Batman: Arkham Knight

[AW8]

The sad thing is that you actually get more things you can do to mess with enemies. You can sabotage weapon crates, detective mode jammers, etc. Just got a voice "synthesizer" to order grunts to certain locations (such as said sabotaged crates). You can throw gadgets while gliding in, as mentioned before. You can steal or pickup baseball bats, which let you strike directly on shielded enemies and those guys that can't be hit before being stunned. You can use environmental objects sometimes a la Sleeping Dogs. You even get a single juggle lol.

But these mechanics are usually pointless because the encounters are too easy even without them.

Agree, I found this to be the easiest Arkham game yet. It's very hard to get punched in combat, I think Batman moves faster in this game or something. I played City on Hard 2 weeks ago, and freeflow combat is less forgiving there, Batman is sluggish and can't dodge hits as well.

I think the gunfire damage has been increased as I insta-die without armor upgrades on Hard. But Predator is still piss-easy because of the Fear Takedowns (upgradeable to 5 insta-KO'ed thugs! 5!) and the gargoyles/vantage points/vents/grates everywhere. You can even switch unseen between hiding above the thugs on the ledges, or beneath them in the grates, with the new "grapple up vent" feature. Oh, and most Predator takedown moves have been made silent or given longer range (normal silent takedown, corner takedown).
The few new enemy types doesn't really weigh fair against these new player advantages.

The New Game+ design is so retarded, why do I have to beat the game once in order to unlock the hardest difficulty?

But even though it's easy... I can't say I haven't had fun. Stealing baseball bats and punching through the defenses of Brutes or manipulating armed thugs with the Voice Synthesizer and Disruptor, great fun. What the game really needs is a proper Challenge Mode where you can play around with all the gadgets and enemy types (and different characters!) on different maps. The AR Training is unfortunately a watered-down Batman-only version, and judging from the Season Pack information, proper Challenge Maps will come as paid DLC.

 

[pippin]

The New Game+ design is so retarded, why do I have to beat the game once in order to unlock the hardest difficulty?

New Game+ is just there so your game looks longer than it actually is.
I've personally never really liked it but some people think of it as a feature that every game should have.

 

[Mangoose]

The sad thing is that you actually get more things you can do to mess with enemies. You can sabotage weapon crates, detective mode jammers, etc. Just got a voice "synthesizer" to order grunts to certain locations (such as said sabotaged crates). You can throw gadgets while gliding in, as mentioned before. You can steal or pickup baseball bats, which let you strike directly on shielded enemies and those guys that can't be hit before being stunned. You can use environmental objects sometimes a la Sleeping Dogs. You even get a single juggle lol.

But these mechanics are usually pointless because the encounters are too easy even without them.

Agree, I found this to be the easiest Arkham game yet. It's very hard to get punched in combat, I think Batman moves faster in this game or something. I played City on Hard 2 weeks ago, and freeflow combat is less forgiving there, Batman is sluggish and can't dodge hits as well.

I think the gunfire damage has been increased as I insta-die without armor upgrades on Hard. But Predator is still piss-easy because of the Fear Takedowns (upgradeable to 5 insta-KO'ed thugs! 5!) and the gargoyles/vantage points/vents/grates everywhere. You can even switch unseen between hiding above the thugs on the ledges, or beneath them in the grates, with the new "grapple up vent" feature. Oh, and most Predator takedown moves have been made silent or given longer range (normal silent takedown, corner takedown).
The few new enemy types doesn't really weigh fair against these new player advantages.

I think encounter design: proper level/map design, enemy choice & placement and patrol routes, etc. would counteract these toys more sufficiently. I mean that was really the difficulty in Predator-ing the other Arkham games. Really damn hard to pull off a Silent Takedown if everyone's watching each other.

On the few new enemy types... The problem is you barely see any of them! Give me 3 Medics on a Predator map (Medics with escorts of course so you can't just silent take them down). Overwhelm me.

Same with Combat. There have been no Mr. Hammers, stun-baton enemies have suddenly disappeared 1/3-way through the game, I don't see any Shielded enemies unless in "Challenge" mode. Where are the overwatching snipers? Once in a while I'll see onein an encounter who of course is easily taken down from behind (and cool, there's a riddler trophy on the other side of the wall!). Overwhelm me!

I really don't know what happened. Asylum had well designed encounters. City had well designed encounters. Rocksteady knows how to do it - I don't know why they didn't give a shit this time around.

