End of Abyss Gets a Day-Two Patch That Fixes Its Biggest Map Problems

Section 9 Interactive has wasted no time polishing End of Abyss. One day after the creepy metroidvania arrived on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC through the Epic Games Store, the studio pushed a patch that clears up most of the problems GameSpot's reviewer pointed to in their write-up.

The headline complaint was the in-game map. At times it fed players bad information, such as marking a door as locked after it had been opened, or failing to show that the key for a given door had been picked up. That matters more than usual in a genre built on exploration and long, winding backtracking routes. Plotting a lengthy trek across the world from a faulty map, only to find out too late that it was wrong, was a real source of frustration. The patch addresses that along with other issues.

The reviewer had called End of Abyss a fun but inconsistent experience, and that verdict was published just two days before the fixes landed. The game itself had only been out for a day. As a result, much of the review now describes a version of the game that new players will never see.

The reviewer notes that this is an unusual situation. Normally, major fixes arrive in one of two ways. Either a game is patched during the pre-release review window, with critics told which bugs are gone or that they are covered by a day-one patch, or it changes shape over months and years through repeated updates, as with Sea of Thieves, Overwatch, Fallout 76, Starfield, Mass Effect 3, and Cyberpunk 2077, which have all prompted re-reviews.

End of Abyss fell into a gray area between the two. Even during the review period, the worst bug the reviewer hit, a boss that failed to drop a quest item, was fixed a few hours before the review deadline, so it never made it into the write-up. The map problems, though, were still there when the review went live.

The practical upshot is good for everyone except the review's shelf life. Only the small group of players who jumped in on launch day will have run into the map bugs. Everyone arriving over the following years will not. The reviewer had planned to revisit the game once their biggest issues were fixed and say it was better now, but never expected that moment to come within 48 hours of publishing.