Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 review embargo lifted yesterday, and one of the trending moments to arise from it was a video demonstrating instantaneous fast travel. Though some were quick to point out that despite not having a loading screen, the studio had been stealthily hiding it behind a button prompt. This isn’t the case, as a developer from Insomniac Games has come out to clarify that loading isn’t being hidden, but rather the prompts are for the player’s usability.

For those who might not have seen the video, here it is for some context.

Another look at Spider-Man 2's insane fast-travel system.

The fact that you can travel to any location, even the opposite corner of the map, with ZERO loading is absolutely mind-boggling.

Definitely the most seamless fast-travel system I've seen.pic.twitter.com/StOVtFgFkl

— Okami Games (@Okami13_) October 16, 2023

Many were quick to point out that the hold-to-confirm prompt was being cleverly used to hide the loading when selecting a location on the map. Since then, however, an Insomniac dev has responded to a user on ResetEra’s Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 review thread, confirming this isn’t the case.

“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.

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).”

What this means is that they (Insomniac) didn’t want users to accidentally press somewhere and be instantly teleported. This confirm prompt was added so players wouldn’t make that mistake.

This also means that fast-traveling could be slightly faster if the prompt were removed, though based on the video, it’d only cut the time by about two seconds per the prompt’s length.

While other games have had seamless transitions and little to no load time during fast travel, one has to remember the scope of what Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 achieves not just in its visuals with ray-trace in every mode but also its scale and densely populated world that makes its instantaneous loading the more impressive.

Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 launches exclusively on the PS5 this Friday.