The Last of Us gets another whopping patch as Naughty Dog admits there’s more to be done
The Frame Rate of Us.
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Naughty Dog’s much-heralded The Last of Us Part 1 released on PC in March and unusually for this studio, and despite a last-minute delay, launched in poor shape. Players reported widespread problems with the port including frame drops, stuttering, poor optimisation throughout, and regular crashes. For any game this would be a shoddy state to launch in, but for one with a reputation like this it feltlike a return to the bad old days.
Developer Naughty Dog has, however, been beavering away since launch and has just released afourth major patchfor the game, which clocks in at about 25GB, and includes “framerate optimization, graphical and texture fidelity, crash fixes, and more.” The studio adds that it will be “releasing additional CPU optimization, framerate and texture fidelity improvements in upcoming patches.”
If you haven’t yet tried The Last of Us on PC, it may be wise to hold off on it for now. Naughty Dog’s clearly hard at work on things, but it’s also firefighting and, while some players are now finding the game runs acceptably, for others it remains a little borked.In PC Gamer’s reviewPhil Iwaniuk lamented that he’d been expecting the definitive version of a classic with this PC version: “Instead, it’s a battle against a shader cache that takes longer to load than even the most un-optimised console emulator you’ve downloaded from the darkest corners of retro gaming internet forums. There are reviews on the game’s Steam page that claim the two-hour refund period expired before it had finished building its shaders, and they’re not joking.”
Oh well:At least we got some great bugs out of it.
The full list of changes follow, and Naughty Dog says it’s “closely watching player reports to support future improvements”. The studio responded to the initial negative reaction from players with something of a mea culpa about the port not hitting “the Naughty Dog quality you expected”, which is as close as it’ll come to saying we know we screwed the pooch, please be patient while we try to unscrew it.
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Rich is a games journalist with 15 years' experience, beginning his career on Edge magazine before working for a wide range of outlets, including Ars Technica, Eurogamer, GamesRadar+, Gamespot, the Guardian, IGN, the New Statesman, Polygon, and Vice. He was the editor of Kotaku UK, the UK arm of Kotaku, for three years before joining PC Gamer. He is the author of a Brief History of Video Games, a full history of the medium, which the Midwest Book Review described as “[a] must-read for serious minded game historians and curious video game connoisseurs alike.”
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