(And hey man, Fear Takedowns are fun as fuck, haha. I'd rather them make the encounters ridiculously harder than take away all our new ridiculous toys.)

But even though it's easy... I can't say I haven't had fun. Stealing baseball bats and punching through the defenses of Brutes or manipulating armed thugs with the Voice Synthesizer and Disruptor, great fun. What the game really needs is a proper Challenge Mode where you can play around with all the gadgets and enemy types (and different characters!) on different maps. The AR Training is unfortunately a watered-down Batman-only version, and judging from the Season Pack information, proper Challenge Maps will come as paid DLC.

Yeah I'm pretty much playing for fun, which for me it is worth for 40% off heh being a Batman fanboy. If I paid full price I wouldn't be happy. Actually IIRC the only reason I pre-ordered was because of the discount. I'm a Chinese Jew, can't pass up what looks like a good deal.

I am also ridiculously confused about this AR/Challenge Map thing. Every other game had Challenge DLCs, yet vanilla still had pretty damn tough Challenges. The screen I posted above seems to be the hardest out of 3 combat AR/Challenges (and it was piss-poor easy), and I don't think I'm going to be getting any more? Wtf?

 

[Clockwork Knight]

The New Game+ design is so retarded, why do I have to beat the game once in order to unlock the hardest difficulty?

New Game+ is just there so your game looks longer than it actually is.
I've personally never really liked it but some people think of it as a feature that every game should have.

And people usually choose the hardest difficulty only after beating the game in lower ones so in theory it shouldn't be a big issue, but it becomes a problem when "I haven't touched a videogame since Pong" is mislabeled as "Normal" in order to keep egos from being hurt.

I would sooner believe this forum to pledge fealty to Gaben when he retroactively announces:

"Many years ago, there was a great development studio blah blah blah Black Isle blah blah blah hired all of them blah blah blah bought and gave them the rights to Fallout blah blah blah Fallout 3 is in the works. Here's a gameplay demo."

And THEN it turns out to be Half-Life 3 and nobody is sure how to react to the announcement.

 

[Israfael]

What 200 Mb patch was someone talking about? I haven't seen anything past the last weekend's small bugfix (which didnt fix memory leaks and seems to have added new ones)

 

[Mangoose]

What 200 Mb patch was someone talking about? I haven't seen anything past the last weekend's small bugfix (which didnt fix memory leaks and seems to have added new ones)

I have no idea! This is the only one I noticed:

June 27:

• Fixed a crash that was happening for some users when exiting the game

• Fixed a bug which disabled rain effects and ambient occlusion. We are actively looking into fixing other bugs to improve this further

• Corrected an issue that was causing Steam to re-download the game when verifying the integrity of the game cache through the Steam client

• Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash when turning off Motion Blur in BmSystemSettings.ini. A future patch will enable this in the graphics settings menu

Computers are so weird, and that's including gaming experience, tech support as a job and for my own damn computer when I try to tweak too much, etc. I only had bug number 3. I had no issue with 1, 2, or 4. In fact, I would rather enjoy bug 2 because the rain is a great fucker up of performance just for "atmosphere."

BTW, Why isn't there an option to turn off rain? Or even better, adjust particle effects/quality/density? It's a pretty sad situation because I can boot up any modern MMORPG and it'll let me modify all of that shit (not to mention UI, lua mods, etc., etc., etc.).

The New Game+ design is so retarded, why do I have to beat the game once in order to unlock the hardest difficulty?

New Game+ is just there so your game looks longer than it actually is.
I've personally never really liked it but some people think of it as a feature that every game should have.

And people usually choose the hardest difficulty only after beating the game in lower ones so in theory it shouldn't be a big issue, but it becomes a problem when "I haven't touched a videogame since Pong" is mislabeled as "Normal" in order to keep egos from being hurt.

Two things:

Usually NewGame+ allows you to start a new, harder, game with all your gadgets and upgrades, and whatnot - That means it's more than just another difficulty. I think I saw this first in JRPGs.

The second part you say about mislabeled difficulty levels is true. But really hasn't been a big deal in Arkham Asylum/City/Origins because if you choose Hard, then you're going to have a good time. The problem with Knight is that Hard difficulty is still too easy! I dislike this very much.

