Batman: Arkham City Catch-All

ianunderhill wrote:
TrashiDawa wrote:

I knew you would show! Just to be extra clear despite your cherry picking I am talking about platform specs, not devotees and it is very tough to argue that multiplatform PC games are not being hamstrung in development by the technical limitations of consoles.

Okay, so what do you suggest could have been done differently with this game given greater headroom and isn't strictly about graphical limitations? That's not a trolly finger-in-the-sternum, either - I'm curious as to what you have in mind. Most of what seemed to be problematic with the game strikes me as being writing problems and the kitchen sink approach to the sidequests ("There's so much to do!"-->"There's still so much to do?! Eh, I don't care anymore."). It's pretty damned solid otherwise.

And yes, I'd love a good Batman game where you get to operate Bat-vehicles, but clearly, the setting/concept of AC doesn't suit that. What else could've been done here?

Uhh, I think we're all talking about the visual aspect of Arkham City. It does look worse on consoles, and I don't think Rocksteady could have done much to alleviate that without more powerful hardware.

Edit: Maybe I'm misunderstanding what TrashiDawa is saying.

ianunderhill wrote:

a trolly finger-in-the-sternum

I'm more curious wtf this means.

If that's the case, fine. "Better graphics" isn't all that compelling an argument for me.

However, I'm easily sold on the "hamstrung" talk when memory limitations etc. result in either a) badly-implemented console games where the frame rate goes to absolute ass when something that would otherwise make for compelling gaming is going on or b) neat features get left out of a PC title when there's no way to do the comparable thing on the to-be-released-simultaneously console version because consoles X and Y are past the first three years of their life-cycle. Item "a" is a known issue, item "b" is a suspected (but likely) one. Both are concerns to me as a games consumer/player.

TrashiDawa wrote:
ianunderhill wrote:

a trolly finger-in-the-sternum

I'm more curious wtf this means.

"Trolly" as in "troll-like". The second part's the whole bit where dude pokes a finger in your chest because he's trying to pick a fight with you. They go together. I'm not going for either. Make sense?

EDIT: Bwah, reading that again as a possible mis-spelling "trolley finger" - sounds like a medical condition picked up from contact between a street car and human skin. I see a prospective point of your confusion. My apologies.

Jayhawker wrote:

It's hard for me to care about a platform that can only be profitable if they can sell games on consoles. You would think the Glorious PC Gaming Master Race could be self sufficient.

The other way of looking at that is a lot of games cost so much they have to spread their risk so. You could just as easily say you don't care about the 360 platform that can only be profitable with PS3/PC sales. Any platform can be self sufficient if the company does their sums right, and there's lots of evidence of just that.

Jayhawker wrote:

It's hard for me to care about a platform that can only be profitable if they can sell games on consoles. You would think the Glorious PC Gaming Master Race could be self sufficient.

Steam, Indie games, and RTSs in general say hello. Sorry for the snippy response, but I dislike both sides of that argument (I'm a PC gamer. Screw the "master race" noise.).

That said, there _are_ some things you could pull off on PC (Barely, in the case of something like ARMA, but still) that wouldn't work on current consoles. I've got a low-rent peasent rig that's something like 4x as powerful as a 360 or PS3. While I do like that my really low-key rig can run modern games, I can see it holding some things back. Don't care about graphics, do care about physics/AI/World size or features cut to work on consoles.

Game devs could also use some education on multiple control schemes. But that's basic usability stuff.

Generally, though, I think the main problem that gets pinned on consoles... isn't really a console problem. High budgets and high-risk means aiming for the lowest common denominator. Be honest, if we _didn't_ have consoles at all... we'd still have modern-shooter overload and no real risks being taken. (Think about it this way: There's no such thing as spec problems in movies, we've still got the same 4 movies coming out of the major studios all the time. Same problem. Business, not technical.)

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/29SOF.jpg)
IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/ezrhq.jpg)

nel e nel wrote:

pics

Tram finger? What am I looking at here?

Scratched wrote:
nel e nel wrote:

pics

Tram finger? What am I looking at here?

