Developer MachineGames has whipped out a second update for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle: a patch that in fact fixes a whip issue for the rugged archaeologist. It’s one of many bugs squashed, alongside double-vision issues after nearly drowning and frame-rate stuttering in cutscenes.
The second update–posted on Bethesda’s website–aims to address a problem in which Dr. Jones couldn’t equip his whip. The Indiana Jones and the Great Circle patch also brings “improvements to global illumination on Xbox.” Basically, shadows look even better, with the image quality appearing less washed out. MachineGames also noted that it corrected a problem on PC where global illumination could be disabled because of “playing with below-minimum VRAM graphics cards.”
Last week saw the arrival of the first update for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, offering up path tracing on PC for select Nvidia cards. MachineGames is working on the feature (which is like souped-up ray tracing) to AMD cards in the future, but it’s not part of this second update.
Meanwhile, Harrison Ford showed up at The Game Awards and heaped praise on Troy Baker and Todd Howard for their work on Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. For those unfamiliar, Ford plays Jones in the five feature films based on the character. Lucasfilm seems interested in more Indiana Jones games going forward, though it wants to focus on this one and its upcoming DLC first.
For more, check out GameSpot’s Indiana Jones and the Great Circle review. It’s also one of GameSpot’s 10 best games of 2024. Below you can find the full patch notes for the second update:
GENERAL
- Fixed an issue where users Game Slot may be reported as being damaged, or may appear to be completely missing, when no actual problem had occurred.
GAMEPLAY
- Fixed an issue where player may be unable to equip Indy’s whip.
- Fixed an issue where a player may end up with Indy’s camera permanently equipped.
- Fixed an issue where player may drop and lose their camera if they use the quick-equip (“key item”) prompt to equip their camera while they are inspecting another nearby pick-up item.
GRAPHICS
- Fix to prevent “Double vision” getting stuck on screen when Indy has almost drowned. To players who have already encountered this issue, repeating the near-drown should clear the issue.
- Some further improvements to reduce “stutter” from duplicated frames during cutscenes.
MISSIONS AND QUESTS – PLEASE NOTE THIS SECTION CONTAINS SOME SMALL SPOILERS
- Fixed an issue where Gina may not approach the secret entrance to the Vatican Treasure Chamber, blocking the mission from progressing.
- Fixed an issue where Gina may go to pick the lock to the exit from the Vatican Treasure Chamber as soon as you enter the room, meaning you may miss some very important story developments.
- Fixed a big hole in the floor collision around the edge of the wall around the Ziggurat in Sukhothai that the player could fall through.
PC SPECIFIC FIXES
- Fixed an issue where Nvidia DLSS may cause performance problems when enabled.
- Fixed an issue where Nvidia Frame Generation wasn’t activated properly if HDR is in use.
- Fixed an issue where Nvidia Low Latency Mode could cause performance problems when used with Frame Generation.
- Fixed an issue where global illumination may be completely disabled when playing with below minimum VRAM graphics cards.
- Fixed an issue where Lighting may be over bright in interior spaces if Path Tracing (Full Ray Tracing) is set to Medium or High Quality.
- Known Issue: Nvidia Frame Generation may be temporarily disabled if HDR is activated for the first time. To work around this issue, disable and then re-enable DLSS. This only needs to be done once.
XBOX-SPECIFIC FIXES
- Improvements to Global Illumination on Xbox, to fix issues where shadowed areas had appeared brighter than expected.
ADDITIONAL NOTES
- Content creators may have experienced crashes in the game if using OBS Studio software to capture video. Updating OBS Studio to version 31.0.0 should prevent these crashes from occurring. See https://obsproject.com/ to update to the latest version.