) in the remastered version IMO.
Great review Oliver! I always enjoy the blend of in-depth technical and artistic review of a game's features that Oliver brings. This indeed looks absolutely terrible. I wonder if the devs can significantly improve this post-launch and if it just launched unoptimized OR if it's really unsavable and just beyond the Switch's capabilities...
Did anyone really think that Arkham Knight would run on the switch? When it came out on PC, there was not one single system that could run it. They fixed it eventually but it took them literally years :D
genuinely feel sorry for any kids getting this for christmas. If the switch is their primary console and they are a batman fan. Shame on you ! Developers
The ESRB should introduce a new “Horrible Performance” warning for games like this. No customer should have to live with shit like that.
So long as the masses keep lapping up subpar ports, the publishers couldn't care less. People with little to no standards and poor self-control are why those of us who are still sane can't have nice things anymore.
@@Shieftaini don’t feel like that’s gonna fix anything with silent boycotting. Corporate executives are out of touch and will blame anything else other than the actual issue.
With gaming journalism only going to report on these issues if customers are dealing with it, it’s really up to the average joe to play the role of the reviewer nowadays.
@@Shieftain Finally somebody who gets it. It's really painful to know my chosen recreation activity is largely inhabited by drooling consumers who can't stop themselves from buying absolute garbage.
If " constant stutter" counts, then I would include Elden Ring's PC port in that case.
@@leithaziz2716 yeah the elden ring pc port sucks, but I’m honestly glad that FromSoftware put effort into Armored Core VI. Which you can’t say for other Japanese developers shitting out bad ports that get defended by the same kind of fanboys.
What happened to WB? Seriously? Who thought this was acceptable? Who thought Gotham Knights was acgeptable? Who thought ruining Rocksteady by making their next game a games as service title? The executives clearly don't care about creativity, or their customers.
Considering the initial launch of Arkham Knight on PC, it's business as usual for WB.
My man, WB has been doing half-*ssed ports for some time now. Arkham Origins (great game) is still pretty buggy, Arkham Knight on PC launch, handled by Iron Galaxy, was unplayable, and all the MK Switch ports have been terrible.
Nothing, they've been doing this for years.
They know that a lot of people just don't notice or don't care about this sort of thing. I had a look at the Switch subreddit a few days ago when people started pointing out how bad these ports were, and there were a not-insignificant amount of people defending them, saying that the issues were "blown out of proportion" and they'd been playing it just fine.
You mean like every corporate overlord publisher for games? They're all like this. None of them care about making games or creativity, they care about making money. They know people will give them money regardless of the minimal amount of work. You care, I care, and a few others care, but *most* don't. And that's who they care about.
“This shouldn’t have passed QA”
I assure you, it didn’t. They knew this was broken.
Agreed. QA enters hundred of bugs that are waived for various reasons even after QA argues them. These decisions are made from Production on up.
Yup, and shows how they regard their customers right? Just unacceptable.
Yeah, QA gets thrown under the bus far to often. Remember how the CEO of CDPR blamed them for CP2077's poor launch as if the fucking QA team somehow missed the boatload of bugs on every platform and gave CDPR the thumbs up lol.
@@devilmikey00 I actually did forget about this until now. And this type of behavior fuels the misconception of "WhErE iS Qa?!?!"
@@devilmikey00 It's not like QA sign off on the golden master and ship it out with no one else in the company seeing it. Every department knew that game was broken.
As someone who played Asylum and City on a dual core 1.3 ghz processor and an Integrated GPU on fairly high settings and got mostly stable 30fps, something is VERY wrong with these ports. Arkham games have always been known for their optimization, sans Knight on PC, but the fact that these aren't even running at 30 on switch is absurd, ludicrous even.
I agree for the PS3 generation, but everything after that point has felt awful. For example, even the PS4 remaster of Asylum and City are locked to 30fps with horrid input latency. They should have just made it an HD port instead, to simply bring it up to the PC version. Only adding extra visual effects if the console could handle it.
I mean isn't the Switchs GPU an integrated chip with a sub 1.0 ghz clocked dual processor?
I played City on an old gaming laptop with a first gen core cpu with 2 cores, hyperthreated, 4 GB ram and Radeon mobile 5730 (higher clocked 5650) and it almost never dropped below 45, staying around 60. City ran around 45, in very rare occasions (very far city views with falling snow) dropping to around 30 fps, and that was on x86 with Windows 7 running in the background, off a 5400 rpm hdd. Something's seriously wrong here.
