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News Batman Arkham Trilogy coming to Nintendo Switch on December 1st (out now!)

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Cool that Asylum and City look good.

Knight really shows that most games can run on Switch, but it just depends on how ugly and terrible running the 3rd party developer is willing to make it.

It's the "worst" of the 3 games but playing it like this is a real disservice to the experience IMO.
 
Well, after playing a few hours of Asylum both on TV and portable, I can say it's absolutely glorious. The original version at high resolution and most of the time rock solid 30 FPS (I'm sure they will fix the small drops).

It's the definitive version of the game on console, I have no doubt. And I imagine it will be the same with City. Now I just hope they will improve Knight the most they can.
 
If UE3 really is the culprit for the state of Arkham Knight then it's fair to expect the upcoming Gotham Knights to perform much better as it's on more scalable UE4.

Still, Turn Me Up needs to work on that "big patch" for Knight in the meantime.
 
9-Volt said:
If UE3 really is the culprit for the state of Arkham Knight then it's fair to expect the upcoming Gotham Knights to perform much better as it's on more scalable UE4.

Still, Turn Me Up needs to work on that "big patch" for Knight in the meantime.
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Didn’t it apparently struggle on PS4 before being cancelled?
 
YolkFolk said:
Didn’t it apparently struggle on PS4 before being cancelled?
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Last gen versions aren't usually done by port studios. Switch version means extra optimizations. We could have something like Borderlands 3 which runs at locked 30fps on Switch with the last patch while it struggled badly on PS4.
 
9-Volt said:
Last gen versions aren't usually done by port studios. Switch version means extra optimizations. We could have something like Borderlands 3 which runs at locked 30fps on Switch with the last patch while it struggled badly on PS4.
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Admire the optimism but let’s be honest, it’s gonna be terrible.
 
Ghostsonplanets said:
MVG take on Arkham Knight:
  • Game is IO bound. UE3 was never made with Switch or Switch tech in mind and it shows. UE3 streaming system not a match for Switch
  • Tested on a overclocked Switch, with a 2.4GHz CPU, 1GHz GPU and 5000 MT/s (2500MHz) memory
  • Once he did that, game was able to run at 60 FPS (HH Mode), but with improper framepacing still
  • Batmobile sections, however, tanked the framerate to around 20 < - >30 FPS, confirming his thoughts on IO being the culprit
  • Think the game can be patched, but wonder if it won't take a lot of time and work to do so.
  • Doesn't recommend to buy Arkham Collection at full price due to Knight. But says that the others two games are more than fine and that they should have separated the games and released two different SKUs: One with Asylum and City (Easy ports) and other, later, with Knight only. Would have given time to Turn Me Up to properly optimize and re-archtect the game to Switch hardware.

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This is why one of my big hopes for Switch 2 is vastly improved IO.
 
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9-Volt said:
If UE3 really is the culprit for the state of Arkham Knight then it's fair to expect the upcoming Gotham Knights to perform much better as it's on more scalable UE4.

Still, Turn Me Up needs to work on that "big patch" for Knight in the meantime.
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There are problems that are inherent to the engine and then there are problems derived from poor design. Gotham Knights is definitely the latter (mixed with problems of the former). A lot of it has been fixed, but I fear the rot is fairly deep. With last gen versions being canned, they probably stopped digging to see how far down the rot went and just worked on getting it good enough for current gen.
 
I've been replaying Asylum (on PC, not Switch) and I'm almost a little annoyed at them immediately going open-world with the next one when they could have done much more with the original formula. I guess that's just what people want with these superhero games.
 
Dardan Sandiego said:
I've been replaying Asylum (on PC, not Switch) and I'm almost a little annoyed at them immediately going open-world with the next one when they could have done much more with the original formula. I guess that's just what people want with these superhero games.
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Same. Open-world worked well enough for Batman, but I think Asylum's "sort of a Metroid Prime" approach made for a tighter, more-memorable experience and I would have loved to see more of it
 
ILikeFeet said:
There are problems that are inherent to the engine and then there are problems derived from poor design. Gotham Knights is definitely the latter (mixed with problems of the former). A lot of it has been fixed, but I fear the rot is fairly deep. With last gen versions being canned, they probably stopped digging to see how far down the rot went and just worked on getting it good enough for current gen.
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Deep or not, it is coming to Switch. And of the leaks are true, two studios are working on the port. There's still possibility of better performance for the Switch version, such miracle ports always unpredictable. Same studio can be both blamed for bad ports and praised for good ones (Vrtuos, The Outer Worlds and Nier Automata). TMU might have dug even deeper for GK.
 
