Did Iron Galaxy screw up another highly anticipated PC port? It kind of looks like it, as early owners of The Last of Us Part I, which finally reached PC yesterday following months of exclusivity on Sony’s PlayStation 5 consoles, have taken to Steam and other platforms to voice their disgust at what they claim is another shoddy port that’s plagued by various problems, including random crashes, graphical anomalies, and other strange and/or surprising quirks, such as extremely long shader compilation times. The Last of Us Part I currently has a “Mostly Negative” rating on Steam, and while Naughty Dog has promised that it is looking into the PC port’s issues, it’s also published a new celebratory blog post that explains how it was thrilled to bring The Last of Us Part I to PC and was “determined to do this right.”
From a Naughty Dog post:
As we began development in-house, we wanted PC players to experience an amazing story that truly lasts the test of time while maintaining the equally high-quality bar across both PC and PlayStation consoles. The Last of Us Part I marks the first time an entry in The Last of Us series has been available on PC with PC-specific quality of life improvements and features such as VSync and frame rate cap options, adjustable Texture Quality, Shadows, Reflections, Ambient Occlusion, and more. As our second modern PC release after UNCHARTED: Legacy of Thieves Collection, it’s important to us as a studio to consider what it means to reach new and old audiences alike.
We were determined to do this right by preserving an experience so many love while delivering it to a new platform. From a technical perspective, Naughty Dog’s engine used for Part I was optimized for PS5. Moving it to PC meant a large amount of tuning, tweaking, and even re-thinking, especially when it came to how we utilized the GPU. We made careful decisions on how to adapt the overall experience for the PC.
PC gaming gives a lot of personal freedom to players to customize their experience. As developers, we must ensure the experience is authentic across platforms while addressing the reality of differing hardware, even if we must reconsider fundamental aspects of a game. For example, The Last of Us Part I on PlayStation 5 employs “stick-walking,” where players traverse a space using the DualSense controller’s thumb stick. As we all know, walking too fast in The Last of Us might alert the Infected, which, if you’re trying to remain stealthy, you’ll want to avoid. But while using the thumb stick, players’ emotions might sometimes get the best of them, resulting in throttling the speed at which they walk. This feature is both tactile and emotional, adding to the suspense of any encounter. For the PC version, we had to consider many players’ preference of using a keyboard and mouse as a viable control method. However, they don’t necessarily behave the same way as a controller. So, the Design team explored and adapted this traversal method while still ensuring a world-class player experience with mouse and keyboard. We want PC players to experience the same level of tactile and suspenseful gameplay console players already enjoy.
The Last of Us Part I PC players: we've heard your concerns, and our team is actively investigating multiple issues you've reported.
— Naughty Dog (@Naughty_Dog) March 28, 2023
We will continue to update you, but our team is prioritizing updates and will address issues in upcoming patches.