According to Steam, I'm now 14GB away from being Batman, even though the game wasn't supposed to unlock for a few days.
Well this is a curious one. After returning home from a refreshing day cleaning the labs, I planned on engaging in my current wind down activity of choice. Namely playing the shit out of Saints Row the Third while making up stories about Dragons so I could pretend I was actually playing Skyrim when the inevitable morning conversation arose.
Scrolling through the mix of buyers remorse and moments of joy that comprise my Steam list I noticed an oddity. When I left for work this morning Batman: Arkham City was dangling ‘two days and eighteen hours to unlock’ in front of me, yet now that is gone, replaced with that magical button that says ‘Install’.
It’s a sixteen gig download, so I still have no idea if the game is actually unlocked on Steam for us Aussies, let alone whether the additional Games For Windows Live and Securerom protection is good to go. But it appears to be coming down the pipes, legitimately.
We’d suggest you hold off purchasing in the hope it has been released early, but those who preordered the Steam version of the game should also see that magical install button.
I’ll update the story once the download finishes and highlight my success or lack thereof, and I’ll chase down that mate who was grabbing it through Green Man Gaming’s capsule software. But it looks like PC gamers might finally be getting their hands on Batman, a month after the console version caused such excitement in the office.
One thing to keep in mind though, is that early reports from gamers in the US are that the DirectX 11 version of the game is borked, delivering appallingly low framerates on high end cards. For now you’ll likely want to run it in DX 9, at least until a patch, or driver updates, or both, fix the mess.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012