Sitting at my desk, getting ready to tackle the daily news, I wonder if I’ll ever live long enough to see a much-anticipated game release with little to no issues. Right now, it seems more likely that I’ll live to see the release of Beyond Good and Evil 2, but who knows, maybe a miracle will happen.
However, the Last of Us Part 1 for PC is not the miracle I’ve been waiting for. The multi-award-winning game rocked the boat when it was announced that the PlayStation exclusive would be coming to PC back at The Game Awards in December of 2022. And since then, the excitement surrounding the port has been palpable, edged on, in no small part, by the utterly fantastic TV Show addition that the game received.
But when the game was released two days ago, the scary part wasn’t its pandemic-based story or its variety of infected. Instead, the true horror came from the issues plaguing the release. The game has so many problems that it earned a Mostly Negative review score on Steam despite being one of my lifetime’s best games.
Some of the more significant issues players have faced have been stuttering caused by frame rate, near-constant crashes, shaders that take hours to compile, and the game refuses to launch for a significant number of players.
A hotfix for The Last of Us Part I on PC went live earlier today, focusing primarily on stability and performance improvements. Patch notes are here: https://t.co/WwxTbVn1wu
Our team is continuing to investigate known issues, and we will let you know as more updates are planned.
— Naughty Dog (@Naughty_Dog) March 29, 2023
Thankfully help is on its way as Naughty Dog has acknowledged concerns plaguing The Last of Us and has committed to resolving them. A minor update that arrived last night was the first step in this commitment. The update is geared toward improving stability and performance. The patch notes explain that the team is hard at work trying to resolve the shader-building-related crashes.
We hope that most of the problems are fixed within the next few days because The Last of Us is a game everyone should get to experience, and that experience should be free of preventable and fixable issues.