It’s a sad thing when something so beautiful becomes so tarnished. For years, The Last of Us has been seen as one of the highest-rated and best-quality franchises to emerge from within Naughty Dog, but the release of The Last of Us Part One on PC has thrown everything into disarray.
Following the game’s launch on PC on the 28th of March, players have been up in arms regarding the sheer volume of bugs, glitches, and performance issues that they’re experiencing while simply trying to appreciate the game. Now, two days after the release of the beleaguered game, Naughty Dog has pushed out the first patch aimed at addressing these concerns.
When It Bombs, It Bombs Hard
On Steam, only 37% of the reviews for The Last of Us Part One are positive, and at the time of writing, it boasts an overall rating of ‘Mostly Negative’. While some of the problems with stability and overall performance are producing some relatively hilarious results, they’re making the game simply unplayable for some.
At the moment, Naughty Dog has a hefty list of issues detailed on the ‘Known Errors’ portion of its website:
- Loading shaders takes longer than expected
- Performance and stability are degraded while shaders are loading in the background
- Older graphics drivers lead to instability and/or graphical problems
- The game may be unable to boot despite meeting the minimum system requirements
- A potential memory leak
- Mouse and camera jitter for some players, depending on hardware and display settings
In an effort to address some of these issues, Naughty Dog pushed out a patch – a hotfix, to be precise – that ‘primarily focuses on stability and performance improvements and other smaller improvements’.
It may not remove blackface Joel, but it’s a step in the right direction. However, a launch like this that’s plagued with bad press and negative experiences will forever be a mark on the franchise.
“Remember when they launched The Last of Us on PC and it basically broke for everyone?”
With soul-crushing delays while installing shaders and performance issues running rampant from the get-go, it may be worth holding off on purchasing The Last of Us Part One on PC until some major work has taken place.
On Reddit, one user shared a clip that showed the characters becoming soaking wet midway through a cutscene for absolutely no reason whatsoever.
If that’s not game-breaking, we don’t know what is…
For more Insider Gaming news, check out our coverage of the ‘limited edition’ Diablo IV Xbox Series X bundle.
