Updated: On Oct. 31 developer WB Montreal released a patch that addressed some of the following issues, including the Burnley Tower glitch.
In the video game “Batman: Arkham Origins,” released Oct. 25, players are pitted against eight bloodthirsty assassins, a corrupt police force and legions of hired thugs.
But gamers' worst enemies by far are the technical glitches plaguing this otherwise strong and entertaining title. (The game sells for $59.99 on PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.)
In many gaming message boards, players are complaining of enemies falling through walls, getting stuck in walls, and becoming abruptly impervious to Batman's attacks.
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Batman will sometimes fall through a wall or two himself, we found, or become reluctant to leave a ledge or grappling point.
The glitches appear to be both more numerous and more severe on PCs, where sometimes the game takes so long to start up that the computer thinks it has crashed, and displays a "program not responding" message.
Simply ignoring this message and waiting for the game to finally start is enough to circumvent that problem, but other glitches are more serious.
The Burnley tower mess
For example, the optional mission at Burnley district comm tower is almost impossible to complete. This section of the game has to be completed to let players fast-travel to the Burnley district of Gotham City instead of walking (or gliding or swinging) across the sprawling map.
In the quest, Batman must break a glass windowpane in order to enter the tower, and then should be able to crawl up an air vent to access the tower's roof. However, after we tore off the vent's cover with the Batclaw and climbed up to it using the grappling gun, Batman simply dangled from the edge without ever going inside.
Trying to double back is no good either; Batman is unable to climb back out of the window through which he entered the room. Players will be forced to restart the game at their last autosave, and thenceforth will have to travel by foot or by grapnel whenever they need to visit the Burnely district.
But it gets worse. The game autosaves your progress at various points, and you can't make backups of previous save points. So it's possible, though unlikely, for the game to save while you're in the Burnley Tower room. That means you'll have no prior save point to return to, and your only recourse will be to restart the game entirely.
Clever gamers like YouTube user KeinZantezuken have discovered a workaround for the Burnley Tower glitch by avoiding the first room entirely — but only by exploiting yet another glitch that launches Batman onto the tower roof.
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At the time of the posting, WB Studios, the publisher of "Batman: Arkham Origins," had not responded to our request for comment.
Email jscharr@techmedianetwork.com or follow her @JillScharr and Google+. Follow us @TomsGuide, on Facebook and on Google+.