@@gamble777888It has 4 cores, 3 available for games, arm architecture, so better performance per mhz and a vastly superior GPU.
@@gamble777888 it's a quad processor. But the gpu, which is the main thing holding it back, SHOULDN'T be producing this result, heck, the stuttering shouldn't be happening bevause of the multicore
This really should have been a next gen Nintendo release. They could have just given us the WiiU version of Origins instead of Knight and then have that be a nice standalone remaster down the line.
They won't give us origins. People has been asking for an Origins port for ages. But Origins will continue to the be unloved stepchild of the franchise.
Hilarious a game a decade old needs to be ported to the "next gen" system....nintendo needs to stop using last generation phone hardware for their consoles. Its embarassing
@StillWeRide well it's how they keep their consoles so affordable. They also rarely need to use the full processing power of their systems.
Maybe not base it off the wii u code given those ports were very much not good. I hope nintendo fans get good versions of these games eventually
I think everyone knew this as soon as it was accounted on the switch a disastrously under powered console, for hecks sake even the trailer for it was almost in stop motion I rememebr watching it lol
It's "WB releasing Shadow of Mordor on PS3" all over again.
Wait, they did that!? Woah... That's a disaster...
I remember the suffering 😢...
Same with MGSV tpp, but fortunately I bought an Arkham knight PS4 bundle when the game launched and played all those games and had a much better experience !
It’s the Switch so it’s expected
@@JBrinx18yep, that game run max 20 fps all time lol
@Zeegoku1007 What’s wrong with TPP on PS3?
I don’t understand why they would’ve even attempted to port Arkham Knight on switch. If the idea was to sell a trilogy I think porting Arkham Origins instead of Knight would’ve been a better choice, plus it would give origins a chance to finally get some love for once.
I agree totally. Origins is basically City in terms of visuals imo but a bit more cartoony for designs.
I mean they've ported a number of demanding PS4 titles successfully on Switch. Dying Light, Witcher 3, Hogwarts, Doom Eternal, etc. They could have done it here as well but they were just lazy.
Lol Doom Eternal runs great on Switch! This could run well if it got a proper treatment! Bus this is gross!
@@pixelmentia They all had effort, care, and probably most importantly, money behind them to make genuinely good versions of those games though. I bet the goal of this was to crap it out as cheap as possible.
That would require WB to spend their money on polishing the game, taking it years to complete like Platinum Games.
Im glad you covered this one Oliver. Your brand of blunt constructive criticism was perfect. I was interested in the trilogy when it was announced, and am baffled at how bad it came out
The first two games are decent wdym
@@SantiagoLeungPrimedid you watch the video?
@@SantiagoLeungPrimeNot really. They average like 25 fps lol
Huh? I think Oliver is the most forgiving and that he generally praises games and visuals more than they deserve
I'm glad you left a comment on this video. Your brand of inaccurate commentary left me on the edge of my seat.
I can only imagine how frustrating the Batmobile must be for the Riddler track challenges
With some inside knowledge: The original was developed specifically for PS4 and XBONE with 8GB of shared memory.
The base video memory data set with a modest texture cache just about fit on those consoles. When it was ported over to PC a minimum VRAM requirement of 4GB should have been applied AND Nvidia even smashed through that with GameWorks volumetric smoke that had a 700MB texture.
The problem for the Switch is that its got 4GB i.e half of the original consoles and you cant easily get memory back from the executable, meshes, animation etc: the memory reductions have to largely come from textures hence the terrible textures.
As for the performance the rendering was completely multithreaded (a large mod to ue3 - alongside moving it to prelim version of dx12(dx11x) and gnm) and the same goes for the rest of the CPU work. It completely flooded the 8 cores of the ps4 and xbone. It was never going to run well on the Switch CPU without cutting a lot but how would you cut out physics/ai etc without a major change to gameplay.
Essentially I feel sorry for the developers here - this port was doomed.
On original PC on Nvidia try -disablemtr to turn off dx11 multithreading - the gfx driver possibly wasnt so happy with deferred command lists on certain configurations it seemed.
Just curious (as a layman), why did this port fail so spectacularly, when doom eternal was such a seamless port, despite undoubtedly being the more impressive game?
@@Superboologan1Because the cutbacks in Doom Eternal were mostly on the GPU. You can always make the graphics worse until it fits.
