The Last of Us gets another whopping patch as Naughty Dog admits there's more to be done
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 felt like a return to the bad old days(opens in new tab).
Developer Naughty Dog has, however, been beavering away since launch and has just released a fourth major patch(opens in new tab) for 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 review(opens in new tab) Phil 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(opens in new tab).
The full list of changes follow, and Naughty Dog
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