Poor Optimization Leads to Poor Performance and Negative Reviews
The highly anticipated release of The Last of Us Part I on PC has not gone as smoothly as expected for fans eagerly awaiting the game’s arrival on their favorite platform. According to numerous reports, the game is plagued by multiple issues that are hindering the gaming experience, including poor optimization that leads to poor performance and numerous crashes. As a result, the game has received negative reviews on Steam, with 66% “Mostly Negative” ratings.
Naughty Dog Acknowledges Issues and Promises Updates
Naughty Dog, the game’s developer, has acknowledged the issues that players are facing and has promised to address them in upcoming updates. The studio has already identified several issues that players are facing with The Last of Us Part I PC port, including long shader loading times, degraded performance while shaders load, instability with older graphics drivers, and potential memory leaks. The team is working tirelessly to rectify these issues to provide a more seamless experience for fans.
Rushed Release Speculations
There is some speculation among fans that The Last of Us Part I’s PC port was rushed to capitalize on the airing of The Last of Us series on HBO. However, there is no concrete evidence to support this theory. Regardless of the reason behind the port’s release, it is clear that the issues need to be resolved before fans can enjoy a stable gaming experience.
Multiple Graphical and Performance Issues Reported by Players
Many players have reported serious graphical and performance problems while playing The Last of Us Part I on their PCs. Some gamers experienced strains on CPU performance, crashes-to-desktops, freezes, sudden shutdowns, strange cinematics or even characters appearing all black or partially transparent.
According to the reviews left by gamers on Steam, 67% of the ratings are negative, with players facing various technical issues, including frequent crashes, long load times, and severe stuttering during gameplay. There have been numerous complaints about the time needed for the game to build its graphical cache, with one user reporting that it took over 70 minutes for the shaders to compile.
Prioritizing Updates and Fixes
Naughty Dog is prioritizing updates to fix these issues that have been reported by players. In a recent tweet from the studio, it has been confirmed that they are taking action against all bugs found in the game. Furthermore, they acknowledged the need to address numerous graphical and gameplay issues raised by their community.
The Last of Us Part I port’s release was delayed by 25 days to ensure that it would debut without any significant issues. However, despite the delay, gamers are still reporting multiple problems after playing the game on their PCs. This underlines how tricky port releases could be and how unexpectable problems arise.
The Importance of Maintaining High-Quality Bar Across Platforms
Christian Gyrling from Naughty Dog shared some insights into why The Last of Us Part I PC port is plagued by multiple issues. He revealed in an interview that moving the PS5-optimized Last of Us engine to PC involved a large amount of tuning and tweaking. This was done to guarantee that gamers can enjoy a high-quality experience across both PlayStation Consoles and PC.
Repairing Trust Takes More than Promises
Despite promises from Naughty Dog that upcoming patches will fix known issues with The Last of Us Part I PC port, it will take more than post-launch support to restore trust among PC gamers who have low expectations for games that have had splashy console releases due to history of poor ports. Exceptions to this trend exist such as Marvel’s SpiderMan & God of War that had successful PC launches. It is essential for studios releasing console games to make sure titles are fully optimized for PC and testing them thoroughly as an unoptimized game will just result in a loss of reputation both for the studio and the game.
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