The First PS4 Patch For ‘Firewatch’ Offers A Huge Performance Boost!
Briefly: This is one piece of news that I’m absolutely ecstatic to learn about.
If you’re a regular around these parts (or listen to the Geekscape Games podcast), you’ll already know full well just how much we loved Campo Santo’s Firewatch, which hit Windows, OS X, Linux, and PS4 just a couple of weeks ago.
In my review, the main issue that I had with the title (aside from wishing that it were just a bit longer) were the constant performance problems that I experienced during my time with the PS4 version of the game. Frequent frame-rate drops, and even one full console lock-up had me noting that “I’m not talking about a lost frame here and a blip there, either; it seemed more like the title was struggling to run on this hardware at all.”
I also ushered hope that these issues could be resolved with a post-launch patch to the title, and that’s exactly what Campo Santo has done, as they announced yesterday on their official blog. The patch is live on PSN right now, and here’s what it features:
-Draw distance and shadow render distance have been improved, which should remove significant texture popping.
-Streaming loading and unloading has been significantly adjusted with extra safeties so you should no longer see loading happen right in front of you.
-We got Unity to fix a very rare hang that could occur when loading and unloading scenes.
-Many instances of unstable framerate have been improved.
-Auto-saves are now far less frequent, as they were causing the worst framerate hitches we have been seeing.
-Several places where people were escaping the world or getting stuck in collision have been refined. Also, if you are stuck in an endlessly falling state, the game will attempt to put you back, either through loading the last save or respawning Henry aboveground.
-Various cases where you were able to interrupt or break your current quest have been safeguarded.
These all sound like major improvements to the title, and I’m very excited that new players will be able to jump in and experience this great title in a much smoother fashion.
Campo Santo also notes that they’re not done supporting Firewatch yet, either, noting that they’re “currently working with Unity on further improving the game by upgrading to an upcoming version of their engine. We’re also planning to add subtitles for other languages to the PS4 version.”
You can read our review of the game here, and once you’ve played it, be sure to listed to Geekscape Games’ spoiler-filled discussion of Firewatch right here. Already play the game? Be sure to let us know what you thought of the title!
