After years of waiting for The Last of Us on PC, we are going to recommend you don't buy it... yet.
Even though it gives non-console gamers their first taste of one of the best games ever made, right now the internet is filled with reports stating the TLoU’s PC performance isn’t up to scratch.
A quick look at PC platform Steam sees it is awash with negative reviews of The Last Of Us Part 1 — a significantly remastered version of the original that arrived on the PS5 last year — citing problems such as inconsistent frame rate, stuttering, crashes and long load times, along with poor optimization issues.
This seems to be the case on even the type of high-end hardware you’d find in the best gaming PCs and best gaming laptops.
"Crashes every 20 minutes. Game is badly optimized. Game looks great just needs to be better optimized," said one user on the reviews part of the The Last of Us Part 1's Steam page.
Another noted: "Terrible optimization. Game takes more than 8 gigs of VRAM on medium settings, 100% CPU utilization in menu. And the temps are really high too. Probably going to refund soon."
And from the thousands of reviews posted, Steam has labeled them as "Mostly Negative" showing that there are a lot of disgunreltd PC games out there.
Developer Naughty Dog has acknowledged the issues and said it’s working on patches to fix the reported problems.
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.March 28, 2023
But all this is rather disappointing as Naughty Dog has a reputation for producing wonderfully polished PlayStation games; I remember playing the original TLoU on the PS3 and found it ran wonderfully even though it pushed the console to its limits.
However, this isn’t the first time PlayStation games ported over to the PC have had a rocky start. Back in January when the rather excellent Returnal came to the PC there were reports of poor performance, though these got fixed pretty quickly. And before that the PC port of Sackboy: A Big Adventure ran into stuttering on powerful hardware.
Wait for The Last Of Us Part 1 to be patched on PC
While we’re big fans of The Last Of Us Part 1 at Tom’s Guide, we’d suggest you wait a bit before buying the PC version.
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
The game is not one you want spoiled by distracting and frustrating performance issues, as it’s really something you’ll want to be fully immersed in. So we suggest you wait until Naughty Dog pushes out a few patches.
We’re quietly confident Naughty Dog will do its best to get TLoU up to modern PC gaming standards pretty quickly. And it’s positive to see the developer acknowledge these problems and reassure us there’s a fix coming.
In the meantime, if you want post-apocalyptic media to consume then HBO’s take on The Last of Us is brilliant. And for a fresh take on the end of civilization, definitely check out Station Eleven.
On the gaming side, I’d suggest trying out the PC version of Horizon Zero Dawn for a post-post-apocalyptic experience, as well as Elden Ring, which does an excellent job at letting you explore a pseudo-medieval world that’s fallen into ruin; it’s tough but deeply engrossing.
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