Trolley finger, of course!

Scratched wrote:
nel e nel wrote:

pics

Tram finger? What am I looking at here?

ianunderhill wrote:

EDIT: Bwah, reading that again as a possible mis-spelling "trolley finger" - sounds like a medical condition picked up from contact between a street car and human skin. I see a prospective point of your confusion. My apologies.

Scratched wrote:
nel e nel wrote:

pics

Tram finger? What am I looking at here?

I think it's a direct reference to:

ianunderhill wrote:
TrashiDawa wrote:
ianunderhill wrote:

a trolly finger-in-the-sternum

I'm more curious wtf this means.

"Trolly" as in "troll-like". The second part's the whole bit where dude pokes a finger in your chest because he's trying to pick a fight with you. They go together. I'm not going for either. Make sense?

EDIT: Bwah, reading that again as a possible mis-spelling "trolley finger" - sounds like a medical condition picked up from contact between a street car and human skin. I see a prospective point of your confusion. My apologies.

EDIT: Dammit! Too slow. Trying to post and make pancakes for kids at once is too much for my old butt.

Burnt Toast wrote:

EDIT: Dammit! Too slow. Trying to post and make pancakes for kids at once is too much for my old butt.

I must say, you have an incredible butt. There's no way I could do both of those with mine, I'd have to cheat and use my hands. :p

Mantid wrote:
Burnt Toast wrote:

EDIT: Dammit! Too slow. Trying to post and make pancakes for kids at once is too much for my old butt.

I must say, you have an incredible butt. There's no way I could do both of those with mine, I'd have to cheat and use my hands. :p

Must . . . resist . . . new sig. . .!

Wait, you can post pancakes?

Batcakes!

IMAGE(https://s3.amazonaws.com/data.tumblr.com/tumblr_m48mt0Gext1rwtb0ho1_500.jpg)

hbi2k wrote:

Batcakes!

IMAGE(https://s3.amazonaws.com/data.tumblr.com/tumblr_m48mt0Gext1rwtb0ho1_500.jpg)

IMAGE(http://www.blogcdn.com/www.comicsalliance.com/media/2012/03/tumblrm0lnb5zzdx1r1069oo1500.gif)

Silly Honey Nuts Cheerios. People with still-alive parents don't become heroes.

hbi2k wrote:

People with still-alive parents don't become heroes.

This is a common misunderstanding. People with still alive parents can become heroes if one or more of parents happen to be heroes or, on occasion, villains.

nel e nel wrote:

[trolley finger photos]

Two words: window period.

Just took a break from Dragon's Dogma to finish up with Harley Quinn's Revenge. Total playtime came in at just a smidge over two hours, and that's only because of a few situations where either the objective or the path isn't completely clear the first time through plus the fact that I haven't played AC in a while and some of the special moves aren't as second nature as they were this past fall.

While it's nice to see some extra game time in this setting with this great a control scheme/combat mechanics, I have to say it really wasn't worthwhile. The most challenging room in this one's similar to the end of the Catwoman story content in that tries to set up a healthbar-ed baddie with respawning gun mobs against a series of ledges, ducts, etc. that should allow for serious stealthwork. Result: the easiest way through is to blitz it recklessly and so the balance is off. In fact, the one genuinely troublesome aspect,

Spoiler:

a hostage situation that occurs at random and can result in a failed mission if you're spotted

, can be avoided outright if you rush it. No good.

There's also not really much in the way of story here, even as far as a Batman game goes. Yes, Harley's still good ol' nuts Harley. Tara Strong's voice performance is substantially more solid than the jarringly bad Arleen Sorkin impersonation she fell in and out of in AC - here, she does it more as a character than an imitation, which is refreshing. Unfortunately, good ol' nuts Harley is also good ol' incompetent Harley. Her "revenge" is neither particularly ambitious or zany - she's still just a scared little girl living in Mr. J's shadow. On the other hand, we should probably be relieved there's no Titan formula antics in an effort to present some sort of half-baked "fair fight" scenario.