Arkham Knight was limited by memory and CPU, and it's really hard to lower demands for those without changing gameplay. You don't want less enemies or simpler physics since that would make the gameplay worse.
Also you can't really compare DE and AK. Different types of games, different engines, made with different goals and in different times for different consoles.
These muddy textures would make some riddler puzzles hard to solve since they require you to look at artwork or graphiti on walls.
Nobody is looking for those
@@doubleog6149I'm looking for those
@@doubleog6149speak for yourself. I’m that weirdo that does
@@doubleog6149 Wrong. Riddler puzzles are my favorite content in the Arkham games, especially in City and Knight. A lot of work went into those puzzles and Knight had more Riddler content than any prior game so you know they were popular with the fans according to Rocksteady's market research. Riddler content is also one of the reasons Origins gets rated so poorly. Bad / little Riddler content.
@@doubleog6149In Knight, you quite literally need all of them to actually beat the game. If you don't 100% it, the game legitimately doesn't end.
They probably should have added Arkham Origins instead of Knight.
This.
Agreed.
Can't believe WB is that hellbent on Origins not getting a modern port that they give us a terrible Arkham Knight(ass) port on Switch
Agreed!
Tbh I like Origins better than Knight as well
They should have just put in Origins instead.
YES
Only Wii U can handle that
@@destroyermcw626you know that game is also on Xbox 360 and PS3? Switch can easily handle batman Arkham origins because the switch is more powerful than 7th generation consoles and Wii U.
This is way deeper than just a case of Switch being underpowered. Other 8th-gen ports like Doom 2016/Eternal and Witcher 3 look and run far better. I feel like they just didn't put the time into this port that it needed. Heck, even Hogwart's Legacy runs far smoother than this.
This game is a wonderful example of frame timing issues. I didn’t understand it but watching this footage, I get it now
Money grab, absolutely ridiculous. Who is playing this game and enjoying it? Makes PlayStation Portal with a bad connection gaming look silky smooth 😂
The true hero of this version of the game is the player him-/herself. 😁
Why they did not include Arkham Origins and kept Knight for the Switch 2 is a mystery to me.
It's not a mystery, WB just wanted to make a quick profit
No such thing as switch 2 fangirl
WB would have cut corners like they always do for their ports.
nintendo says switch will had 10 years of life, like 2027 😂😂
why the hell would they even try porting Arkham Knight...
made no sense this system is really a brick outside of exclusive and it can barley run some of those
Because money
@@ROGALLYWORLD yeah, even some exclusive games are rough *cough cough* Hyrule Warriors *cough cough* Pokemon S+V *cough cough*
money
I'm honestly really glad they went with the original versions of Asylum and City and not the ones from Return to Arkham. Was not a fan of how that handled the cutscenes and character models. Made everything look overly bright for no reason.
True but unfortunately, Asylum RTA is the only one with the beautiful rain that got cut on the X360/PS3/PC for some reason.
So what if you lowered the brightness lol
@@haxeltheplug1913 The cutscene brightness in RTA is different from the in-game brightness for some reason so even if I did, I would have to keep configuring it after every cutscene. Also that still wouldn't account for the lighting and character model changes in the cutscenes which in my opinion, make them look significantly worse than in the original.
@@haxeltheplug1913Brightness isn't the real difference. Lighting, colors, colorgrading, saturation, and character models are.
Shouldn't this be illegal to sell a broken product at full price. Not to mention exploiting customers without any ramifications. We badly need a Quality Check Government Authority to verify such easily detectable unfinished ports for consoles & at recommended specs for PC.
810p for Arkham Knight is deeeeeply stupid if you think about it, Switch has just 25,6 gb/s of memory bandwidth, i rather aim for a "enough" 720p with FRS2 on quality or balanced mode and done, it would be WAY BETTER than a stuttery 20 fps experience...
This makes me appreciate Doom 2016 port to Switch a lot more.
2016 and Eternal's Switch ports I hear are one of the best Switch ports period.
saber int. and panic button really be doing the best switch ports out there.
That port is just insane.
This.
My hats off to Panic Button for that superb Switch port of DOOM 2016 & DOOM Eternal. 👍👍👍👍👍👍
Both games visual identity largely remains recognizeable, and it has rock solid 30FPS with little to no dips in performance.
Nintendo initially planned to release the Switch with only 2GB of RAM. Let that sink in ...
