Insomniac Games has rolled out Patch 4 for Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, focusing on substantial performance enhancements and critical bug fixes. The update addresses a range of issues, promising a smoother and more stable gaming experience for players.
This is the fourth patch since the game’s rather lacklustre launch in which it came out with seemingly minimal promotional material and terrible optimisation. But since its release, Insominac games have released multiple patches, each attempting to address the biggest issues with the game. Will this finally be the update that makes the game worth its £50 price tag?
Spider-Man 2 Patch 4
Chief among the improvements are significant CPU and GPU performance optimisations, particularly when ray tracing is enabled. Players can expect noticeable gains in areas with sand and improved map navigation performance, leading to a more fluid gameplay experience. This should please those who found the game stuttering in certain areas.
Beyond performance, the patch tackles a series of frustrating bugs. Notably, the update rectifies the issue of brightness, contrast, and visual effects settings resetting upon game restart or time-of-day changes. Crashes, including those affecting quad-core processors with ray tracing and instances of quick game exits, have been resolved, enhancing overall stability.
Visual fidelity has also received attention, with fixes for ray-traced shadows and reflections. Issues such as persistent Symbiote Nest shadows and excessive lighting have been addressed, alongside improvements to ray-traced ambient occlusion. A bug causing characters to appear overly dark with XeGTAO has also been corrected.
Further refinements include user interface improvements, such as preventing mouse scroll bar dragging issues and resolving input mapping conflicts. The patch also delivers numerous visual bug fixes related to ray-traced effects. This comprehensive update aims to provide a more polished and enjoyable experience for all Spider-Man 2 players.
Spider-Man 2 Patch 4 Notes
- Resolved a bug that caused mission trails to not appear on first playthrough for some players.
- CPU and GPU performance optimizations related to raytracing.
- Performance improvements in areas with sand.
- Improved map navigation performance.
- Settings for Brightness, Contrast and visual effects no longer reset when the game is restarted, or the time of day is changed.
- Fixed a crash that could occur when quitting the game quickly after starting it.
- Resolved a crash that could occur on quadcore processors when enabling raytracing.
- Addressed a bug that caused ray-traced shadows of Symbiote Nests to persist after they were cleared.
- Fixed a bug where ray-traced shadows caused excessive lighting in some cases.
- Resolved a bug with ray-raced reflections that caused characters to appear darker when Ambient Occlusion was set to XeGTAO.
- Fixed a bug where the mouse could get stuck in a dragging state when dragging a scroll bar.
- The [Space] input in ‘Press [Space] to continue’ will no longer be replaced by the key mapped to ‘Jump’.
- Various crash fixes and stability improvements.
- Various visual bug fixes related to ray-traced reflections.
- Various fixes to ray-traced ambient occlusion and ray-traced shadows
- Various user interface bug fixes and improvements.
Should I Buy It?
Now that four patches have been released, I think the game looks significantly healthier and might be worth playing now. Even the Steam reviews seem to be saying the same, with the recent reviews now showing 79% positive, a huge difference from when it launched with 49%.
