One of the more impressive technical achievements in Spider-Man 2 is its fast-travel system, which has gone viral on social media and impressed critics due to its speed.
The PlayStation 5 exclusive lets players select anywhere on the New York map to fast-travel to, once the player unlocks fast-travel in that region, and appear there in just a handful of seconds, Spider-Man already swinging above the city streets.
It’s an impressive system that has already become a talking point ahead of Spider-Man 2’s release date on October 20. Part of that debate revolves around what’s going on under the hood as players use fast-travel. Check it out in the X video below:
Spider-Man 2's fast travel could be as quick as 1.33 seconds. #SpiderMan2PS5 pic.twitter.com/VYYPQjZHL5
— IGN (@IGN) October 17, 2023
You’ll notice that to fast-travel in Spider-Man 2 you need to hold down a button for a few seconds before the system kicks in. Some had thought this hold-to-confirm masked loading time, but according to Insomniac, that’s not the case.
Taking to ResetEra to respond to a user, Insomniac’s director of core technologies, Mike Fitzgerald, said the development team added the hold-to-confirm prompt for player usability, which makes a lot of sense. The last thing you’d want is to accidentally fast-travel somewhere because of a single button press. But it could have been removed, which means Spider-Man 2’s fast-travel really is blisteringly fast. According to IGN’s social team, it takes just over a second to go anywhere on the map.
“That's a hold-to-confirm prompt, not hiding a load. If anyone wants to check, they can look at how late it's possible to cancel it out when they're playing,” Fitzgerald explained.
“Last month I brought up whether we should remove the hold-to-confirm, mostly to address that accusation we were seeing. 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). :)”
While Spider-Man 2 physical release owners do not need to download its Day 1 patch in order to enjoy the game in full, Insomniac still "highly encourages" those who do buy the disc version to install patch 1.001.002 before they start playing.
We wrote in our Spider-Man 2 review: "As a sequel in a spectacular series, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is both blessed and cursed... Insomniac refines a successful formula of combat and web-swinging without revolutionising either in major ways, making them comfy and familiar with just enough new tweaks and abilities to elevate them to fun new heights. The part that feels like it actually needed a radical rethinking is the open world of New York City, which has been made bigger but not better, with an exhausting checklist of mostly repetitious side activities."
Spider-Man 2 launches on PS5 on October 20. In the meantime, check out our Spider-Man 2 PS5 performance review as well as our review discussion on Podcast Beyond.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.