"I'm done with your studio": Fans displeased with Rocksteady developer defending Gotham Knights being locked at 30fps

Gotham Knights very recently announced that it will be locked to 30fps on current-generation consoles with no option for a "Performance mode." This is usually the norm for most AAA titles releasing on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles.

The announcement about the upcoming superhero action-adventure game from WB Games Montreal was immediately met with polarizing reactions from players, who took to Twitter to express their views on the matter.

Once the situation caught some traction, a developer from Rocksteady, the development studio behind the iconic Batman Arkham games chimed in as well. He expressed his take on the whole debacle and why he thinks the 30fps lock will be implemented by Gotham Knights.

Fans did not take kindly to the statements made by the developer, which they felt were nothing more than an excuse for lazy development. They believe this is given further credence since most AAA titles on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S offer players an option for 60fps performance mode.

This is true despite the fact that they feature the same graphical features and resolution targets.

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Rocksteady developer defends 30fps cap on Gotham Knights

In his Twitter thread, Lee Devonald, a character technical artist at Rocksteady, stated that the current-generation console hardware has limitations that hinder performance drastically.

On top of that, the modern visual features such as ray-traced reflections, global illumination, and a resolution target of 4K massively tax hardware. This leaves very little legroom for performance optimization without drastically scaling back visual fidelity.

While the developer was right to point out some visual features come with a significant impact on performance, most games do offer a separate mode on current-generation consoles. These usually scale down graphical features to maintain a consistent and smooth 60fps gameplay experience.

Devoland also stated that the game's Xbox Series S version was the main culprit behind Gotham Knights' 30fps cap. While it makes sense for the underpowered Xbox system, it is not a viable enough reason for the game to not have any performance mode. This is especially true for Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, which are significantly more powerful than the Series S.

Fans were quick to reply back to Devonald with tweets like "Nah! You were wrong and I'm definitely done with your studio!" and much more.

Gotham Knights being locked to 30fps, while it has its own reasons, was never clearly communicated to players. This left many fans who were looking forward to the game are skeptical over optimization.

It is also really baffling to players that games like CD PROJEKT RED's Cyberpunk 2077 and Guerilla Games' Horizon Forbidden West, both of which are open-world titles featuring the same graphical features and NPC interactions. They deliver a smooth 60fps gameplay experience while Gotham Knights, built on an improved version of Epic Games' Unreal Engine 4, caps performance at 30fps.

Even games like Ghostwire: Tokyo, which is yet another open-world action-adventure title built using the Unreal Engine 4, delivers a solid 60fps even with ray-tracing and other modern graphical bells and whistles enabled.

It remains to be seen if WB Games Montreal will eventually add a performance mode to the game via post-launch updates, much like Dying Light 2: Stay Human. As of now, it doesn't seem like players will be able to play Gotham Knights at anything beyond the 30fps on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X when it releases on October 21, 2022.