The Last of Us, a game about a zombie apocalypse that you may have heard of, came out on PC this week. That’s good news for anyone who missed it the last three times it came out on different PlayStation consoles, but the bad news is that the game isn’t at its best at launch.
At the time of this post, the game only has a 33% positive rating on Steam, which has nothing to do with how good the game is and everything to do with how it came out. There are a lot of complaints from players, but most of them have to do with:
Freezes: The game is freezing all over the place, sometimes on its own and sometimes taking Steam (or the whole PC) with it.
CTD: A lot of people can’t play the game because it keeps crashing to the desktop.
Performance: Players say that the game puts too much stress on the CPU instead of the GPU, which means that the game doesn’t run as smoothly as it should on their systems.
Mouse stutter: This one is pretty funny. It seems that stuttering happens when you use the keyboard and mouse together. This won’t happen if you use a gamepad. So there’s a performance hit because of the controls? Wild (this was also reportedly an issue with the Uncharted ports as well) (this was also reportedly an issue with the Uncharted ports as well).
Some of My Favourite Steam Reviews Include:
This works so badly!
This PC port is the worst I’ve ever seen. I waited 10 years for the game and avoided all walkthrough videos, reviews, spoilers, etc. This disgusting excuse for a port ruined every bit of excitement I had for the game. Building shaders for almost two hours now, main menu crashes every five minutes or so while building shaders.
Poor use of resources. On medium settings, the game uses more than 8 gigabytes of VRAM and uses 100% of the CPU in the menu. And the temperatures are also very high. Most likely will refund soon.
Already bought and loaded. As soon as it was ready, we put it out there. Went to the settings. At 1440p maximum settings, this game is using almost 10GB of VRAM (game defaulted the settings to maximum).
Mind you, I’m using an RTX 3080 Ti with 12GB VRAM. Never could get past the menu screen, which always crashes when the game shows a message that says “BUILDING SHADERS” in the bottom right corner.
Even though you might think this will be fixed (or at least improved) in the coming months, it’s getting to be a disappointing trend that many of Sony’s big PlayStation ports are having trouble running on PC.
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
Horizon was a mess, Uncharted had a lot of the same problems, and now this is happening. There is some hope there, too, because Horizon got past its early problems to become a great PC game, but these bad first impressions aren’t helping anyone.
For What It’s Worth, Naughty Dog Has Responded to The Issues, Saying:
PC players of The Last of Us Part I, we’ve heard your concerns, and our team is looking into many of the problems you’ve brought up. We’ll keep giving you updates, but our team is focusing on the most important ones and will fix problems in upcoming patches.