The last of us— a zombie apocalypse game you may have heard of — finally released on PC this week. That’s good news for anyone who hasn’t managed to play it on various PlayStation consoles over the past three releases, but the bad news is that the game isn’t at its best, at least at launch.
At the time of release, the game only has a 33% positive rating on Steam, a number and timeframe that has little to do with the quality of the game itself, but rather everything to do with the state in which it was released. Players’ complaints are numerous, but they boil down to a few common issues such as:
Freezes: The game freezes in all sorts of random places, sometimes by itself, sometimes taking Steam (or the whole PC) with it.
CTD: The game keeps crashing on the desktop for many users.
Performance: Gamers complain that the game puts way too much load on the CPU and not the GPU, and as a result, performance is nowhere near as smooth as it should be relative to their systems.
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mouse stutters: Now that’s funny. Apparently using keyboard + mouse causes stuttering. Using a gamepad removes this. So there’s a controller-based performance hit? Wild (this was also reportedly an issue with the Unexplored also ports).
Some of my favorite Steam reviews are:
Wow, this is going like crap
Worst PC port I’ve ever seen. I’ve waited 10 years for the game, avoiding all the walkthrough videos, reviews, spoilers, etc, and this disgusting port excuse ruined every single ounce of excitement I had for the game. Been building shaders for almost 2 hours now, crashes at main menu while shaders are being built every 5 minutes or so.
Terrible optimization. The game requires more than 8 GB of VRAM on medium settings, 100% CPU usage in the menu. And the temps are very high too. Will likely be refunded soon.
Pre-purchased and pre-installed. Launched it as soon as it was done. Went to settings. It turns out that this game uses almost 10 GB of VRAM at max settings of 1440p (the game has the settings set to max by default). I’m running an RTX 3080 Ti with 12GB of VRAM, mind you. I could never get past the menu screen which always crashes when the game shows a notification that says “SHADERS BUILDING” in the lower right corner.
While you’d expect these things to be fixed (or at least improved) in the coming months, it’s becoming a disappointing pattern that many of Sony’s major PlayStation ports are struggling with performance issues on PC. horizon was a mess Unexplored suffered from many of these same problems and now this. Sure, there’s encouragement to be found there too—horizon has overcome its initial issues to be one hell of a good experience on PC – but those bad first impressions don’t help anyone.
For what it’s worth, Naughty Dog has responded to the issues saying:
The Last of Us Part I PC Players: We heard your concerns and our team is actively investigating several issues you have reported. We’ll continue to update you, but our team is prioritizing updates and will fix issues in upcoming patches.