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I don’t understand why City gets lumped in with the issues that other open world games have. I can certainly see it with Knight since its map is several times larger than City, it’s filled with a lot more repetitive side missions, and it’s nearly twice as long to complete the main story.

City on the other hand is about the same length as Asylum, you can easily get from one end of the “open world” to the other in about a minute, the side missions are few and largely story-driven, and around half the game is spent in confined, Asylum-like areas like the Steel Mill, the subway, the museum, and Wonder City. It’s barely more open world than something like Ocarina of Time.
 
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After playing Asylum for a few hours, split between docked and handheld pretty evenly, this port is far from perfect. The frame pacing is generally poor, and framerate stutters are common. In portable mode they are less pronounced, but they are there. I overclocked my Erista Switch to max clocks on the GPU, but framerate hitches remain. There is something going on that pegs the GPU to 100%, and it's more often than not for no apparent reason. CPU cores all hum along at 30% usage, so no benefit from overclocking those. Asylum is V 1.0.0 and is the version that was on the carts ready to sell back in October. They spent zero time in that two month delay improving Asylum, and it's a shame because unlike Knight, Asylum could be polished up to perfection with a bit more work. Knight is getting all the bad press, but Asylum isn't as good as it should be. Compared to the developers work with the Borderlands collection, this Trilogy port is a let down for sure. Two of the three can and should be nearly perfect but aren't, and the third is currently a mess. Hopefully WB gives them a few more months to work on all three games.
 
TLZ said:
Watched the MVG video of Knight and my God is it horrible. A pixelated mess with horrible performance and bad asset streaming.

We need the Switch 2 now.
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I don't dispute that we need Switch 2 but this port could have been much better and hopefully will be. I'm sure there will be bad ports on Switch 2 as well just like PC gets (here's looking at Knight on PC).

and this...

Ghostsonplanets said:
MVG take on Arkham Knight:
  • Game is IO bound. UE3 was never made with Switch or Switch tech in mind and it shows. UE3 streaming system not a match for Switch
  • Tested on a overclocked Switch, with a 2.4GHz CPU, 1GHz GPU and 5000 MT/s (2500MHz) memory
  • Once he did that, game was able to run at 60 FPS (HH Mode), but with improper framepacing still
  • Batmobile sections, however, tanked the framerate to around 20 < - >30 FPS, confirming his thoughts on IO being the culprit
  • Think the game can be patched, but wonder if it won't take a lot of time and work to do so.
  • Doesn't recommend to buy Arkham Collection at full price due to Knight. But says that the others two games are more than fine and that they should have separated the games and released two different SKUs: One with Asylum and City (Easy ports) and other, later, with Knight only. Would have given time to Turn Me Up to properly optimize and re-archtect the game to Switch hardware.

Click to expand...
 
Kreese said:
Asylum holding up pretty well to the PS5 version

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Luneth said:
Man, I didn't remember how messed the Return to Arkham remasters were. They completely destroy the original art and atmosphere. And better to not talk about the faces.

I'm not usually picky with remasters changing things, but as a big Arkham fan these particularly are one of the very few I just refuse to play. I'm really glad we got the original versions on Switch.
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Aostia82 said:
Yes, under this particular point of view, the Switch version is way better than the PS5 one: power of artistic direction, lol.
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There is no PS5 version. This is PS4 BC on PS5.
 
Kreese said:
I don't dispute that we need Switch 2 but this port could have been much better and hopefully will be. I'm sure there will be bad ports on Switch 2 as well just like PC gets (here's looking at Knight on PC).

and this...
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I don't think Knight can get much better, or any at all. The other 2 yes since they're 360 ports.
 
TLZ said:
We need the Switch 2 now.
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Switch 2 won't be the "golden savior" like some people make it out to be. It will launch as an unproven system and first year we will see Nintendo backed third party ports like Switch did. Nintendo would ask more recent stuff (like Switch got, Doom and Wolfenstein) from third party partners and they'll have their own problems as they'll be down ports on their own.

