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

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Goodtwin said:
I am really really......really hoping they patch these up to standards they set with their port of Borderlands, but as it stands today there are numerous superior options to play these games and if one of those is available to you, that would be my recommendation.
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How would you say this compares to something like The Witcher 3 port?

I hope you're not one of those people who are willing to say that the game should be played on anywhere else but Nintendo Switch. I'm keeping my copy, thank you.
 
SiG said:
Any news of patches yet?
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The game came out recently and it looks like the development team is going to meet Christmas in between. For Arkham Knight until January I don't think there will be any patch

The other two games, Asylum and City, you can play them without problems on your switch. They work very well.
 
Decided to get rid of these and got the trilogy on Steam Deck instead, shame Knight turned out the way it did but I appreciate they at least attempted it.
 
SiG said:
How would you say this compares to something like The Witcher 3 port?

I hope you're not one of those people who are willing to say that the game should be played on anywhere else but Nintendo Switch. I'm keeping my copy, thank you.
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I do not have the Witcher 3, so I cant speak definitively on it, but from the framerate test videos I have seen for the Witcher 3, it seems that that game runs at a pretty consistent 30fps except for some specific problem areas. Arkham Asylum and City just dont hold a lock onto the 30fps target consistently, and the poor frame pacing exasperates the problem, making it feel worse than it really is. Portable mode runs similar according to my framerate counter, but the small screen tends to hide the small dips and frame pacing issues. It appears to run smoother in handheld even if it actually isnt.

I wouldn't say to play the game anywhere but Switch, but there are numerous opportunities to play superior builds of these games. If portable play is a priority for you and you do not have something like Steam Deck, I would say go ahead and get it on Switch. I have purchased Arkham Asylum twice now, once for PC and now for my Switch. I have purchased Arkham City three times, once for my Wii U, once for PC and now for my Switch. In terms of performance, these games are not as good as the Wii U build of City.

I know it sounds like I am bashing the Switch build, but I am really just expressing my disappointment. I was very much looking forward to having Asylum and City on my Switch and expected better results than what we got. Asylum and City are very much playable, and if an inconsistent framerate doesn't really bother you, by all means go ahead and make the purchase.
 
Been playing Arkham Asylum so far and haven't really encountered any major issues. I feel the complaints are overblown.
 
SiG said:
Been playing Arkham Asylum so far and haven't really encountered any major issues. I feel the complaints are overblown.
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And that's great. If your happy with it, more power to you and I'm glad your enjoying it. Opinions on what constitutes major issues is subjective. Or when someone says they play fine, that is very subjective because one persons tolerance for framerate inconsistencies will differ from somebody else. Honestly, if you are somebody that is not sensitive to framerate fluctuations, they your opinion could very much mislead someone who is because objectively, they do not run great and do in fact run worse than they did on hardware from 2005 with the Xbox 360.



As you can see the frametime graph rarely holds a solid line at 33ms, with numerous spikes between 16ms and 50ms. Arkham City gives off a better first impression, but as you progress into the game, especially when down in the subway or near the subway, performance can tank there. I saw it dip into the teens on occasion with my Switch.

So I've said my peace and will leave it at that, still holding out hope for some significant patch work, but as its stands, I wouldnt have spent the money knowing what I know now. I think if you can watch the performance video in this post and dont think that will bother you, go ahead because they are still great games at the end of the day, but for me I would grade them as poor ports or Asylum and City, and one disaster with Knight.
 
I have higher expectations for PS3/360 era games (Asylum) and Wii U ports (City) on Switch. It's obviously stronger and existing remasters like Skyrim, Dark Souls, AC Black Flag look and run splendid. Those inconsistent frametimes in that footage give me a headache.
 
Skyrim is fantastic on Switch yea. Dark Souls was never fixed for audio issues, cloud saves, or the performance in the areas it couldn't hold 30 so I dropped it. I should go back to Black Flag!
 
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SiG said:
How would you say this compares to something like The Witcher 3 port?

I hope you're not one of those people who are willing to say that the game should be played on anywhere else but Nintendo Switch. I'm keeping my copy, thank you.
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I played the originals of Arkham Asylum and City on 360 at launch then the Remasters on PS4. I played Knight at launch on a fairly powerful PC (but quickly gave up due to the poor quality of the port) then finished it on PS4. I played The Witcher 3 at launch on the same PC (great experience) then again on Switch.

For me I've put a few hours into each Batman on Switch. Asylum and City are fine if you're not one for Digital Foundry videos or too sensitive to framerate drops. They are better than the PS4 Remasters imo due to using the original art and not having an unlocked wildly fluctuating framerate like on PS4. They were worth the £30 I paid for the Switch version at launch for portability.

