Insomniac Turns Down Wolverine's Infamous 'Fart Gas' - and a Full Off Switch May Follow

I never thought I'd type the words "fart gas" in a headline about a big PlayStation first-party game, and yet here we are. Honestly? I'm kind of delighted.

If you missed the saga: in Marvel's Wolverine, Logan tracks people by smell, and the game shows that as a wispy trail hanging in the air behind whoever he's following. It's a lovely idea on paper - he's Wolverine, the nose is part of the package. In practice, the cloud drifting out behind characters looked a bit... unfortunate. When reviews landed earlier this month, The Washington Post's Gene Park called it "fart gas", and the name stuck instantly. Once you've seen it, you can't unsee it.

The bigger gripe wasn't the joke, though. Players digging through the menus found that the scent trail isn't tied to the navigation assist option. You can switch off the guide line, you can switch off the mission waypoint, and the gas just stays there. For a game that otherwise gives you a good amount of control over how much hand-holding you want, that one stung.

So here's the good news. Insomniac has pushed out an update that lowers the opacity of both the Scent Trails and the Audio Sense indicators, making them noticeably less intense. The same patch also tackles some common crashes that a small percentage of players have been hitting since launch. And the studio says it's still looking at ways to improve the Senses, including exploring toggleable options for a future update. No date, no promise - but the door is open.

I want to be fair to both sides here. I play a lot with my nephew, and for him a big, obvious "go this way" trail is a gift, not an insult. Guidance like that is what lets younger or newer players actually finish a game like this. The problem was never that it existed. It was that you couldn't choose. A softer default now, and hopefully a proper switch later, is exactly the right order of operations.

Also, a studio reacting this quickly to feedback - even feedback delivered in the form of a fart joke - is just nice to see. Logan's nose lives on. It's simply a little more polite about it.

Image: Xephuwu / CC BY-SA 4.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:KontrolerDualSense.jpg