---

Still, I'm not kidding when I am having fun. As AW8 said, whether or not the gadgets are necessary, it's fun as fuck to sabotage a medic pack so that when the medic tries to revive he gets knocked out. Two encounters ago, there were a bunch of unarmed henchmen with weapon crates nearby (so their intent was to grab the weapons if they noticed anything)... I sabotaged all three weapon crates so

There's some other fun stuff, too. There are aerial drones, and you can glide and land on top of them, set an explosive charge, leap off, and then blow it up while you're falling. Lol. You have to do that with the Manbat, too, which is actually a challenge since you have to find his approximate location, find a high spot to survey to find him, and then glide after him. Aerial drones shine a very obvious beacon. Manbat does not. This is one of the nice things about the a good number of the side quests IMO... in general less hand holding in terms of finding where the next part is (without being Deadshot find-the-pixel bullshit from Arkham City). You gotta pay attention to the city environment, the bat-radia, some of Alfred's advice, etc.

Sadly. The game where it matters - Predator and Combat encounters - just are not challenging. So while I'm having fun, I'm not having a satisfying experience.

 

[Israfael]

• Fixed a crash that was happening for some users when exiting the game

• Fixed a bug which disabled rain effects and ambient occlusion. We are actively looking into fixing other bugs to improve this further

First one happened for me 100% of the time, so yes, it was present (i have an AMD card though). 2 and 4 are interconnected to each other - Blur could have been disabled only if you set DoF and AO to off, but then X-button vision stopped working properly (it didnt show people and some objects).

Sadly. The game where it matters - Predator and Combat encounters - just are not challenging. So while I'm having fun, I'm not having a satisfying experience.

I suspect that difficulty always resets to easy due to glitch, which would not surprise me given the story of this game. Still, i spent around 30 or 40 hilarious minutes trying to free one of the firemen (one that is surrounded by 2 AR-15 thugs, 2 shock stick thugs, 2 knife thugs, 2 shield thugs and some other mooks) without progressing too much into the story and having no gadgets except defaults and it was quite challenging for me (for some reason i have huge troubles with executing M3+space+space combo)

 

[Ulminati]

Dunno what it did, but my steam client downloaded ~200mb for arkham knight the other day.

Well, I know it made the game unable to recognize my controller

 

[Mangoose]

• Fixed a crash that was happening for some users when exiting the game

• Fixed a bug which disabled rain effects and ambient occlusion. We are actively looking into fixing other bugs to improve this further

First one happened for me 100% of the time, so yes, it was present (i have an AMD card though). 2 and 4 are interconnected to each other - Blur could have been disabled only if you set DoF and AO to off, but then X-button vision stopped working properly (it didnt show people and some objects).

I don't doubt you. PC bugs are just funny.

Sadly. The game where it matters - Predator and Combat encounters - just are not challenging. So while I'm having fun, I'm not having a satisfying experience.

I suspect that difficulty always resets to easy due to glitch, which would not surprise me given the story of this game.

[/quote]
No, I mean difficulty in terms of level design, enemy choice and placement and patrol routes, etc.

Still, i spent around 30 or 40 hilarious minutes trying to free one of the firemen (one that is surrounded by 2 AR-15 thugs, 2 shock stick thugs, 2 knife thugs, 2 shield thugs and some other mooks) without progressing too much into the story and having no gadgets except defaults and it was quite challenging for me (for some reason i have huge troubles with executing M3+space+space combo)

See the thing is... For 50% of the game after this I've seen zero shock stick thugs and maybe one shield thug. I have no idea what they fuck happened to Rocksteady QA.

 

[Mangoose]

Dunno what it did, but my steam client downloaded ~200mb for arkham knight the other day.

Well, I know it made the game unable to recognize my controller

Try deleting your "...\Steam\SteamApps\common\Batman Arkham Knight\BMGame\Config" folder and also your "...\Steam\SteamApps\common\Batman Arkham Knight\Engine" folder (the latter also has configs), run a verify files, and have it redownload for you.

Actually you might as well also do the same for the folder "...Steam\SteamApps\common\Batman Arkham Knight\Binaries" since it's just 136MB, and who knows if some of that patched correctly.

It'll just be like 140MB of downloading files so it won't take long.

 

[Ulminati]

Assuming they really fixed the bug where checking integrity makes steam re-download the entire game :3

 

[Mangoose]

Assuming they really fixed the bug where checking integrity makes steam re-download the entire game :3

That's been fixed. I actually tempted fate and did it again heh. (Copypastad the directory into a backup folder)

 

[Ulminati]

Dunno what it did, but my steam client downloaded ~200mb for arkham knight the other day.