Arkham Knight is awful and not fit for purpose. It's an afront to The Witcher 3 port to compare it lol. I'm actually surprised someone managed to release a port of this game worse than the PC original... I have no confidence in the publisher spending the money needed to put in the necessary work and optimisation to get it to even a steady 25fps.
 
bloopland33 said:
I mean, it's still really fast, though. They didn't have to put it on sale with their other games, or do 30% off.
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They've made the same offer with a game that came out a month ago and it's selling a lot. I wouldn't see anything unusual, there's a reason Warner wanted all their releases before Christmas, for hosting a christmast sale.

If you're concerned about commercial success, I wouldn't worry, the game in the Eshop has been well placed in the rankings since its release.
 
Ojoloco said:
They've made the same offer with a game that came out a month ago and it's selling a lot. I wouldn't see anything unusual, there's a reason Warner wanted all their releases before Christmas, for hosting a christmast sale.

If you're concerned about commercial success, I wouldn't worry, the game in the Eshop has been well placed in the rankings since its release.
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Oh, interesting, they are doing this elsewhere, you're right. Glad to hear it's been doing well on the eShop at least too.
 
Yamanoi said:
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At least this takes away the sting for anyone interested in Asylum and City. I think many people were expecting them to be sold separately for $20, so when the Trilogy released and you were forced to buy the whole package, that was a bit much to swallow considering just how bad Knight runs on Switch.

Serif said:
I have higher expectations for PS3/360 era games (Asylum) and Wii U ports (City) on Switch. It's obviously stronger and existing remasters like Skyrim, Dark Souls, AC Black Flag look and run splendid. Those inconsistent frametimes in that footage give me a headache.
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Yep, Black Flag is an amazing port to Switch. It looks and runs extremely well. My general opinion is that games from the 360/PS3 era should transition to Switch with as good or better performance with a bump in resolution to 900p or 1080p. There are numerous examples of this being done and those have set the standard for high quality ports.

There has to be some gremlins in the UE3 game engine that aren't easily removed. Did Rocksteady do a lot of low level customization for UE3 when creating the Arkham games? Perhaps some 360 and PS3 optimization that was very unique and doesn't play nice with the Switch's more modern Tegra X1. Memory bandwidth does seem to be a culprit for at least some of the frame drops because if I clock the memory to 1600Mhz in portable mode, that makes a noticeable improvement while turning the GPU clocks from 384 to 460Mhz made little to no difference. So is this a bottleneck with no solution? I find it hard to believe since other open world games such as Red Dead Redemption, Black Flag and Skyrim all render at 1080p on Switch. My theory is that Arkham Knight was a complete disaster and occupied the majority of Turn Me Up Games development time. Asylum and City probably got into a sellable state rather quickly and then it was all hands on deck for Knight. As bad as Arkham Knight is right now, can you imagine how bad it must have been back in early October when they were supposed to release? Asylum is still on version 1.0 and City is at 1.1. They almost certainly spent two months pulling out their hair trying to get this game into a passable state and just couldn't do it. The choice to bring over Arkham Knight has held back the trilogy as a whole.
 
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For Asylum, idk. I definitely don't think I'm getting the obvious hiccups when I spin the camera 360 degrees like I was before. But it also didn't feel smooth at points during the very first combat scenario in the opening. So I'm not sure.
 
bloopland33 said:
For Asylum, idk. I definitely don't think I'm getting the obvious hiccups when I spin the camera 360 degrees like I was before. But it also didn't feel smooth at points during the very first combat scenario in the opening. So I'm not sure.
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I'm going to try again from the very start. I do know the opening custcene is entirely FMV.
 
Ojoloco said:


Edit. Lol the doomslayer number
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Very cool they got the Asylum patch out sooner. From what I've seen it's only a few improvements away from being on par with the Arkham City port.

That Arkham Knight patch...well it'll come eventually.
 
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Pre-patch: Asylum was running well my first several hours into the game but for whatever reason became a mess as I progressed through the game with the constant frame-hiccups. I'm not that frame sensitive but it was actually diminishing my experience. I think a lot of it had to do with the over-world expanding in the outdoor areas of the game, but there was even frame hiccups that began to occurr during the post death sequences with Joker/Ivy ect. It's weird... it almost reminded of PS3 Skyrim which kept performing worse as you progressed through the game (though not nearly as egregious).

Post-patch: It seems like they cleaned all that up substantially in Asylum. I wish I started with City (which I've only messed around with for a few hours but seems great) but this excites me for the possibilities with Knight.
 
bloopland33 said:
For Asylum, idk. I definitely don't think I'm getting the obvious hiccups when I spin the camera 360 degrees like I was before. But it also didn't feel smooth at points during the very first combat scenario in the opening. So I'm not sure.
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I replayed the opening sequence this morning to see what the framerate was doing. The patch seems to help the game recover from framerate dips quicker, but it still dips quite often. In the first fight, the game constantly floats between 27-31fps. When going into detective mode, it tanks the framerate to a constant 24fps and doesn't recover. The frametime graph is still far from a straight line, but its less varied than before the patch. One way to almost always initiate a framerate dip is when going from walking to running. Almost like clockwork the game dips a few frames and then recovers. I will have to play around in Asylum with my end game file to see how some of the more egregious sections run now. I did try portable mode with a memory overclock and it didn't seem to make the same improvement as before, so they may have found some memory bandwidth saving optimizations. For me the game still doesn't look particularly smooth, but it honestly has more judder when its mostly the frame pacing rather than actual framerate drops. The game will sit right around 30fps often, but its spiking between 16ms, 33ms and 50ms frame times and it honestly it looks worse than when it has a sustained drop into the mid 20's. All this is less noticeable on the small screen, so if you are going to play primarily in portable mode, you may not notice these fluctuations at all.