Weren't companies like Capcom the one to voice their concern to Nintendo that 2GB ram isn't enough for RE Engine to run that ultimately pushes Nintendo to have 4GB ram instead?
Yup. And they also had the opportunity to use an enhanced Nvidia Tegra X1 chip (X1 +) or even wait a little for the X2 but nope, they went for the cheapest hardware possible to maximize profits. Screw the developers and screw the consumers.
@@J.A.Z-TheMortalThe X1 made sense because it was already being commercially produced and would therefore be cheaper and easily to actually get. They had to get something out in the face of the Wii U failing and faltering 3DS sales, so waiting for something new made little sense. Given the struggles in the tech industry in the few years following the Switch launch regarding chip availability, it's pretty clear they made the right call.
@@J.A.Z-TheMortalNintendo always went with that strategy. Cost effective and mass produced old but reliable technology.
Oddly enough it works for them now knowing they don't sell the Switch at a lost.
@@moister3727Nintendo only started doing this with the Wii. Every console before the Wii had basically state of the art hardware and technology. The Nintendo 64 was doing 3D graphics that weren’t possible on any other console but was expensive to make cartridges. The GameCube was significantly more powerful than the PS2 but was limited by its mini disc capacity. The Wii was basically a GameCube with motion controls and low capacity discs.
The only thing that is consistent with Nintendo is that they still haven’t figured out cheap modern storage mediums for games.
"Wanna see me release a broken port? Wanna see me do it again?"
-Warner Bros Games
LOL!!!!
Even for the Switch, it still feels like much more could have been done here. The fact that the games from the LAST TWO gens don't fear much better than Arkham Knight, says alot.
I can't help but notice the launch is right in time for the holiday season, where Switch software goes into overdrive. There's no way you can convince me that developers weren't under pressure to get this game out.
How aren't the first two games running at 60fps... My low end PC back then could run the games at medium high options at 60fps, they were so well optimized
Because the Switch is weak as hell. It's only marginally better than Xbox 360 which couldn't run those games at 60fps either.
The 4GB of ram hurts a lot
Seems like they should have made way more compromises to the world detail. Like, would it be ideal to cut the rain particles entirely? No, but when performance is this bad, that kind of cut would be preferable.
Was it hard to stay awake playing this disaster of a game at 3:53 AM? (note 2:48 into the video). You do a great job on these reviews. Thank you for staying up so late for us :)
He's playing on Richard's account, and they are in different timezones. With that said, Oliver is clearly a super dedicated and hard worker, and we are lucky to have him.
Time to take a "Maybe It'll Run Better On Switch 2" pill....
I can accept low res textures, shadows and effects, even less polygons to achieve a good gameplay but that horrible performance kills my desire to buy it. What makes me angrier is that I cannot buy them separately.
Also, it was supposed to be a good port because they delay it 2 months to work on it, but we all know it was because October was full of good releases.
WB should just have ported Asylum and City with Origins, even if it had a different developer, that would have been much better and Origins would have gotten some traction again, maybe even leading to a remastered version for PS4, but no WB just had to put the most demanding game of the franchise on the underpowered Switch and called it a day, now they're also going to port Gotham Knights to the Switch as well
To be honest I wanted to get the Batman Arkham Trilogy just to play Batman Arkham Aslyum and Batman Arkham City on my Nintendo Switch.
Arkham City plays n looks great on Switch. I have sunk about 2 + hours into it. Can't speak for the others.
I could probably enjoy Asylum and City well enough, especially in portable mode, but knight is a bit too far. It's playable, but it would be rough.
Glad I got these on my steam deck if wanted. I've been playing Origins on Deck and it's been running fine so far and looks great.
Because getting the rights to Origins made too much sense.
Thanks for the break down on this title. My suspicion was that this game was suffering from more than just coming out on older hardware, but there were far more problems at hand. It is not just that they made and released an unacceptable port of a demanding game (or set of games); it looks like they made really drastic cuts that go well beyond the what would have been needed to bring the game out on the switch. The developers may have still needed more time or resources, but pushed ahead anyway and there is no other way to put it than that this is a bafflingly bad port.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't there some Switch games where the cartridge and or e-Store purchase just downloads a client of some sort where the game is streamed and the actual processing happens on some sort of server? If thats a thing, then why not do it for Arkham Knight? We all know good and hell well the Switch couldnt run even a 480p super low LOD version of AK so why in the heck didn't they have it be streamed on some moderately powerful PC?
