The pre-release conversation about Wolverine was not exactly ideal for Insomniac. While reviews were generally positive, albeit lower than its past games, a frequent fixture was criticism of the game’s “hand-holding” mechanics, steering players to obvious places in the linear game. The most infamous was the “scent trail,” coined as “fart gas,” which became a widespread meme.

Now, the Wolverine scent trail has been patched, along with audio sense indicators. Here are the patch notes:

This hotfix adjusts the presentation of the Scent Trails and Audio Sense indicators, reducing their opacity to make them less intense. Our team continues to evaluate ways to further improve Senses in the game, including exploring toggleable options for a future update.”

You can compare the old and new scent trails, which now look less like the Roadrunner just sprinted by you and more like misty fog:

It’s better, though some are still calling for its removal entirely. While Insomniac says it’s potentially working on toggles, the situation is trickier than just turning it off. This isn’t to say it was a good design choice in the first place, but many of these segments were not designed to have no pathway indicators. That may not be a big deal in the most linear of levels, but I do think some people complaining about this have either A) not played the game or B) not played enough to reach the later levels of the game, which are more open, and it would be much, much easier to get annoyingly lost in.

You could argue that is more of a level design problem than an indicator problem. It is definitely true that Wolverine does way too much of this. I don’t think the scent trail is even the main problem, it’s just a piece that includes climbing indicators, jumping indicators, basic tutorials popping up in the late game, exact waypoints on demand, giant pulses for objectives and chests, and Logan just flat out telling you what to do or where to go if you pause for even ten seconds or so. Then, the scent trails on top of that. So this is clearly a larger problem than just scent trails.

So far, early estimated data from Alinea Anayltics suggests around 1.9 million copies of Wolverine have been sold, a solid start for a game that had, at the very least, some amount of online controversies attached to it. Though many offline people just…wanted to play a cool Wolverine game. As it stands, Wolverine is outselling every PS5 exclusive since Spider-Man 2, albeit in this generation, that’s not the highest of bars, admittedly.

Personally, near the end I am pretty mixed on the whole thing, and that’s a wide range from combat to story to, sure, some of the over-designed navigation. We’ll see what further changes come.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy .