” So where will Naughty Dog’s next adventure take us? Rest assured, PlayStation and PC players, we can’t wait to tell you more, whether you prefer a DualSense controller or a keyboard and mouse. Developing for both platforms allows us to incorporate lessons learned from either into the overall design of our games. Sharing our stories and experiences on PS5 as well as PC is something Naughty Dog has embraced and will continue to support in the future. “, can we read. Suffice to say, it would be surprising if The Last of Us multiplayer game the studio is to reveal this year isn’t already in development on PC in addition to the PS5.
An unacceptable copy at launch
In its publication, Naughty Dog also explains that wearing The Last of Us Part I on PC was no small feat. “From a technical point of view, the Naughty Dog engine used for Part I was optimized for the PS5. Bringing it to PC required a lot of tweaking, tweaking, and even rethinking, especially when it came to how we used the GPU. We made careful decisions on how to adapt the overall experience for the PC“, can we read. On paper, Naughty Dog has taken care to highlight the capabilities of the platform with specific functions and settings (VSync, ultra-wide format, adjustment of the quality of textures, shadows, reflections, ambient occlusion…) while adding new options to photo mode.
Unfortunately, for its first PC port made in-house (Iron Galaxy had taken care of Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection), the studio renowned for pushing the limits of consoles completely missed its PC debut. While gamers have responded (the game topped the charts on Steam yesterday, peaking at 36,496 concurrent players), user ratings are near disaster, far from the standards PC gamers have become accustomed to with PlayStation games. Studios. With only 32% of positive evaluations out of 5,500, the picture is really grim and, as often with the PC, the root of the problem comes from technical optimization. Many players also point to crashes, the endless generation of shaders as well as frequent and excessive loading times.
In short, nothing to do with the experience of PS5 players and there is urgency for Naughty Dog who quickly reacted on Twitter by confirming to be on the case to release the necessary patches as quickly as possible, knowing that a page listing the most frequently reported problems has been put online here. On the menu so far: “Shaders take longer to load than expected”, “Performance and stability degrades when shaders load in the background”, “Older graphics drivers cause instability and/or or graphical issues”, “game cannot start despite meeting minimum system requirements”, and “potential memory leak”. Good luck and especially welcome to PC.