Batman: Arkham Knight has consistently been plagued with technical issues from its release, even causing it to be pulled from shelves. A new patch was promised, and slowly drips and drabs of it were released to the community until the game was re-released last month ... still with many and more issues, leading to Warner Bros. offering refunds for the game and trying to questionably mask the poor user reviews on Steam. All along the way, there has been the promise of fixing the technical issues of the game. Also included in that list of promises was the eventual support for SLI and Crossfire. Today, in a response on Arkham Knight's Steam forums, Warner Bros. has said there will be no support for SLI and Crossfire coming.
In the "interim" patch before the final one that led to Arkham Knight's release, Warner Bros. specifically mentioned that SLI and Crossfire support would be coming in future updates. However, that definitely now is not the case.
The post that details this information says that the past few months have been spent investigating how to get SLI and Crossfire support into Arkham Knight, but the results were not so great. They found that in the best case estimates the performance improvements were minor. Warner Bros. then decided that the small gain vs. the high risk of other issues cropping up for all players was not worth pursuing SLI and Crossfire.
It is worth highlighting the fact that this was not posted as an announcement from Warner Bros. but simply a response to someone asking a question—though from an official developer. That means no release on it, no special place for it in the News tab in its community hub, nor any other place you'd expect new information from a company about their game.
Quick Take
I think this will be a bit of a learning moment for Warner Bros. in that they should never promise something they aren't 100% sure about. I doubt the potential backlash this could cause would be nearly as great if they had been more thoughtful in the way they presented their efforts for SLI and Crossfire support. Rather than wording it to be an eventuality, a sure thing, it would have been far better to have said they're attempting to get support—or something similar.
In any case, many will be highly critical of its absence at all, promised or not.
Is SLI and Crossfire support something we should expect to see from an AAA game? Where else does Arkham Knight need some fixing? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
