Is city still hot a garbage port?
Is it? I got it for cheap on Steam sales and haven't gotten around to it.
(The typical story for Steam users, amirite?)
City was treated like
Knight at launch, a crapped out port from the consoles was dumped onto PC with a bunch of nvidia exclusive features stuck on and the game was never truly optimized. (Actually,
Asylum was the same way, people forget because the game had smaller maps with few controlled spots for gliding. There's also loads hidden all over the place with door animations or Batman kicking through something, it's most noticeable once you start back-tracking for the endgame.)
They did patch it up better than they did
Knight though which Rocksteady completely just left in Dave Lang's hands (even though Iron Galaxy already had crapped out the
Origins PC port), so it was eventually playable on common hardware of the time with PhysX and such off (8800GT-ish was fine I think?) and at this point standard gaming hardware should do fine with the GOTY.
If you don't have it on a SSD it'll hitch, pause and UE3 texture pop-in if you move through the world too fast though. Might even on a SSD. It's really not a cared for UE3 engine like say Gearbox did with
Borderlands 2.
Origins was buggy, but Montreal actually patched it a few times including the busted missions (and Splash Damage futilely tried to fix the PC multiplayer* despite WB not paying them to), but they were still dealing with Rocksteady's cobbled together engine so you'll always load doing the fast-travels and they tried to hide some of the seams by putting blocks in your path so you can't skip through the load chunks like you could by going at odd angles in
City. A lot of the collision and animation bugs are actually also present in
Asylum and
City, but people overlooked them because they were the first games.
Origins' combat
is slightly off too, which probably makes it more noticeable coming from the earlier games.
And the world is empty as fuck since it's much larger.
Far and away the best story and bosses though, and the interiors are alright, they main problem is they "had" to top
City like
Knight so the extra sized city isn't really as great as
Asylum's tighter go-everywhere design.
It's kinda crazy that the 500 person studio hasn't really done anything (we know of) in five years except some DLC missions for
Knight. I always assumed they were doing the rumored Suicide Squad spin-off game, especially since
Origins has an after credit setup for it, they had job openings talking about more 3D action games set in the DC universe**, and the schedule seemed like it lined up for them to put it out near the movie.
*It would crash the game for everyone if the matchmaking failed for any single player connected. IIRC, SD indicated it was something they literally couldn't fix and they would have been better off not using the engine they were given, just the assets. So they "patched" it to extend the time before it failed to like an hour or something so if you got the black screen you could back out and try again. Needless to say the multiplayer was not populated for very long. (Although I liked parts of the "concept" since it was asymmetric (with Batman hounding both teams) and the regular shooting was Splash Damage quality enough. They should explore the idea in Dirty Bomb somehow.)
**Infact one is still listed:
WB Games Montréal seeks a Senior Systemic Gameplay Programmer to work on its open-world AAA title based on one of DC Universe’s most popular IPs. This person will focus on the systemic ecosystem of the game, including gameplay, missions, and encounters.
