Naughty Dog has responded to fans after The Last of Us arrived on PC this week to a largely negative reception. Originally a PlayStation exclusive, The Last of Us has been review bombed on Steam and has received a "Mostly Negative" review score with thousands of players reporting that the long-awaited port has a range of issues such as frame rate stuttering, crashes, and overall poor performance even with robust hardware.Often referred to as one of the greatest games available on PlayStation, The Last of Us is acclaimed for its world building and storytelling. The announcement of the PC port generated a lot of excitement when it was revealed at The Game Awards in December 2022. The Last of Us PC port was initially given a release date of March 3, 2023, but was later delayed by a few weeks to release on March 28.The Last of Us was released on March 28 without any further delays, but the reception has been less than favorable. Developer Naughty Dog has acknowledged the issues many players are experiencing and has committed to address them in upcoming patches. Naughty Dog has requested that players submit tickets for any issues they encounter via its support page. The "Known Issues" page lists some of the problems that will hopefully be addressed in due course such as the game being unable to boot on systems that meet the minimum requirements and a potential memory leak.
Another big issue The Last of Us PC players are reporting is unreasonably long loading times, which seems to be at the top of Naughty Dog's to-do list. Even with a high-end PC it has been reported that the initial load time can take 45 minutes or more as the game builds and compiles shaders. Background shader loading also appears to be responsible for in-game performance issues. According to Naughty Dog's "Known Issues" page outdated graphics drivers could potentially cause instability and resultant crashes.
Some players are incensed with the fact that Iron Galaxy was chosen to port The Last of Us to PC rather than Sony subsidiary Nixxes Software who handled the comparatively well-received ports of Spider-Man and Spider-Man: Miles Morales. Iron Galaxy is perhaps best known for the infamously bad PC port of Batman: Arkham Knight, but has more recently handled ports of Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy and Spyro Reignited Trilogy in collaboration with Vicarious Visions and Toys for Bob respectively. Iron Galaxy also assisted Retro Studios with the development of Metroid Prime Remastered.
The Last of Us Part 1 is available now on PS5 and PC.