I will be very interested to see what they can do for City. City has areas that drop hard, but it also has lots of areas that flat out run good with proper frame pacing. I would be curious to know if some of the optimizations they are implementing in Asylum and City are really just retroactively implementing optimizations that they are going with Arkham Knight. They are all UE3 games, so even if the focus remains on Arkham Knight, they may by default find optimizations that they can implement into Asylum and City.
 
I am curious what the 2GB patch consist of? I mean, the game was only 6.8GB prior to the patch and has grown by 25%. Perhaps assets aren't decompressing fast enough so they went and uncompressed many of the files? The CPU isn't anywhere near maxed out, so I have my doubts that is it, but a 2GB patch is substantial for a game of this file size.
 
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Goodtwin said:
I replayed the opening sequence this morning to see what the framerate was doing. The patch seems to help the game recover from framerate dips quicker, but it still dips quite often. In the first fight, the game constantly floats between 27-31fps. When going into detective mode, it tanks the framerate to a constant 24fps and doesn't recover. The frametime graph is still far from a straight line, but its less varied than before the patch. One way to almost always initiate a framerate dip is when going from walking to running. Almost like clockwork the game dips a few frames and then recovers. I will have to play around in Asylum with my end game file to see how some of the more egregious sections run now. I did try portable mode with a memory overclock and it didn't seem to make the same improvement as before, so they may have found some memory bandwidth saving optimizations. For me the game still doesn't look particularly smooth, but it honestly has more judder when its mostly the frame pacing rather than actual framerate drops. The game will sit right around 30fps often, but its spiking between 16ms, 33ms and 50ms frame times and it honestly it looks worse than when it has a sustained drop into the mid 20's. All this is less noticeable on the small screen, so if you are going to play primarily in portable mode, you may not notice these fluctuations at all.

I will be very interested to see what they can do for City. City has areas that drop hard, but it also has lots of areas that flat out run good with proper frame pacing. I would be curious to know if some of the optimizations they are implementing in Asylum and City are really just retroactively implementing optimizations that they are going with Arkham Knight. They are all UE3 games, so even if the focus remains on Arkham Knight, they may by default find optimizations that they can implement into Asylum and City.
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Thanks for checking things out with your tools, I was waiting for you to chime in with what you were seeing. Bummer about Aslyum. What the hell.
 
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Just got finished with AA but still have those bad ass arcadey challenge rooms to do... the stealth sections being my favourite.

I'll say it again... the thing that gives AA its case for the best in the series is the fact that it takes place within the confines of Asylum (like the graphic novel of its namesake), the layout of world and Batman's interactions with the Joker all throughout the game including the Jokers hilarious and well done dialogues in the stealth sections. The Joker is definitely at his very best in Asylum.

It's unfortunate about some of the early performance hiccups, but this trilogy is brimming with some of the greatest gaming content of all time. If they can get Knight closer to the level of AC and now post patch AA, this will be some of the best $ spent on a trilogy whether you've played the games or not. So much gaming goodness here.

It's very good news that patching this series seems to be a priority for the developers. It seems to be happening often with Switch ports these days which bodes well for future support.
 
I wish they were available separately, I'd gladly pay $20 to replay Asylum in portable -- don't care to replay the other two bloated open world games again in compromised versions.
 
20 is also the max I’d give. But in my case I only do not care about knight. So the sale brings it to the limit of what I would pay
 
Has anyone had a chance to check it out yet? I haven’t unfortunately.

@Goodtwin, if you don’t mind the @, any plans to check out City with your tools? No pressure, just wondering.
 
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Hot diggity! Gonna try to load this up tonight. It's annoying that Arkham City on the Switch chugs more than the Wii U version.
 
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Well, I just checked on my Switch, and apparently Arkham City already updated itself to v1.0.2. Time to give it a go.
 
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I flew around Arkham City to see if the patch improved the performance, and I couldn't tell a difference. There is still a lot of judder because of the inconsistent frame pacing and will still dip into the mid 20's in various areas. There must have been some customizations to UE3 for these Batman games that doesn't play nice with the Switch hardware. Turn Me Up games had terrific results with the Borderlands Collection where they delivered a nearly locked 30fps. After a hefty patch for both Asylum and City, both are playable but neither hold a consistent update throughout.
 
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