Gotham Knights fans are cancelling their pre-orders

Furious DC fans who pre-ordered the upcoming Gotham Knights have claimed they’re going to be canceling their orders after hearing the latest news on the game. 

As you may have heard over the weekend, the open-world Batman adventure will be locked to 30fps on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, with no option to sacrifice resolution for an increased framerate. 

Typically, new-gen games like Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered, Demon’s Souls, and the enhanced version of Cyberpunk 2077, allow players to choose between performance and visual fidelity. Those who choose performance can play these games at 60fps, at the expense of things like 4K resolution and ray-tracing. 

Fleur Marty, an executive producer at Gotham Knights developer WB Games Montreal, revealed in a leaked Discord message that the upcoming game will be locked 30fps with no performance mode - a controversial departure from other new-gen games. 

In fairness, Marty pointed out that Gotham Knights does support fully untethered co-op play in a “highly detailed open world”, which apparently means achieving 60fps isn’t quite as straightforward as lowering the resolution. For those who might not be aware, untethered co-op means that the second player can go anywhere in the game’s open world, and is not expected to remain in proximity to the host player. 

Unfortunately, Marty’s reasoning wasn’t quite enough for some fans, who argue that waiting until one week before the game launches to reveal it’s locked at 30fps on console was a pretty poor move. 

One fan observed: “Can’t decide if I am more disappointed by the fact it is only 30, or that they were clearly trying to keep that a secret until reviews drop.”

“Canceled my pre order,” another fan replied to WB Montreal. “I was super excited for this game until now. Why would you cancel the game on last gen consoles if you can't even have it run at 60 fps for current gen? Might as well have kept it on last gen.”

A number of others echoed this sentiment, threatening to either cancel their console order and get the game on PC, or step away from it entirely. Whether or not they actually go through with this remains to be seen, of course. I’d wager that most of the people making noise about canceling either won’t, or never actually pre-ordered the game in the first place.