This isn’t the article I’d planned to write today. I’d intended to send you all off into what will hopefully be a long and happy weekend full of food, family, football, and fun with a feel-good piece about a game with a worthwhile new benchmarking mode. I, for one, can’t get enough of those: I’m always looking for a game that gives me, in addition to countless hours of enjoyment (like what I’m still getting from Skyrim), an easy and highly-extensible way to assess the gaming capabilities of video cards and processors. Something with lots of settings I can explore and tweak, something that’s quick to get into and just as quick to run, and something that I can pull down from my Steam account with minimal effort whenever I need it. In the tech world, I’m thankful for as many of those as I can get.
Alas, Batman: Arkham City offers no such benchmarking experience.
Before going any further, one important caveat: This represents what I went through with the PC version of the game using Steam. I’m also not going to delve into whether this is a good game or not, on any platform. I honestly don’t know yet. From my roughly half hour of play time, it’s more or less on par with Batman: Arkham Asylum, which in my book is a fine thing.
But so much else about just getting the game up and running is not fine that I’m hard pressed to recommend it on general principles — and that I feel I can’t recommend it at all to those who, like me, may have interest in it for its built-in benchmark.
First, the game is big — really big. As in, more than 16GB in size. It’s the biggest game I’ve ever seen on Steam, though I won’t say it’s the biggest ever; it’s only about 1GB larger than Total War: Shogun 2. (The next biggest, L.A. Noire, is just over 13GB.) But a large game means a long download. At home, on my decidedly average internet connection, it took most of a day; at work, where I routinely get downstream speeds upwards of 4MB/s, I still needed more than an hour. That time adds up quickly.
In and of itself, that’s not a deal-breaker. What’s more grating is what happens once you’ve downloaded the game. You have to authenticate it. Yes, you have to prove to that you have the right to play a game that is already linked to your Steam account. Again, I haven’t experimented with every game in the Steam library, but I’ve followed most of the major releases over the last two or three years, and this is the first time my Steam account has not being sufficient proof that I’m entitled to play the game.
The procedure is not that arduous on its face. When you launch the game in Steam, a window pops up. It displays a CD key and a message informing you that you’ll need to enter the key once you’re in the game. There’s also a button that automatically copies the key to the clipboard, which is handy. So when the authentication window appears, a few moments later, just paste the key in and you’re golden.
Well, semi-golden. A few minutes after that, you have to do it again. This time the key request comes when you’re logging in to Games for Windows Live with your Windows Live ID — something that’s a requirement if you want to be able to save the game or see all it has to offer. This is yet another first for me: Even on games (even on Steam!) that support the Games for Windows Live features, I’ve never needed to present proof that I’m also legally allowed to continue — in the past, my being in the game has always been sufficient. Only after you do all this can you finally play.
Oh, and there’s one last wrinkle. Once you successfully authenticate the game (on the Windows side), a message appears to tell you that you can only install the game on four more PCs using that code. Yes, you can install it on each PC ten times. But if you travel a lot, or if you do a lot of tweaking to your computer that involves reinstalling Windows — or even just Steam — you could run up against this limitation very quickly.
Let’s review. The game takes forever to download. Once you’ve got it, you have to prove you own it. Then you have to prove you own it again. Then after you’ve proven you own it twice, you’re only allowed four additional fresh installations of it. Something’s crying out “turkey” here, and it sure as heck ain’t Thanksgiving.
Just so there’s no misunderstanding here, I’m in no way begrudging the folks at Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment their rights to protect their work. In fact, in matters of piracy and copyright, I frequently find myself giving as much latitude to the creators as possible. Part of this might be due to my background in the arts and my work as a writer: When I construct something from nothing, I want to be fairly compensated for my hard work and inspiration, and I think everyone who goes to similar trouble deserves to be able to profit as much as they can from it.