[Video] BioWare Makes Fun of Marvel's Spider-Man's "PuddleGate" Controversy

[u/cristi1990an]

https://youtu.be/yQph-_imtDY

[u/s0megu]

It says Alpha footage. What presentation is that from? Looked it up and Alpha assets aren't 100%

[u/And_You_Like_It_Too → u/s0megu]

I was looking for a specific gif of Spiderman running against a glass windowed building that I’d seen the day before in a comment/reply to a thread about this whole puddle nonsense. Turns out, if you search this subreddit for “Spiderman, puddle, window, reflection” or any combination of those, you get a whole lot of garbage. Anyway, the reason I even posted a gif was just to show what it looks like when Spiderman runs along a building without reflecting on the surface of it. I spent a couple minutes looking for the most recent one and after about 5 minutes, I realized I was wasting my time and just posted the one I did. Some people argue that proves there were never real time reflections in the game dating all the way back to alpha.

• Another commenter provided this gif to prove there are minimal reflections along building surfaces, although I don’t know how old it is and what the source video is. That’s the thing about this controversy — people are arguing that there was a supposed downgrade or removal of graphical features, but no one is saying a specific date that you can say “everything before or after this time was changed”. So I got a ton of replies in my inbox, some proving there were definitely reflections in puddles, others saying they were just shadows, others saying the real problem involved cube mapping, or ray tracing, reflection mapping, light mapping, or that it was due to image/gif/video compression, or time of day, etc.
  

Then there’s this video from August 16th — “Just the Facts” that appears to show there aren’t obvious reflections at 0:39, 1:08, and 1:59. But again, maybe that’s due to the time of day, the position/orientation of the sun, whether Spiderman is on the north/south/east/west face of the building, etc. So I honestly couldn’t tell you if there are reflections along glass/mirrored building surfaces in the final build of the game. I do think the whole thing is really silly though, and the game looks fantastic. I’d rather it perform well than have reflections (although I admit I would like even a minimal reflection of Spiderman like in that gif, though I’d probably never have noticed it otherwise if it weren’t for this whole nonsense controversy).

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I was one of the first comments on this video, and all I was trying to do was give context — that the original conversation was about the supposed lack or removal of reflections, and that there weren’t untold hundreds or thousands of people outraged about the diminishment or removal of a solitary puddle. And because stories, articles, threads, and videos have now been created like the telephone game, there are far more people that believe people were complaining about a puddle than they were the reflections. I just figured that was worth contributing to the conversation, but if I knew it was gonna fill my inbox like it did, I’d have skipped it entirely. Anyway, reflections or not, I think the game looks awesome and I can’t wait to play it.