*EDIT: I googled it, "Cloud Version." Why didn't WB just do that?!!?!
There is something about these games (putting aside Arkham Knight) that seem to be difficult to port. Even the Wii U version of city had frame time issues that were head scratchers for the time given it was an existing game that wouldn't be doing anything the Wii U couldn't handle. It would be easy to fault the skill of the porting houses but when you collectively look at multiple studios having trouble with these games even now I would love an honest conversation from developers about it. This latest release disappoints me even though I was never it's audience, as I don't feel I need a switch version myself. It is, however, as a series just an all time favorite that I want preserved and accessible to as many people as possible, so it's a real bummer.
Some games REALLY DON'T BEED TO BE ON THE SWITCH. Arkham Knight was the dumbest choice for a Switch port.
You forgot to mention whether or not Harley Quinn's behind wobbles in the Switch version of Arkham Knight, or if she firmed it up. You disappoint me greatly, Digital Foundry.
That’s very important to know
Arkham Knight on switch is still more playable than is disastrous launch on pc in 2015.
Its a real shame. Asylum and City should have performed flawlessly, potentially even better with FSR2 and other techniques used nowadays on Switch. Knight would have been a tough nut to crack for the aging mobile hardware. Nice review.
I don't think FSR 2 would've done anything beneficial here. Looks like a heavy CPU bottleneck that's only able to be resolved with a complete redesign of the games rather than a port where settings are cut back so far with very little effects to overall playability.
This kinda reminds me of how Doom 3 looks running on a Voodoo card.
would love to see Cloudburst sequence's event on framerate.
Ooooooh nooooo.
The Witcher 3 shows how Switch hardware isn't the problem, the issue is with devs who dont know / are too lazy to optimize , like here.
Different engines, different perks, different perfs.
The switch is mainly target at casual gamers. The type that do short burst gaming when they are outdoor. For this kind of consumers what the switch can do and deliver is already acceptable and enough for the switch owners already.
Its mainly the consoles and pc gamers who are doing unfair comparisons and whining the loudest on the internet.
Nintendo switch is garbage son 😂😂😂
Arkham knight I could understand, but less than 30 fps for a 2009 game??? Really?
They could have swapped Arkham Knight out for Arkham Origins and focussed on polishing all of those. Then if they wanted to add Knight, wait for Switch 2. Some ports are just too big to fit into the small shoes that are Switch 1
Nintendo is just not interested in releasing current gen hardware in their consoles. The Switch was already way, way behind base PS4 and XOne with its measly 256 GPU cores and a mobile quadcore processor clocking at less than a GHZ. 4 GB of old DDR4 Ram with only 1600 Mhz clock speed is also very low and behind last gen. There are phones with more power than the Switch. They just shouldn't try to port last gen AAA games to the Switch.
@@memento81 Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal and a lot of other game ports would like to have a talk with you, the fact that arkham is a code mess that was released with no effort behind it as a cash cow is not the device's fault and it wouldn't have mattered if it was more powerful.
@@GemmstoneAthat comparison doesn’t work. You can’t use games that are built on different engines/tech to another. Even on the same engine there’s so much going on in the background it doesn’t work. I didn’t know this either until I got into game dev.
@@inshal6420 My guy, the location system in the map doesn't even work, yes, you're right that you can't compare engines, Unreal is so damn bloated for example, but that doesn't mean that this specific port wasn't released as a cash cow without effort, there's so many games that were ported that even if you don't like how they look, they at least work (ie. The Witcher 3) and are playable, this is not. and again, if the switch was 2 or 3 times more powerfull, it wouldn't have mattered.
I recently installed Batman: Arkham Asylum on my 13700k to see how it would play on the Intel UHD Graphics 770. It played great at 1440p max settings at a locked 60fps. There are a LOT of older games that will play on integrated graphics these days.
The past two console generations could technically be considered integrated graphics too. APU's have evolved to ridiculously impressive levels.
@@WH250398Ryzen APU's are nearly on par with a GTX 1050. By the time GTA 6 comes out on PC, I wouldn't be surprised to see Mini PCs being able to run it surprisingly well.
@@WH250398console SoC is more like GPU with integrated CPU. Meanwhile PC APU are CPU with integrated GPU.
After the Batman Wii U debacle you'd think they'd had learned their lesson.
Didn't Arkham Knight also release on PC in an unplayable state as well?
