Spider-Man 2 is full of impressive technical achievements, but the one that’s currently blowing everyone’s minds is just how quick fast travel is. The PlayStation 5 exclusive lets you travel from one end of its sprawling map to the other in just a couple of seconds. It’s so good players thought Insomniac Games must be hiding something.
A clip that recently went viral on social media ahead of Spider-Man 2’s October 20 launch had players marveling at the feature’s elegance and speed in the new blockbuster. “The fact that you can travel to any location, even the opposite corner of the map, with ZERO loading is absolutely mind-boggling,” tweeted user Okami13. “Definitely the most seamless fast-travel system I’ve seen.”
In a thread on ResetEra discussing the fast travel system (via Gamesradar), users debated if there might be a mini-loading screen hidden in the button press required to initiate it. When you fast travel in Spider-Man 2, you have to hold down the triangle button for a second or two overtop of the location you want to move to. The fast travel it triggers is so speedy, some players assumed Insomniac must be using this delayed input to mask the map loading in the background.
Not so according to Mike Fitzgerald, Insomniac’s director of core technologies. “That’s a hold-to-confirm prompt, not hiding a load,” he wrote on ResetEra. “If anyone wants to check, they can look at how late it’s possible to cancel it out when they’re playing.” In fact, the studio even debated removing it at one point to make fast travel even faster.
“Last month I brought up whether we should remove the hold-to-confirm, mostly to address that accusation we were seeing,” Fitgerald wrote. “But it was correctly pointed out to me that having a confirmation window was important for player usability, which at the end of the day is far more important than Internet cred points (even though we love our Internet cred points).”
Having played Spider-Man 2, I definitely agree that the “hold-to-confirm” requirement is a nicer experience. In addition to the satisfying haptic feedback from the button press, it also prevents you from accidently initiating fast travel to somewhere you didn’t mean to go or while trying to check map icons for information about new activities. But it’s still wild to think that Spider-Man 2 could actually support almost instantaneous fast travel across its sprawling version of New York City if the feature was turned off.
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