After a rough start that stuck it with a "mixed" user rating on Steam, Spider-Man 2 on PC finally has its first proper patch, with fixes for "several" crash issues and bugs, and a promise that "more bug fixes, improvements and performance optimizations" are on the way.
Spider-Man 2 did not quite stick the landing when it hit PC in January, as a multitude of players ran face-first into sub-par performance and hard crashes. PC Gamer's Nick Evanson, who understands this sort of thing, explained that the game's use of the GPU decompression option in DirectStorage may be at the root of at least some of the game's performance issues. There's no mention of that in today's patch notes, although as Nick said, fixing it might be a bigger problem than it seems because of possible spinoff effects, particularly for people on lower-end gaming rigs.
In any event, this patch promises "several crash fixes based on feedback from many of you," along with toggles for film style animation and comic SFX, fixes for UI and visual bugs related to DLSS ray reconstruction and raytracing, changes to the way New Game+ is started, and a backup system for autosaves. The game's crash reporting system itself has also been upgraded, which will hopefully help developers more quickly figure out what's going on.
"Thanks to updates to Sony’s Crash Reporting System, we can now receive screenshots along with crash reports," developer Nixxes wrote. "This will give us additional insights into where issues occur frequently in the game. We are committed to improving your experience and continue to work on regular updates with more bug fixes, improvements and performance optimizations."
If you're having issues that aren't covered by this patch, Nixxes has also shared a list of workarounds that might help you out until a proper fix is released. You'll also want to ensure your GPU drivers are up to date. If that's a bust, you can also drop a line to Nixxes support. The full patch notes are below.
Release Notes (v1.205.0.0)
- Various crash fixes based on player feedback and data from our crash reporting system.
- Improvements to crash reporting with screenshot support.
- Film Style Animation and Comic SFX can now be toggled via Settings > Game > Camera.*
- User interface improvements to simplify starting a New Game+
- Implemented autosave backups. At key points in the story the game will create a backup of the autosave slot.
- Added mouse scrolling to the manual load/save menu.
- Various improvements and bug fixes to the user interface.
- Reduced noise in character hair when using DLSS Ray Reconstruction.
- Enemies webbed to surfaces no longer have a black background when using ray-traced shadows and ray-traced ambient occlusion.
- Fixed a bug related to ray-traced reflections that could cause pixelation artefacts along water edges.
- Settings for Subtitle Text Size, Closed Caption Text Size, Icon and Prompt Size and Audio Listening Mode are no longer synchronized between different devices.**
*These options become available after obtaining the Across the Spider-Verse Suit.
** As a result of this change, these settings will be reset to their defaults after you install this update.