Like, Switch 2 is likely to get Suicide Squad on launch and there would be no guarantee it'll perform better than Knight on Switch.
TLZ said:
I don't think Knight can get much better, or any at all. The other 2 yes since they're 360 ports.
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It can. Almost all miracle ports on Switch got better with patches, even Ark.
 
TLZ said:
I don't think Knight can get much better, or any at all. The other 2 yes since they're 360 ports.
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Probably will not be improved much but there are actual technical reasons for this as stated:

MVG take on Arkham Knight:

  • Game is IO bound. UE3 was never made with Switch or Switch tech in mind and it shows. UE3 streaming system not a match for Switch
  • Tested on a overclocked Switch, with a 2.4GHz CPU, 1GHz GPU and 5000 MT/s (2500MHz) memory
  • Once he did that, game was able to run at 60 FPS (HH Mode), but with improper framepacing still
  • Batmobile sections, however, tanked the framerate to around 20 < - >30 FPS, confirming his thoughts on IO being the culprit
  • Think the game can be patched, but wonder if it won't take a lot of time and work to do so.
 
9-Volt said:
Switch 2 won't be the "golden savior" like some people make it out to be. It will launch as an unproven system and first year we will see Nintendo backed third party ports like Switch did. Nintendo would ask more recent stuff (like Switch got, Doom and Wolfenstein) from third party partners and they'll have their own problems as they'll be down ports on their own.

Like, Switch 2 is likely to get Suicide Squad on launch and there would be no guarantee it'll perform better than Knight on Switch.

It can. Almost all miracle ports on Switch got better with patches, even Ark.
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I don't know about Suicide Squad since I haven't seen anything of it. I'm talking about games like Arkham Knight. Surely the Switch 2 can do much better and do this game justice. Also shows the Switch is overstaying its welcome, again.
 
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Kreese said:
Probably will not be improved much but there are actual technical reasons for this as stated:

MVG take on Arkham Knight:

  • Game is IO bound. UE3 was never made with Switch or Switch tech in mind and it shows. UE3 streaming system not a match for Switch
  • Tested on a overclocked Switch, with a 2.4GHz CPU, 1GHz GPU and 5000 MT/s (2500MHz) memory
  • Once he did that, game was able to run at 60 FPS (HH Mode), but with improper framepacing still
  • Batmobile sections, however, tanked the framerate to around 20 < - >30 FPS, confirming his thoughts on IO being the culprit
  • Think the game can be patched, but wonder if it won't take a lot of time and work to do so.
Click to expand...
Yea I watched the MVG video. And those points are exactly why we need a Switch 2 for a game like Arkham Knight.

The game was pushed to 60 with bad frame pacing yes, but the resolution still looks horrible. The whole thing imo should've just been skipped on Switch and given people Arkham Origins instead. I honestly don't know why this game keeps getting ignored and overlooked. It's a very good game and would've fit perfectly here, and just left Arkham Knight for Switch 2.
 
Goodtwin said:
Best thing about getting my OLED Switch was it made the decision to jailbreak my launch Switch an easy one. The only reason I jailbroke my Switch was so I could overclock it, and for games that have only minor stutters in framerate, they are usually eliminated with an overclock. Even Zelda TotK is far more stable with when maxing out the GPU clocks. Mild CPU overclocks help in some games, but in general it seems pointless to go beyond 1.3Ghz. It seems that Asylum and City are good, but not quite locked to 30fps, so I am optimistic that overclocking the GPU and maybe a slight CPU overclock will give me the rock solid 30fps. The porting developer Turn Me Up Games have done terrific work with many Switch ports and I have a feeling they will continue to polish up this collection over the following couple months. Perhaps one more patch prior to Christmas to at least iron out Asylum and City, those two games are low hanging fruit to polish up to perfection. Arkham Knight comes down to just how much additional development time they can get authorized from WB. If WB is willing to pay them for a few extra months after the new year to work on it, then they have a real shot at matching or even exceeding the results of the Witcher 3 on Switch.

Doom 2016 and Eternal are excellent "impossible ports" on Switch, but they were able to gain a lot of performance by being able to drop from 60fps to 30fps. Games like The Witcher 3 and now Batman Arkham Knight being 30fps games makes it all the more impressive that they could get them running on Switch at all.
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It's just dumb that Nintendo doesn't allow max clocking.

Plenty of people do it and play for hours on end and I've never heard of one person bricking their console.
 
