The Last of Us Part 1 coming to PC should be a cause for celebration, but so far players are reporting poor performance as the negative Steam reviews roll in.
The Last of Us Part 1 launch on PC should have been a slam dunk for Sony. Having already released the game on PS5 several months back, and with people now more hyped than ever for the IP following the success of the HBO TV show, all the game needed to do was release and, well, work correctly. Unfortunately, that’s not been the case so far, with PC players who have purchased the game reporting various technical issues.
One of several negative reviews for the game on Steam cites “terrible optimisation”, taking a shot at how much CPU and VRAM the game takes up when simply trying to run. Another user, meanwhile, left a poor review saying that they’ve been suffering from crashes “every 20 minutes” when trying to play, despite the fact that the “game looks great”. One user review that’s received a lot of upvotes claims that the game has crashed no less than 14 times within a single play session.
It's highly unlike that developer Naughty Dog and PlayStation wouldn’t have been aware of these problems prior to launch. After all, The Last of Us Part 1 had already been delayed slightly from Friday, March 3, to yesterday as confirmed in a tweet last month, presumably in an attempt to iron out these technical issues. “We are working to make sure that The Last of Us Part 1 PC is in the best shape possible,” it read. All evidence so far suggests that doesn’t seem to have worked out.
Luckily, Naughty Dog took to Twitter relatively quickly to respond to the issues players have had so far, writing in a post that “we've heard your concerns, and our team is actively investigating multiple issues you've reported”. How long it will take Naughty Dog to resolve these issues is unknown.
The Worst of Us
Just when The Last of Us could seemingly do no wrong, it’s been surprising to see Naughty Dog mess up the PC port of the game in quite this way. It’s especially shocking considering that the game had already been released on PS5 in a great state last year in advance of the HBO show’s premiere, and the PC port had already been delayed to ensure a smooth launch.
We know that PlayStation is still relatively new to the PC space, partnering with specialised studios like Nixxes and Iron Galaxy with the intention to bring such prestigious first-party games over to the platform. God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn and Uncharted 4 all enjoyed relatively smooth launches, but this botch with The Last of Us PC port indicates that there are still more lessons to learn.
Naughty Dog clearly tried to give itself a few extra weeks to polish up the game by delaying the game to Tuesday, March 28, but hasn’t worked to iron out the important issues. Iron Galaxy is credited with aiding Naughty Dog on this port, and has a good past precedent porting AAA titles like Spyro: Reignited Trilogy, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy. It’s at least nice to have these issues addressed, so hopefully, they’ll be resolved relatively soon.
