Developer Liquid Swords has released a major update for Samson. The studio had announced the update earlier this week, right as the open-world action game finally came out, and had said that it would address many issues with the game, ranging from performance problems to crashes, and even progression-blocking bugs.
The performance improvements largely revolve around PSO-related issues, including misses, such as one that fetches materials from the wrong LOD (level of detail) levels, even for Nanite-enabled meshes. Speaking of which, misses related to NaniteLumenCard and NaniteShading have also been addressed, along with ray tracing-related misses for dynamic geometry.
As for general gameplay, the update has brought in a failsafe for NPCs dying to fall damage, as well as fixes for issues with AI running onto busy roads to inspect dead bodies, and police sirens sometimes not working. The update has also brought in some more polish to the game, like improved lean-on-wall alignment, higher volume for NPC vehicles, and separate dialogue buckets for police vehicles and remote dialogue. For a complete list of everything in the update, check out the patch notes below.
Samson is currently only available on PC. For more details, check out our review. Also, take a look at the studio lead’s opinions on the current state of the industry.
Samson update #1 patch notes:
Performance
- Several performance fixes focusing on PSO related hitches (Fixes stuttering related issues)
- Fixed some misses with Slate
- Fixed landscape RayTracingDynamicGeometry misses
- bIgnoreMaskMateria & bRequireRTDynamicGeometryUpdate was not set correctly from landscape PSO precache dispatch since 5.7
- NaniteLumenCard & NaniteShading misses
- Fixed PSO misses due to FStaticMeshComponentHelper::CollectPSOPrecacheDataImpl fetching materials from LOD levels depending on MinLOD even for Nanite-enabled meshes which will render with LOD 0 materials
Crash fixes
- Crash fix for clearing UseDestructionHelp for vehicles with a timer
- Fix for potential case where attempting to update a failed dispatch when losing warp governance could clear the callback lambda as it was being executed, causing a dangling this pointer and crash
- Fixed various audio-related crashes, including one when closing the game
- Avoid race conditions caused by writes to bIsCachedRayTracingInstanceValid and bDynamicRayTracingInstanceCachedDataDirty from parallel tasks
- Force separate storage unit between ray tracing and non-ray tracing bits
- Force separate storage unit between bIsCachedRayTracingInstanceValid and bDynamicRayTracingInstanceCachedDataDirty
Physics
- Fixed issue with Physics destructables behaving like solid objects and not getting destroyed when playing on high framerates.
Mission
- Ice Fish – NPCs spawned in the Beatdown are no longer only Level 1
- Thrill of the Fight and Running on Fumes – now functional after save/continue
- Suzy Red no longer gets multiplied during “Stitches for Snitches” mission completion
- Hit 16 (No Return Fare) – passenger now gets into the cab at the pickup location
- Dave Shultz Tailing Job – Dave now spawns close to player, avoiding near-instant fails for being too far away
- Story Chapter – No Whisper Dealers – no beatdown triggers when eliminating enemies, preventing mission failure
- Hot Iron – fixed issue where the fail radius for the reach dealer objective was too small
- Day 3: Oonagh Welcome Home – call now comes after story mission Blood on Tap rather than Dirty Scripts
- Fixed issue with the “Hot Iron” not being replayable after failing and retrying the next day.
- Improved traversal and removed collision traps by White Whisper stash close to the priest’s house in Park Avenue.
- Fixed the Cumberland barge wall
General Gameplay
- NPC fall damage added as a failsafe for dropped NPCs
- Day 3 Pickups – raised interact range to allow easier pickup if an item is dropped under a body
- Let outsiders check if the driver can be pulled out of the vehicle
- Fixed issues where enemies were not advancing towards you in group encounters
- Fixed issues with AI running onto roads to inspect dead bodies
- Fixed issue where police siren sometimes did not work
Polish
- Fixed smoker alignment in Double Tap and Suzy’s
- Fixed vehicle voices
- Added a dedicated “remote dialogue” bucket for voice lines without a visible speaker (e.g. phone calls or police radio chatter)
- Added separate dialogue buckets for police vehicles and remote dialogue
- Fixed door kick spam
- [Audio] New day stinger now plays before dialogue
- Increased volume for NPC vehicles
- Prevented corpses from popping back up or being launched into the air after takedowns, hazards, or railing interactions
- Improved lean-on-wall alignment
- Blocked bark gestures or one-offs during ranged combat
- Fixed Vivian holding a folder in the doctor’s office instead of nothing
- [Audio] Added “outside vehicle” dialogue lines to NPC non-combat efforts
- Fixed several grammatical errors
- Removed the facility marked on the map for no reason.
- Improved French localization, adding a whole lot of strings that were missed in translation.
Combat
- Fix for unreliable combat barge. If you tried to do a combat barge during the 4-second cooldown, it would just drop you out of combat stance instead.
- Fixed issue with Enemies failing to pull the player out of a vehicle if misaligned even slightly.
- Balanced Police escalation detection ranges to make it fair to the player.
- Fixed issue with player falling through the floor, dying.
Usability
- New “Controls” screen for showing game input from the pause menu
- Correct text for Carpe Diem: First Job costs 0 AP.
- Added Heal to combat hints
- Fixed so we toggle Grab / Throw when you pick up an item in the combat hints
- Fixed issues with changing the Deadzone setting not changing the way sticks respond
- Fixed issues with turning off vibration in the settings.