Well, I know it made the game unable to recognize my controller

Try deleting your "...\Steam\SteamApps\common\Batman Arkham Knight\BMGame\Config" folder and also your "...\Steam\SteamApps\common\Batman Arkham Knight\Engine" folder (the latter also has configs), run a verify files, and have it redownload for you.

Actually you might as well also do the same for the folder "...Steam\SteamApps\common\Batman Arkham Knight\Binaries" since it's just 136MB, and who knows if some of that patched correctly.

It'll just be like 140MB of downloading files so it won't take long.

Deleted everything. Controller still doesn't work.

 

[Echo Mirage]

The Batgirl DLC trailer is up.



It looks...well yer.

They really picked the cream of the crop of scenes to show.

 

[Excidium II]

Looks better than the main game

 

[Talby]

The final shot of Joker pointing the gun makes me think this could be the Arkham version of the Killing Joke where

Spoiler

Batgirl/Barbara Gordon/Oracle gets shot through the spine.

 

[Ivan]

Great, 1.5 hours of cheap fight encounters.

 

[Darth Slaughter]

Great, 1.5 hours of cheap fight encounters.

It would be an improvement next to the 10 minute harley quinn DLC.

 

[Mangoose]

The final shot of Joker pointing the gun makes me think this could be the Arkham version of the Killing Joke where

Spoiler

Batgirl/Barbara Gordon/Oracle gets shot through the spine.

 

[yes plz]

Never understood the love for Barbabra Gordon as Batgirl outside of nostalgia.

cassie cain 4 lyfe

 

[Mangoose]

Dunno what it did, but my steam client downloaded ~200mb for arkham knight the other day.

Well, I know it made the game unable to recognize my controller

Try deleting your "...\Steam\SteamApps\common\Batman Arkham Knight\BMGame\Config" folder and also your "...\Steam\SteamApps\common\Batman Arkham Knight\Engine" folder (the latter also has configs), run a verify files, and have it redownload for you.

Actually you might as well also do the same for the folder "...Steam\SteamApps\common\Batman Arkham Knight\Binaries" since it's just 136MB, and who knows if some of that patched correctly.

It'll just be like 140MB of downloading files so it won't take long.

Deleted everything. Controller still doesn't work.

I'm sorry I have no idea what the problem is then. I don't want you to delete anything else because that'd be gigs to deal with. Are you using an Xbox controller or something else? Not that I can troubleshoot that...

Maybe switch to another USB port? My motherboard has two different USB controllers, and one likes to not work randomly.

i.e.

Chipset:

1. Up to 14 USB 2.0/1.1 ports (8 ports on the back panel, 6 ports available through the internal USB headers)

VIA® VL805 chip:

1. Up to 4 USB 3.0/2.0 ports (2 ports on the back panel, 2 ports available through the internal USB header)

Edit: BTW Ulmninati sign up for WBPlay when you get back into the game. I don't believe it's very intrusive, but it'll let us have a bit of e-peen competition. The other Codexers playing the game aren't e-peening and it makes me sad.

 

[Drakron]

Never understood the love for Barbabra Gordon as Batgirl outside of nostalgia.

cassie cain 4 lyfe

Because she is Batgirl again after, get this, some South African Hospital fixed her up?

 

[Ulminati]

Edit: BTW Ulmninati sign up for WBPlay when you get back into the game. I don't believe it's very intrusive, but it'll let us have a bit of e-peen competition. The other Codexers playing the game aren't e-peening and it makes me sad.

I'm not much for epeening anyway. Plus I'm probably too old and too bad to offer you much competition. :3

 

[Tytus]

Never understood the love for Barbabra Gordon as Batgirl outside of nostalgia.

cassie cain 4 lyfe

Fuck you, Stephanie for lyfe.

 

[yes plz]

Never understood the love for Barbabra Gordon as Batgirl outside of nostalgia.

cassie cain 4 lyfe

Fuck you, Stephanie for lyfe.

I liked her more as Spoiler and as Cassandra's side kick. If DC were to release a Black Bat & Spoiler book I'd buy three of every issue. When DC's most recent reboot made those two disappear is when I lost interest (though I think Spoiler is finally back).

Because she is Batgirl again after, get this, some South African Hospital fixed her up?

Yeah, that was stupid. I remember DC's rationale for it was essentially, "She's the more recognizable Batgirl, so you know... more sales."