It’s been a busy year for the Last of Us, with both a TV adaptation and PC port of the now 10-year-old game for fans of the series. Unfortunately, only one of these has received massive applause, and in a turn of events, the TV show has been much better received than the game (or PC port, at least).
Although the base of the game is the same as the widely praised PS3, PS4 and PS5 games, this port has multiple issues. It’s crazy that a studio like Naughty Dog (or maybe port handlers Iron Galaxy, it’s hard to tell who has actually been in charge) would send a game out in the state that it did. Even now, after a couple of hotfixes and a more prominent patch, players continue to have issues.
My experience has been mixed; I’ve loved, laughed and (almost) cried during my time with the game, and I’ll cut through a lot of the social media point scoring that has followed since its release in the rest of this article. This will give you an idea of what’s happening with this port.
First up, this is the same game that scored exceptionally well on its original release back in 2013, remaster in 2014 and remake in 2022. You’ll follow the main characters, Joel and Ellie, as they travel across America in a post-apocalyptic setting following an outbreak of cordyceps fungus; the fungus infects its host, turning them into an almost zombie-like creature.
From the initial outbreak, Joel and Ellie’s journey happens around 20 years later and finds the world in a sorry state. Everyone is doing whatever they need to to survive. Quarantine zones, independent territories, and nomadic mobs are their way of life. Their journey sees the pair bond as they build a relationship and travel together to try and find a cure for the outbreak.
Although the game is ten years old, I’m leaving it as spoiler free as possible regarding the story for anyone that hasn’t experienced one of the best game stories ever written. Although the story is terrific, the voice acting is even better with the fantastic casting of Troy Baker as Joel and Ashley Johnson as Ellie. It frankly is that good, with them showing off some remarkable chemistry.
On to the PC port…..and this was where I started to get worried. The game begins to pre-build shaders on its first launch. Building shaders is normally good and will help reduce or even stop stutters during gameplay. After 30 minutes, I was only around 30% done with this step, and it took nearly an hour and a half to complete. That’s way too long, considering starting the game without doing this, will affect your performance in the game.
During this long wait, I started reading up on all the issues players reported on Steam and Twitter. Broken textures, high CPU and GPU usage, high ram usage and vram usage, graphical glitches and some people could not even play the game due to crashes. I was devastated and crossed my fingers that it was all being blown out of proportion and waited to get in the game.
Once the shaders had finally been completed, imagine my surprise when I jumped into the game, and it looked amazing! Performance was around where I thought it would be, and best of all, as the hours ticked by, I didn’t experience one crash.
For reference, I have a relatively good set-up, 5800x Cpu, 7900xt Gpu, 32GB of ram and a moderately fast Nvme SSD. Running the game at 3440 by 1440 resolution and ultra settings, performance was between 80 and 100fps. All seemed good for what lay ahead. Thanks to my starting experience, I started to believe this was a PC port that people just didn’t have the hardware to run correctly.
Yes, the game had high usage on almost every metric I could check, but it was working, and I had plenty of resources to go around, so I plodded on.
As I made my way thru the first few hours of the game, there were a few minor stutters and an occasional mouse movement issue, but that was it, and certainly, nothing game-breaking like what was being reported all over social media. After a few hours of exploring the beautiful world on offer, I was as happy as Larry.
Then shortly after, I came across a section of sustained lower performance as Joel, Tess, and Ellie travelled through a broken building on their search to meet with the group known as the Fireflys. Performance tanked and stayed in the low 50fps area for around ten minutes. I never thought much of it as I had everything set to max, and thanks to rain effects, a lot was going on in the game. This should have been my first sign of trouble…
As the days went past and more reviews and reports dropped, I released I was one of the very few people not only enjoying the game but honestly able to play it. Images of graphical issues and horrible texture issues spread like wildfire across Twitter, as well as this; the game wouldn’t even load for some players trying to play the game on Steamdeck and if it did, players faced some rather unfortunate bugs and glitches. This was a huge sticking point for many fans as writer Neil Druckmann had posted not long before release that Joel and Ellie would grace the popular handheld console so many expected it to be a verified game for Steamdeck.
A couple of tiny fixes were released for the game, improving my experience even more; I had lower ram usage and GPU and CPU temperatures which dropped by around 8 to 10 degrees. Once again, I wondered if the game’s issues were being dragged into fanboy wars looking to cause harm to TLOUs and, in turn, Sony PlayStation’s highly regarded history.
The 3rd person combat felt meaty and measured, and, in a change from my usual gaming style, I was desperate to be as stealthy as possible and stay out of the eye of enemies or infected hunting me down. I fell in love with a game that failed to click on its original release (on a very short ply-thru, to be fair) and was eager to finish Joel and Ellie’s journey.
Then around 10 hours in, I experienced my first crash. The game froze during a firefight, and I was booted to my desktop; a bug report screen asked me to send data. After so long of not having any issues, I added some details and set off to reload my game. Luckily, my auto-save was just a moment before my crash, so it hadn’t cost me much game time. As I started to play again, the game crashed at the same moment.
Unfortunately, this became a similar occurrence until the credits rolled. The game would then continue to crash unless I did a complete system reboot. This would let me continue for a varied amount of time before another crash would cripple my play-thru. Over the next 4 hours, I battled not only the infected, crash after crash and as much of the joy of a wonderful game was stripped from my brain.
I tried to push on, desperate to reach the end, until I hit a section in a hospital very close to the closing chapter of the game. It was here that the game continually crashed at the exact same moment, and I had to admit defeat and postpone both my hopes of finishing the game and this review and wait for a patch to allow me to see the story’s end. Said patch arrived on Friday, the 7th of April, and although it’s not stopped the crashes, it let me continue to the game’s credits.
Few games have frustrated me the way The Last of Us has. When it works, it is a great experience, and having options like high refresh rates and ultrawide could have made this the best place to play an unforgettable storytelling adventure. You might be able to say that one day, but that depends on the game getting the love, care and patches it needs.
A lot has already been written about the game’s optimisation, but even with my issues, I wonder if the optimisation is as bad as it’s been made out to be. In the next few years, many older pc’s are going to need a serious upgrade to continue having great experiences. In particular, graphics cards with 8GB or less of vram or anything older than four years will struggle to keep up. This is clear to see on the requirement pages of more recent game releases from 2023, like Forspoken and even the upcoming Dead Island 2. It’s the price we pay for technology that’s constantly pushing forward and will be seen more and more as games move away from the last generation.
For now, I advise leaving The Last of Us PC port on your wanted list. I can’t recommend anyone spend their hard-earned cash on a port that might struggle to work, depending on their current hardware. In 6 months, this could be a must-own game from PC, but only time will tell, unfortunately.
-BigGP