It did
Honestly, you think our fellow gamers would have learned their lesson as well. No one should buy this and support this behavior.
@@BlueAversion So bad in fact it got pulled from Steam. Although this was more to do with the studio doing an absolute DOGSHIT job at the port. (same people that did TLOU on PC IIRC)
Didn't it run just fine on Wii U?
I feel like frame issues are not treated as seriously as glitches or monetization issues on consoles. Performance is extremely important and you're not a "frame snob" for wanting your games to run properly in 2023, when games from over 20 years ago managed to run at a stable 60 on their native hardware. We deserve better
Shouldn’t be sold. Worst part is you can’t buy the games separately either! You have to buy all three if you want the somewhat acceptable City.
It’s baffling that WB is asking $60+ for this game in this state.
Here ya go well throw 4.76$ tax to!! Lol enjoy!
@@destroyermcw626 It’s $5.32 in sales tax where I’m from.
Hoping that the Outer Wilds port (which releases tomorrow) is in great shape, will be waiting for the review!
I played through them all on PC at highly modded 4k60 not long ago so it's fairly fresh and beautiful in my mind. Seeing this is absolute pain.
What mods?
I played it, and I hate it already. And it gets worse. Some areas in the game where there is a Riddler Trophy, its IMPOSSIBLE to get because the game is glitched. One example: the Riddler Trophy on Miagani Island in Bristol thats hidden in the subway car hanging on the track, theres a Riddler Trophy inside it and you cant get it. The game is glitched in a way that prevents you from getting it.
Nintendo should take some responsibility and block sale of this until it’s fixed, if it’s even fixable. The whole point of a console is a seamless experience, people shouldn’t have to make a judgement on whether a *console game* is playable on their hardware.
I used to hate Arkham Knight as I felt the influence of nearly every common complain at the time (Batmobile and predictable antagonist reveal) and joined the bandwagon like everyone else until I was going trough a rough patch in my life in 2018, replayed it and realized maybe that's the point of the game-- Batman gets hammered physically and mentally but he never breaks, never complains and that car isn't a burden, it's an extension of his indomitable willpower, you just can't break him no matter what you do, and the Arkham Knight character while equal in skill, has none of those qualities. I took that as the lesson of the game and it became one of my fav games ever. As for the Switch port, WB should have held this back until the Switch successor. Just pull this for sale like they did with the PC port as there's no way this is doing an already misunderstood game any justice.
I installed Arkham Knight on pc today and played it on max settings 90 fps locked. Geez it looks soo good. It is hard to believe that this game is 8 years old. Honestly if I could get any new game looking that good running locked 90fps then take my money and fck ray tracing.
I just want a 60fps patch for Knight on PS5 and XBSX.
And 4k support and higher texture resolution and higher texture filtering.
there are so many games that's not suppose to be on switch, MK1, Alan wake remastered, and this one
Arkham on Switch? Arkham Knight took like a year to get patched to work properly on PC and consoles! How the heck did they plan on running this on the equivalent of a toaster?
5:12 couldn’t they have used fog to cover up the landscape instead of a strip of buildings? That looks goofy as hell 😂
I would say that the fog would worsen the performance 😅
Switch 2, is LONG overdue..
It really makes you feel like Batman on the minimum spec pc
Imagine selling one of these CEOs a damn luxury car that stalled out, leaked oil all over and had a hole on the muffler.
They wouldn't he happy being sold junk but here we are, as they happily sell it.
It looks like you were downloading the other Arkham titles in the background while playing Arkham Knight. In my experience the Switch doesn't handle background downloads well and it makes even the best optimized games freeze up whenever they need to load stuff into memory.
Explains why lots of folks didn't have problems. DF is kind of inept.
I guess this port was actually impossible
Maybe it can be patched
Ultimately this example asks the question; When a game has to be significantly downgraded that it becomes unrecognizable and unplayable, should it be ported at all? Of course the publishers will say yes no matter what, but should they charge full price for a downgraded game that is almost 9 years old?
Also, I worked on Arkham Origins and so the "Trilogy" hurts a little :(
Yeah, WB ignores Arkham Origins when it comes to this franchise for some reason.
It’s a shame, too. I loved the story in Arkham Origins.
