Batman: Arkham Asylum and Batman: Arkham City are being remastered and bundled into a pack dubbed Batman: Return to Arkham, which launches on July 29 for £39.99 on Xbox One and PlayStation 4. A PC version isn't planned.
While the games aren't all that old in the grand scheme of things—Batman: Arkham Asylum was released in 2009 for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3—publisher Warner Bros. is promising upgraded models, environments, lighting, effects and shaders thanks to the use of Unreal Engine 4. Both games originally shipped on a heavily modified version of Unreal Engine 3.
Remastering is being helmed by Virtuos, a studio better known for handling 3D art duties for publishers, rather than releasing any games of its own. It does, however, have some experience in releasing remasters, most notably the recent Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster for PS4 and Vita.
Noticeably absent from Batman: Return to Arkham is 2013's Batman: Arkham Origins, a game developed by Warner Bros. Games Montréal rather than series stalwarts Rocksteady. Both Warner Bros. and Rocksteady seem to have completely disowned Batman: Arkham Origins in recent years, the game being the least well-received entry in the series to date.
Also absent is a PC version, which—given the complete mess Warner Bros. has made of its PC games of late—should come as little surprise. The PC port of Batman: Arkham Knight was disastrous, with players reporting numerous bugs, glitches, and performance issues.
While the publisher did attempt to fix the problems, releasing an updated version of the game that demanded a laughable 12GB of RAM, it eventually gave up and issued refunds to anyone that bought the game.
Warner Bros. similarly gave up on Mortal Kombat X PC players when it stopped allowing them to purchase future DLC for the game, which was also marred by problems at launch. Many critics labelled it simply "unplayable" on PC, and while Warner did attempt to save face by releasing patches, some of those updates deleted players' saved data by mistake.
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