Knight was the only game I wanted to play. I’m cool though.
 
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It'll never not be funny seeing people claim we needed the Switch 2 yesterday because of some select (bad) ports.
Way to create your own kind of narrative.
 
TLZ said:
Watched the MVG video of Knight and my God is it horrible. A pixelated mess with horrible performance and bad asset streaming.

We need the Switch 2 now.
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Switch isn't the problem for Arkham knight, and of all the games in history, I probably wouldn't pitch my tent on any versions hardware being the problem for a game that had one of the most notoriously bad PC versions of major games in history. Had WB budgeted enough time/money to make it work, it could have been done, but they cut corners again, and here's the resutl.
 
The best plan would have been a double pack of Asylum and City on Switch and Knight as a launch title for Switch 2.

People don't even have the option of cheaper purchases of those two prior games without including Knight, and they're being buried in this negative backlash when they're actually really good versions.
 
For all the complaining, and I've done some, I'm so glad these games are finally on the Switch. Asylum and City, especially, being the originals at 1080p. Knight is also a favorite and if they'd waited a year to get a PS4-par version in the Nintendo ecosystem, yes, this would've been a dream collection perfectly realized.

But again, that said, still happy these are here with the first two coming over as well as they did. Been so fun replaying them after so many years.
 
bloopland33 said:
For all the complaining, and I've done some, I'm so glad these games are finally on the Switch. Asylum and City, especially, being the originals at 1080p. Knight is also a favorite and if they'd waited a year to get a PS4-par version in the Nintendo ecosystem, yes, this would've been a dream collection perfectly realized.

But again, that said, still happy these are here with the first two coming over as well as they did. Been so fun replaying them after so many years.
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I am happy that Asylum and City are on Switch, but I am also disappointed that the port quality is not up to the standards Turn Me Up Games set with the Borderlands Collection. Asylum drops frames a lot and the frame pacing is generally poor. If you go back an look at framerate test for Asylum on PS3 and 360, you will see a near lock at 30fps with proper frame pacing. I haven't played Arkham City yet, but the framerate test I have seen still show quite a few stutters compared to the originals released on 360/PS3. I am "hopeful" that they patch these two games up to a rock solid 30fps, but I am skeptical that it will happen. The Trilogy was delayed two months and Asylum received zero attention, telling me that they felt the game was "good enough." The port of Knight obviously turned into a nightmare, and I am sure all the workers at Turn Me Up Games was focused on trying to get that into a playable state, but even with the delay the outcome for Knight will be perceived as not worth a purchase. The best course of action is to sell these games independent of one another on the eshop, and give Asylum and City a bit more polish. They have an opportunity to offer Switch gamers two excellent and highly polished Arkham games and at this point, its best to just chalk up Knight as a lost cause. Unless WB is willing to greenlight another 4-6 months of development for Knight, but I seriously doubt they will.
 
Goodtwin said:
I am happy that Asylum and City are on Switch, but I am also disappointed that the port quality is not up to the standards Turn Me Up Games set with the Borderlands Collection. Asylum drops frames a lot and the frame pacing is generally poor. If you go back a look at framerate test for Asylum on PS3 and 360, you will see a near lock at 30fps with proper frame pacing. I haven't played Arkham City yet, but the framerate test I have seen still show quite a few stutters compared to the originals released on 360/PS3. I am "hopeful" that they patch these two games up to a rock solid 30fps, but I am skeptical that it will happen. The Trilogy was delayed two months and Asylum received zero attention, telling me that they felt the game was "good enough." The port of Knight obviously turned into a nightmare, and I am sure all the workers at Turn Me Up Games was focused on trying to get that into a playable state, but even with the delay the outcome for Knight will be perceived as not worth a purchase. The best course of action is to sell these games independent of one another on the eshop, and give Asylum and City a bit more polish. They have an opportunity to offer Switch gamers two excellent and highly polished Arkham games and at this point, its best to just chalk up Knight as a lost cause. Unless WB is willing to greenlight another 4-6 months of development for Knight, but I seriously doubt they will.
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I agree. City I think I can ignore the drops when they happen as it’s been fine enough so far. Asylum I can definitely tell. I’m with you on not being sure these two get patched. I don’t recall if someone already tried the first two on an overclocked Switch to see what it did. Worst case I’m hoping the switch 2 smooths them out a bit.
 