Excellent video. It's disappointing that it turned out this way. guess you can't win them all. Shame as I really love this series. Hopefully this can be salvaged by a substantial performance patch. Interesting this is by the same company that ported the first Borderlands collection. I was overall impressed by that conversion, How well is Borderlands 3 running on switch? Are you guys going to cover that one as well?
Arkham Knight is still one of the best looking games I've ever played, nearly 8 years later. Even games with comparable graphical fidelity pale in comparison to Knight's artistic direction, imo. So of course I didn't think the Switch was going to hold a candle to PC or even PS4/XBox One versions.
But this somehow managed to look worse than I expected. It looks like a Call of Duty Wii game and performs like Cyberpunk [at launch].
Still confused why Rocksteady didn’t didn’t put Arkham City on the physical cartridge as well.
They definitely could have put Asylum and City on one cart and then just made Knight the separate download.
Because Nintendo is out of touch? 😂
Probably used the smallest card size again to cut costs.
@WH250398 hahaha it's the guy that hates the ps vita. How are you feeling knowing that sony announced the third portable aka playstation portal that proves you were wrong about sony not making a portable againe when they did. You owe me a million apologies that you were wrong that sony is going to make a handheld after the ps vita hahahaha
@@EnaTenkiyoGamer What kind of drugs are you on?
@@WH250398 what kind of hate fetish are you on about the playstation portal hahaha
They could patch these 3 games on PS4 to run at 60fps on PS5 to make up for this...
I can Play at 60fps on Xbox one X in Challenge mode and Riddler’s Revenge.
And while they're at it, make Knight stop crashing on PS5. Happens probably 20 times per playthrough.
@@swagar I didn't know that... I still need to platinum that thing and the mountain of useless dlc it has.
I simply cannot believe it has been 6 years and we still have not gotten a hardware update. Why don't the game developers stop releasing games on Switch to force Nintendo to release their next console?
One word : £
Because that's not how business works. You go where your customers are not the other way around.
nintendo says switch need still on the market for 10 year, 2027😂😂
Not only are devs not going to force Nintendo to release a new console, they're going to keep making Switch ports for another 6 years after their next console does finally drop, for the same reason they did it with the PS2. They'd be stupid not to develop for something with that big of an install base, outdated or not.
Motion blur being removed definitely goes into the positives category.
"This should never have gotten past QA" No, QA almost always finds these issues. The problem is, the decision to fix them isn't up to anyone who cares to have them fixed in favor of meeting their deadline for shipping.
Thank you Oliver. I might have bought this but - oh boy, it looks like playing a title while something else is busy taking priority on the storage medium - the actual visuals look as expected for switch and 'okay' but the pipeline is stretched too thin...The "wow" factor from the OG versions - "Hang on, is this actually playable?" moments missing feel like a compromise too far.
Hopefully there’s going to be a patch to solve some of the issues soon 🤷🏻♂️
if not sales, not patch...
@@robone9978 If not patch, not sales also
I disagree, I’ve completed the trilogy on switch today and they all run good. Had a great time.
I'm hoping at least Asylum and City run okay, was wanting to get this for my friend for Christmas as he only has switch but loves batman 😅
Wow some people really will defend literally anything
I can't wait to hear you guys analyse the GTA6 trailer. I'm curious to see if you guys think it's capable of running at that fidelity on a PS5/Xbox. The lighting, crowd density, and physics are way beyond anything we've seen on the current gen consoles.
The texture quality and the npcs are kinda poor in that trailer
@@ThomasVvVyou're the only poor guy here buddy
@@ThomasVvV🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓
As if this is the first time Rockstar has downgraded crowd density .. and is cyberpunk 2.0 a joke to you
@@Theseriexx Yes,Cyberpunk is a joke conpared to GTA
4:46 how this cutscene passed qc on switch!?
I really disagree with 0:12
I somewhat agree with Arkham City and completely with Asylum yes... Arkham Knight has never been polished on either last gen consoles or PC. My PS4 and Series X does not maintain a stable 30fps and it crashes surprisingly often. The PC port eventually became good although that crashes somewhat often too, sadly the Arkham City PC port is a stuttering mess as well unless you tweak some ini files
Thought the same "very polished" I was like "unless he meant Polish, Knight was certainly not polished when it launched elsewhere"
You said it best near the end. We know if they had more time/money/competency that the ports would have been a lot better.
So in that event if this was really the best they could have done, then it just shouldn’t have been ported.
