Lately it's seemed that The Last of Us franchise can do no wrong: the Last of Us TV show has been a commercial and critical success, generating the kind of audience love that had me watching the 30-minute Making The Last of Us last night and wishing it was about three hours longer. So it's surprising to see developers Naughty Dog making what appears to be a pretty major mistake: putting its name to a PC version of the first game containing some show-stopping bugs.
I saw one of them for myself last night: in the most harrowing and talked-about bit of the introductory stage, a section that's absolutely devastating on PS4 or PS5, a bug turned it into complete slapstick. And reports say there are many more.
This isn't Naughty Dog's doing; the port was handled by a different company. But it's their game, and the PC problems are a rare PR disaster for one of gaming's highest-profile franchises.
What's wrong with The Last of Us on PC?
If you head along to the Steam store you'll see that right now the PC port is sitting with a truly dreadful 5/10 rating and over 9,000 negative reviews. And the reviews are all saying much the same thing: it's slow, it's buggy, it's crashy, and it's really not in a state that is in any way acceptable for a game costing nearly £50. The problems don't appear to be affecting everybody, but they do appear to be affecting quite a few gamers.
You know things are bad when the developers have to issue a formal statement. "The Last of Us Part I PC players: we’ve heard your concerns, and our team is actively investigating multiple issues you’ve reported," Naughty Dog posted on Twitter. "We will continue to update you, but our team is prioritizing updates and will address issues in upcoming patches." One such patch has already been released but there will be more in the near future.
If you're a PC player and you've also got a console, the PS5 remaster is a glorious thing and I haven't encountered any problems playing it; if you have PlayStation Plus the PS4 version is included in your subscription. If you don't, it's currently £5.99 on Amazon. It might not be as pretty as the PC version, but it's almost 90% cheaper and sounds like it's also 90% more playable too.
