Following an increasingly rocky launch period, The Last of Us Part 1 on PC finally gets some good news by way of a fan mod that turns the game into a full-fledged FPS.
It’s no secret that the launch of The Last of Us Part 1 on PC was disastrous. What should have been a cause for celebration, with one of PlayStation’s premiere franchises coming to an all-new audience, ended up being plagued by constant crashes, poor optimisation and weird glitches. Developer Naughty Dog has been rushing out hotfixes in the weeks since, but it’s down to the effort of fans that The Last of Us Part 1 on PC has finally received a spell of good news.
If you’ve ever wondered what The Last of Us would play and feel like as a bonafide FPS, then YouTube user Voyagers Revenge is here to help you wonder no longer. His video, which was posted over the weekend, showcases the results achieved by his undeniably impressive fan-made PC mod, bringing the camera behind the eyes of player-character Joel rather than from his waist-high view as is tradition. It’s a tad janky in places, expectedly so, but PC players are clearly onto something.
The FPS fan mod appears to be strictly limited to having Joel shoot from the hip, as opposed to aiming down the gun sights as has become custom amongst most shooters these days. That said, the combat is still appropriately claustrophobic and works well to make the actions of infected enemies even scarier. The camera briefly switches third-person mode during cutscenes and moments when Joel must, say, lift Ellie up to a higher level, but it’s not all that disruptive.
It's not clear when or if this Last of Us Part 1 PC mod will be available to more players sometime in future, though creator Voyagers Revenge does mention that the mod is “currently a work in progress”. Naughty Dog, meanwhile, is still busy getting the official version of its game running to a decent standard on PC, recently releasing Update 1.0.3, which according to its forum post aims to provide “audio, UI, and visual fixes” in addition to adding new audio compatibility options.
The first-person of us
The thought of playing The Last of Us as a first-person shooter never once crossed my mind. However, after seeing how effective blasting away infected enemies in this way looks thanks to the fan mod, I’m jealous as a dedicated PS5 player that I’ll likely never get the chance. So good is this FPS perspective within the rundown location Naughty Dog has created, I’m almost hoping that PlayStation takes notice and considers adding the mode as an official update in future.
Of course, this isn’t the first time that a traditional third-person action game has been given the FPS treatment at a later date. The global behemoth that is GTA 5 could only be played in third-person when it first launched on PS3 and Xbox 360 in 2013, but an approved first-person mode arrived just over a year later when Rockstar’s open-world crime-em-up launched on PS4 and Xbox One. It’s not my preferred way to play, but when horror is such a core component it might be more successful in The Last of Us.
Before Naughty Dog even considers adding any sort of extra mode to The Last of Us – on PS5 or PC – it needs to focus on fixing the recent port, so is absolutely correct to do so. We’re now well over two weeks since it launched and the fact that basic issues relating to video and audio still haven been fully fixed is troubling, and a clear indication that The Last of Us PC should have likely been delayed. Here’s hoping Naughty Dog get it done sooner rather than later, so we can focus on celebrating cooler aspects like this recent FPS fan mod.