Publishers need to just stop releasing garbage and unfinished games. They are about to cause their own video game crash very soon at this rate.
they REALLY pushed this X1 silicon to the absolute limit jesus christ
Is it really pushing it when using brute force?
Thank you for your coverage, Oliver! As always, you deliver very effective critique.
Excellent analysis, I submitted an email of complaint and requested a full refund. The Trilogy is shocking on the Switch, the first two Asylum and City are in an unacceptable state especially considering age of the games and its not like it's remastered versions either and Knight is basically mostly unplayable! Delayed for months and they STILL pushed this CRAP out to the public!? ABSOLUTELY SHAMEFUL!
How this was even green lighted to go gold on switch and then be sold to the public is absolutely disgraceful really!
Developers must stop releasing broken/badly performing games... It's like they don't even test them anymore before going gold...
No day one patches either to fix issues, the developers should be ashamed of themselves putting out this trilogy in a state like that!
It's basically just a quick cheap and nasty cash grab, all this behaviour does is damage trust between gamers and the industry!
Sad how bad things are getting now...
Cutting the world into segments with loading times would have been better, if the system can't stream it at all well, why bother. Also the resolution, why not drop to 480p to help a bit, that's still 'dvd' quality.
Man this makes me happy that these games were released on PC many years ago even though the PC version of Arkham Knight itself was a disastrous release but later on the issues were fixed. Thanks to graphical mods you can make the PC version of both Arkham Asylum and Arkham City look better than the originals on PC and they still run a million times better than on the Switch.
These games also run beautifully on steam deck. If you're not sensitive to stutter, you can even enjoy arkham knight at 40fps.
Important to note that the PC version of Arkham Knight was never *fully* fixed. I ran into troubles with it that I've never had in any other game, such as it crashing if I ever tried to record using ShadowPlay. Really a shame because IMO it's easily the best game in the series, I just wish it wasn't a buggy, poorly optimized mess.
Arkham knight was never really fixed. We just got hardware powerful enough to brute force it into acceptable territory. You still need 3rd party mods to smooth it out and even then it's not perfect.
This game runs amazingly on my ROG Ally and got all 3 games for 5.45 lol
First MK1 and now this, these companies should feel ashamed, including Nintendo itself.
What's mind-blowing even further is that Arkham City was on the Wii U, even. My guess is that it ran better there, too.
Wouldn't it be funny if they re- released Arkham Origins....and it came out alright?
Actually no, City on Wii U ran worse than 360.
@@semvisionI stand corrected. Especially since I never owned it. It's just mind boggling why this is like the 3rd time we got a collection that didn't run well, not only on the Switch, but also was from consoles from previous generations. Is it really that hard to do this?
Is it just me, or was more care taken with ports to Switch earlier in the Switch lifecycle than now?
Fantastic work Oliver! Very informative and saddening. Companies will always go after the almighty dollar. I do wonder though at what point will it harm their reputation so much that they learn not to do this?
Common Switch port L
As a huge fan of the Arkham series this video is wonderful.
What an absymal port.
Wow, after watching multiple review videos of this trilogy most people were saying Asylum and City are good, you are the only person who has rated those as being pretty poor. 9:30 I also think it's a good thing that the Switch versions of Asylum and City were based on the PS3 and 360 versions, those versions looked much better than the Return to Arkham remaster IMO because there was more character in the visuals. Batman for example looks a lot different (and worse) in the remastered version IMO.
DF always shits on switch games, it's their gimmick at this point. It's always over exaggerated nonsense.
@@UnexpectedDangerMaybe because they're the only channel that actually measures performance and has evidence to back up their claims
I’m not surprised. The Return to Arkham port for XBox One was also handled pretty poorly. These games have always just run best on PC, unfortunately.
The fact they made it at all is hilarious 😂
Great review Oliver! I always enjoy the blend of in-depth technical and artistic review of a game's features that Oliver brings. This indeed looks absolutely terrible. I wonder if the devs can significantly improve this post-launch and if it just launched unoptimized OR if it's really unsavable and just beyond the Switch's capabilities...
Did anyone really think that Arkham Knight would run on the switch? When it came out on PC, there was not one single system that could run it. They fixed it eventually but it took them literally years :D
genuinely feel sorry for any kids getting this for christmas. If the switch is their primary console and they are a batman fan. Shame on you ! Developers
You can play fucking risk of rain 2, rdr1, the long dark, bioshock 1 and 2, and borderlands games on switch, but not arkham knights? Bruh💀