Dealing with the Rare Game Bugs

Dealing with the Rare Game Bugs

The concept of discovering bugs in a video game is nothing new, and unless Arkham City is literally the first game that you have ever played, chances are good you have experienced your fair share of game bugs in the past.  Generally speaking video game bugs tend to come on three different flavors, the first two of which -- game freezing and Load Errors -- are generally considered to be game-breaking bugs, while the third -- behavior errors -- while not game-breaking per se, can be amusing.

Fortunately Batman: Arkham City appears to only have the third type of bug, as in the several hundred hours of play that I have given it I have yet to run into either of the first two (excluding the Game Save Bug that actually got me about halfway through the game and forced me to replay that first half as well as prompted me to add the section on UPS hardware to the guide).  Back to my point though, the only bugs that I have encountered in the game are behavior errors in which the world stops behaving the way you reasonably expect it to and does odd things.

When you encounter this sort of error or bug, the only thing that you can do to correct it is to back all the way out of the game, quitting to the first screen, and then restarting your console and the game.  This usually corrects the issue, though there is one particular area in the northeast part of the map where the broken highway sticks out over the water where the bug is actually easy to trigger.  When that happened to me I had to reload the game three times to get it not to bug on me.

The Only Bug Type Found in the Game

In the video embedded above you can see what I am talking about with respect to game behvior.  Specifically as you watch you will see me deploying an ice raft and pulling myself to the opening of the secure area -- I then disable the TYGER Turret and pull myself in, and everything is going as it should.  There is no indication on screen that anything is wrong, until I try to actually enter the secure area, whereupon I encounter what appears to be an invisible wall!

Multiple attempts to enter this area result in failure.  It is not accessible, which means we have a bug.  After leaving the immediate area I try again to deploy an ice raft and re-enter, only to discover that a strong updraft has been placed in teh area by the game, making it impossible to land on the ice raft!  Watch the video to see what I mean -- I am not doing that the game is. 

As I approach the raft the invisible updraft grabs my cape wing and sends me up into the air.  Straight up!  I wish there was a way to get the game to do this when I actually want it to, that would be so cool...

There are several other areas in the game that can trigger this sort of bug -- and when that happens your best solution is to quit to the first screen and turn the console off, and then back on, and load the game.  Basically I think you need to turn off the console to flush the cache, as otherwise there is a chance that upon reloading the game you will en up with the same error.

All things considered as gamers we should be very grateful that this is the extent of the bugs in Arkham City!