bloopland33 said:
I don’t recall if someone already tried the first two on an overclocked Switch to see what it did.
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I have overclocked my Switch with Asylum, but it wasn't enough to eliminate the dips. It probably prevents some of the most minor dips, but anything that was dipping into the mid 20's still does so even with the GPU set to 912Mhz. There is something going on in the rendering pipeline that randomly, but persistently spikes GPU usage to 100%. I was in a small room in Asylum panning the camera around in a circle observing the GPU usage, and it would range from as low as 30% all the way up to 100%, even when overclocked. So I do believe there is some sort of inefficiency within the renderer that could be optimized, but if the developer puts all their focus on Knight and consider Asylum and City good enough, will they bother to dive in iron this out? Time will tell. CPU usage is pretty much always at 30-40% in Asylum and this does make me wonder if there are some task that could be offloaded from the GPU onto the CPU. That would probably require a deep dive into the nuts and bolts of the game engine, so probably not going to happen.
 
TheGreatMightyPoo said:
Is it unlikely or likely they’d patch these on the next Switch???
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I'm going to say unlikely, but I am in the mindset that backwards compatibility will work via an emulation layer for the GPU that works for all Switch games rather than games getting/needing patches on a per game basis. As far as the potential for upgrade patches for these games, I do not see that happening either. Turn Me Up Games will have already moved on from working on these games by the time Switch 2 launches and I do not see WB contracting a developer to work on an upgrade patch that wont have any meaning return on investment. When people talk about "upgrade patches" for Switch 2, what that really involves is port of the Switch game to the new hardware. They cannot take advantage of the new hardware with just a simple patch, it will require a more extensive port.
 
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TheGreatMightyPoo said:
Is it unlikely or likely they’d patch these on the next Switch???
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I do have a tendancy to be a negative Nancy, but I think people should keep their expectations in check about what is likely to get a free patch. The vast majority of games didn't on the playstation ecosystem, and it's reasonable to assume it will be similar on the switch successor.
 
Gotham Knights on Switch is gonna give Lords of the Fallen Series S and Xenoblade 2 Switch a run for its resolution money.
 
Yamanoi said:
Gotham Knights on Switch is gonna give Lords of the Fallen Series S and Xenoblade 2 Switch a run for its resolution money.
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Gotham Knights is just a bizarre game in general to try to port because... It's very CPU heavy for reasons no one understands.

So there's not really an easy way to improve performance by just slashing the resolution down. It may just run at 12 FPS the entire time.
 
I wouldn't be surprised if Gotham Knights ended running better on Switch than Arkham Knight. I think most of the problems of AK on Switch are derived from UE3. There are some textures which will take a long time to load, or even won't load at all. It reminds me of the first UE3 games but much, much worse. It seems like Switch simply can't handle a heavy-modified version of the engine, which itself is not natively supported by the console.

I truly hope they will improve AK with patches, but if the problems are indeed derived from the engine, then I don't see how they can fix that.
 
Surely if they couldn’t get Knight to run well they would have been better off skipping that and just announcing the Arkham Collection (Asylum+City) for Switch instead? They must have known early on if they could get it running in an acceptable manor or not.
 
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ILikeFeet said:
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The title is a bit clickbait, seeing that 2 of the 3 ports are going well, and Knight only has problems with the Batmobile in the dock profile

(And I better not even mention how absurd it is to say that it goes at 0fps because it has suffered a crash)

A resume:

https://nintendoeverything.com/batm...ate-and-resolution-switch-knight-city-asylum/

Knight:
-The typical graphical cut of a Switch impossible port like illumination and textures
- 30 fps with drops using batmobile or travelling fast
– 810p resolution when docked
– 540p in portable


– Arkham City and Asylum uses dynamic resolution up to 1080p (often 900p)
– Portable is up to 720p
-30fps, Asylum has drops on dock mode (runs without problems on portable)
 
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How come the games run even worse in docked? I assumed it would be the other way round.

This release is such a bummer, i'm considering seeing if I can return the game for a refund at this point.
 
YolkFolk said:
That’s a very generous assessment.
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I have the game, and in addition to that I saw gameplays and the switchUp analysis, and the fps problems only appeared with the batmobile.

Literally, in the DF video, where the game appears having serious problems is using the batmobile.
 
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