Naughty Dog says it is “actively investigating multiple issues” as complaints about graphical and performance issues continue to flood in following the PC release of The Last of Us: Part 1 on Tuesday.
The thousands of reviews on Steam—67 percent of which are negative, as of this writing—tell the tale of players facing massive problems simply playing the game they purchased. There is an overwhelming number of complaints about everything from frequent crashes and extreme loading times to “severe stuttering” during basic gameplay. Even with some positive reviews on the site supportive of the game’s underlying console versions, others complain that the PC edition is currently “stuttering, crashing, and unplayable.”
Even Joel can’t believe the amount of loading time..
by u/RuneLFox in thelastofus
Many user complaints seem to focus on the extreme amount of time needed for the game to build its graphical shader cache the first time it’s loaded. One Reddit user shared a timelapse of a 70-minute wait for those shaders to compile. Others point out that this extended loading time is particularly significant given Steam’s two-hour playtime window for requesting a no-questions-asked refund.
The Last of Us Part I PC players: we’ve heard your concerns, and our team is actively investigating multiple issues you’ve reported.
We will continue to update you, but our team is prioritizing updates and will address issues in upcoming patches.
— Naughty Dog (@Naughty_Dog) March 28, 2023
A “known issues” update on the Naughty Dog support site acknowledges issues with shader loading taking “longer than expected” and stresses that “performance and stability is degraded” while those shaders are loading. The support page also warns players of a “potential memory leak” (which some forum-goers are attributing to a bugged decompression library) and that “older graphics drivers” can also contribute to “instability or graphical problems.”
“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 wrote in a tweet Tuesday evening. “We will continue to update you, but our team is prioritizing updates and will address issues in upcoming patches.”
Joel has seen better days…
by u/can_i_see_your_cat in thelastofus
In a blog post accompanying the game’s PC launch Tuesday, Naughty Dog’s Christian Gyrling noted that moving the PS5-optimized Last of Us engine to PC involved “a large amount of tuning, tweaking, and even re-thinking, especially when it came to how we utilized the GPU.” The team was focused on “maintaining the equally high-quality bar across both PC and PlayStation consoles,” Gyrling wrote.
Nixxing Nixxes?
Some eagle-eyed fans started expressing worries about this latest PlayStation-to-PC port earlier this month when an Iron Galaxy logo appeared at the bottom of a PC spec sheet posted on the Naughty Dog blog. Iron Galaxy, you may remember, was responsible for the “seriously broken” port of Batman: Arkham Knight in 2015, which was eventually pulled from Steam amid widespread demands for refunds. Four months later, after multiple patches, players were still reporting massive resource allocation issues with that version of the game.
Iron Galaxy’s apparent involvement is especially notable given Sony’s 2021 purchase of Nixxes, which has been responsible for better-received PC ports of PlayStation titles like Spider-Man and Horizon: Zero Dawn. Then again, Iron Galaxy did work on the PC release of Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection, which Digital Foundry called an “accomplished but unambitious port” upon its release last year.
TLOUP1, Anyone else having glitches like these on PC?
by u/official_tommy_boi in thelastofus
Ironically enough, this week’s PC release came after a 25-day delay that Naughty Dog said at the time was to ensure the “PC debut is in the best shape possible.” Who knows how many more days players will have to wait until the game has truly reached that “best shape possible” status.
Listing image by Reddit / official_tommy_boi
