Samson patch notes – vital fixes incoming in the first major update on Friday

Samson has launched to a fair bit of flak, which is, in many ways, unfair, as it is a $25 game. Its biggest problem is that people really want it to be a great game, so they have kicked it as it was not what they expected, having seen a few screenshots and YouTube vids. It is important to remember this isn’t a AAA studio with a $300 million budget, though, and maybe cut the guys a little slack.

As reported earlier, the CEO agrees that the launch bugs are unacceptable and indicated that a patch would come out on Friday. We now have the full patch notes, so we have a bit more of an idea of what fixes we can expect when it drops.

Samson Patch Notes – Update 1

Samson’s first post-launch patch is very much a firefighting job, zeroing in on the issues that have dragged its debut down to a Mixed rating on Steam. Performance tweaks target stuttering and shader compilation hiccups, while a raft of crash fixes aim to stabilise everything from audio to GPU-related failures.

Missions and progression get a much-needed pass too, fixing broken objectives, dodgy NPC spawns, and bugs that could outright halt your progress.

On the gameplay side, AI behaviour has been tightened up, police sirens actually work again, and NPCs are less likely to behave like absolute wrong ‘uns. It’s rounded out with a hefty dose of polish, from audio balancing and dialogue fixes to stopping ragdolls from launching into orbit.

Here are the patch notes for Samson in full.

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

• Several crash fixes related to audio, animation and GPU
• 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

Mission

• Several fixes for mission and progression related issues
• 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

General Gameplay

• Several fixes for gameplay related issues
• 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

• Several updates for general polish across various parts of the game
• 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
• Fixed missing translations