Last Of Us Part 1 PC Port Is Drowning In Negative Steam Reviews, Dev Responds
After a short delay from its original launch target (around three and a half weeks), the much-anticipated PC port for The Last of Us Part I released to PC this week, but it's unfortunately not living up to expectations. After just a day on Steam, it's racked up a "Mostly Negative" impression out of more than 6,400 user reviews, with the early consensus being it's a "shoddy port." Ouch.
One of the user reviews called it a "Crash Simulator," followed a breakdown of the number and types of crashes they experienced. They include three to the desktop with an error message, three game freezes that had to be rectified through the Task Manager, five freezes together with Steam, one crash and PC freeze, and two crashes in game, for a total of 14 crashes.
Others complained of similar experiences.
"Crashes ever 20 minutes. Game is badly optimized. Game looks great just needs to be better optimized," one of the user reviews states. Another user rocking a gaming PC with a Ryzen 9 5900X processor, GeForce RTX 3080 Ti graphics card, 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB NVMe SSD chimed in, "Game crashes a lot. Unplayable...my system is as clean and updated as it can be and usually in most games where people have problems I have none or less."
Yet other complained about the time it takes the port to compile shaders.
"30 minutes to cache 16 percent of shaders... all the while my Core i9-9900K is CRANKING at 100 percent non-stop. Nice job guys, multi-billion dollar company btw. Gross. Then again, this is all such a major first world problem, maybe I'll refund the money and donate it to charity. Piss off Sony," an angry user wrote.
In addition to frequent crashes and lengthy shader compiling times, there are complaints of generally poor performance, mouse stuttering, and other issues. The negative reviews stem from a variety of platforms, too. One of the reviews states they're seeing frame rates dip below 60 frames per second on a system with a Core i9-13900K processor and a GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card, running at 4K with DLSS turned on. In comparison, the user states their frames never dipped below 120 FPS on the Resident Evil 4 Remake.
"Naughty Dog added a really cool Crash Bandicoot Easter egg. Every time you play the game, you experience a new Crash," a user wrote.
If there's a silver lining to be had, it's that developer Naughty Dog isn't burying its head in the sand. In a Twitter post, the developer responded to the loud criticism with a promise to patch out the bugs.
"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 stated.
In a follow-up post, the developer stated it continues to monitor its support pages and urged players to submit a ticket for issues they encounter. Naughty Dog also posted a link to its known issues page with the following items listed...
- Loading shaders takes longer than expected
- Performance and stability is degraded while shaders are loading in the background
- Older graphics drivers leads to instability and/or graphical problems
- Game may be unable to boot despite meeting the minimum system requirements
- A potential memory leak
The Last of Us Part I is a remake of the original game that released in 2013. It launched to PlayStation 5 last September, then to PC this week. On the PC the minimum requirements are fairly tame calling for an AMD Ryzen 5 1500X or Intel Core i7-4700K processor paired with 16GB of RAM and 100GB of SSD storage. For graphics, it calls for a Radeon RX 470 (4GB), Radeon RX 6500 XT (4GB), NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 (4GB), or GeForce GTX 1050 Ti (4GB).
The recommended requirements bump things up to a Ryzen 5 3600X or Core i7-8700 processor with the same 16GB RAM + 100GB SSD, along with a Radeon RX 5700 XT (8GB), Radeon RX 6600 XT (8GB), GeForce RTX 2070 Super (8GB), or GeForce RTX 3060 (8GB) graphics card.
Performance (60 FPS at 1440p, High preset) and Ultra (60 FPS at 4K, Ultra preset) requirements are significantly heavier, culminating in a Ryzen 9 5900X or Core i5-12600K processor, Radeon RX 7900 XT or GeForce RTX 4080 graphics card, and 32GB of RAM.
If you want to give it a spin despite negative reviews, you can grab the PC port on Steam.