If it winds up on sale later, or if you haven't checked out AC yet and plan on getting the GotY edition, you might have a little fun with this. Playing in story mode as Robin is good fun, and having the player switch characters chapter-to-chapter works better than it did in AC with the Batman/Catwoman sections - the time-shift involved between the first part presented and the first part that happened feels cool. For now, however, this isn't likely to satisfy anyone's lust for more AC story enough to warrant a purchase.

Picked up recently during my Florida visit.

IMAGE(http://img220.imageshack.us/img220/1154/20120702163203210.jpg)

They look pretty cool.

I want this one though.

Yesterday, I saw the new Batman movie, so decided to get Arkham City started, finally. Fired it up and first spent about a half hour fighting around with the GFWL UI to get my new password in, then trying to figure out where the resolution settings were.

When I finally got the game started, I found I had no dialog audio in the opening cutscene. I had music and sound effects, plus subtitles, but no dialog. When I skipped the cutscene, I heard a line or two of gameplay dialog, but then quit in frustration.

Anyone run into this or seen a fix for it? I'm starting to wish I'd just gotten the Xbox version.

Chaz wrote:

When I finally got the game started, I found I had no dialog audio in the opening cutscene. I had music and sound effects, plus subtitles, but no dialog. When I skipped the cutscene, I heard a line or two of gameplay dialog, but then quit in frustration.

Yes I had that problem but I've completely forgotten what the solution was. Might have been to switch to DirectX9, I do remember that I couldn't play it in DX10, although that might have been for some other reason.

I saw that as a potential solution, but I couldn't find a Directx option in the launcher's graphics settings. I'm running a GTX250, which I think doesn't do DX11, so maybe that option's hidden?

DanB wrote:
Chaz wrote:

When I finally got the game started, I found I had no dialog audio in the opening cutscene. I had music and sound effects, plus subtitles, but no dialog. When I skipped the cutscene, I heard a line or two of gameplay dialog, but then quit in frustration.

Yes I had that problem but I've completely forgotten what the solution was. Might have been to switch to DirectX9, I do remember that I couldn't play it in DX10, although that might have been for some other reason.

Had a lot of lag and other graphical issues with the game until I switched to DX9. Magic bullet fix.

Chaz wrote:

I saw that as a potential solution, but I couldn't find a Directx option in the launcher's graphics settings. I'm running a GTX250, which I think doesn't do DX11, so maybe that option's hidden?

DirectX 11 was released late, and it has frequent stuttering issues even when it runs at high frame rates most of the time for me.

I don't know if you have it or not as an icon, but what you want is the Launcher that you get the first time you start the game. In my install, this didn't get created as an icon, so I have to go to the following file if I want to change some of the graphics settings:

\Batham Arkham City - PC\Batman - Arkham City\Binaries\Win32\bmlauncher.exe

From there chose "settings".

I don't know if this will fix your missing dialog issues.

Yeah, I found the launcher after some searching last night, but didn't see the Dx11 options. They might have been hidden, or I might've just missed them because it was late and I was already annoyed at the GFWL password interface.

It's also possible the game needs to be patched. I have the Origin version, and Steam has spoiled me with its auto-patching. I just expect my games to be updated now, and I haven't run Origin and looked for updates probably since I installed it.

Chaz wrote:

Yeah, I found the launcher after some searching last night, but didn't see the Dx11 options. They might have been hidden, or I might've just missed them because it was late and I was already annoyed at the GFWL password interface.

It's also possible the game needs to be patched. I have the Origin version, and Steam has spoiled me with its auto-patching. I just expect my games to be updated now, and I haven't run Origin and looked for updates probably since I installed it.

Settings>DirectX11 Features. It's right in the middle of the Settings window.

I think updates are still handled via GFW, and they'll prompt you for any possible upgrades at launch of the game.

Huh, I got a GFWL update, but there wasn't anything as obvious as a giant Directx 11 Features thing. Starting to strongly suspect that I'm missing a patch. I'll have Origin look for updates when I get home.