The Last of Us Part 1 for PC crashes and burns out of the gate

Shawn Knight

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Editor's take: Unfortunately, it seems that bungled launches are becoming the norm rather than the exception. The Internet doesn't help as it affords the ability to launch today and tie up any loose ends tomorrow. It's the sort of behavior that makes you long for the days of old where developers had one shot to get it right and they didn't ship until everything was sorted.

Developer Naughty Dog celebrated the release of The Last of Us Part 1 on PC earlier this week but based on early feedback, perhaps they should have spent more time fine-tuning the port than planning their victory laps.

The Last of Us Part 1 hit Steam on Tuesday and has already amassed more than 7,100 reviews as of this writing. Only a third of the reviews are positive which leaves the title with a "mostly negative" average.

Skim through the user reviews and you'll find multiple complaints regarding the game's hardware utilization, overall performance, and instability. Shader compilation is another common complaint, with several folks claiming this process alone can take an hour or more to complete.

Perhaps the issues would be a bit easier to stomach if this weren't a remake of a 10-year old game.

Nevertheless, Naughty Dog is seemingly on the case. In a support document published last night, Naughty Dog said it was investigating multiple issues including lengthy shader load times, performance and stability issues while shaders are loading, problems related to older graphics drivers, being unable to boot the game despite meeting the minimum system requirements, and a potential memory leak.

The dev added it was working on patches and would provide updates as they become available.

The Last of Us Part 1 for PC was originally due out on March 3 but got pushed back a few weeks and finally launched on March 28. The standard edition retails for $59.99, and the deluxe edition commands $10 more. The latter includes a handful of in-game items like weapon skins and explosive arrows.

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Considering how many re-releases/remasters it has gone through already, $60 just looks like a cash grab (especially since they know people who enjoyed the show will be inclined to buy it).

And then they didn't even get the port stable for launch? Talk about being blinded by greed...
 
Incredibly overrated game to start with, spawning an abominable TV adaptation starring Pedro "I want to kill children" Pascal who somehow hasn't been cancelled yet.
No idea what you're talking about with Pedro and killing children but I sure agree the game is overrated....bigtime.

Considering how many re-releases/remasters it has gone through already, $60 just looks like a cash grab (especially since they know people who enjoyed the show will be inclined to buy it).

And then they didn't even get the port stable for launch? Talk about being blinded by greed...
Absolutely. This was just an easy and quick cash grab at the expense of PC gamers. Turd bags!
 
I recommend watching the digital foundry video to settings you can change to minimize the crashing.

 
I was interested in trying the game, so I grabbed it. I started it up, and the shader loading started. It looked like it was going to take a while, so I went and did other stuff. Came back (think it was around 20-30 minutes) and it was done. I set the game settings to Ultimate across the board, and 1440p ultrawide. Been playing ever since, and only problem was something with my controller settings. Also, after the initial shader load, it never did it again. I guess I'm just lucky, because the game has worked great for me.
 
I was interested in trying the game, so I grabbed it. I started it up, and the shader loading started. It looked like it was going to take a while, so I went and did other stuff. Came back (think it was around 20-30 minutes) and it was done. I set the game settings to Ultimate across the board, and 1440p ultrawide. Been playing ever since, and only problem was something with my controller settings. Also, after the initial shader load, it never did it again. I guess I'm just lucky, because the game has worked great for me.
Or perhaps you are just down playing the many issues hundreds of people are reporting....which sounds white possible.
 
This is one of the best games I ever played, and real piece of art on ps3. How all the technical issues will be quickly solved and more people will be able to enjoy this masterpiece.
Btw it works quite well on Linux, just needs to be tinkered a bit.
 
Here we go again, studios does not give a s'hit anymore, stop preordering overpriced and full of bugs games, its ridiculous that they dont have any QA people, they must have been fired by some smart *** exec higher up that tone deaf and just after money
 
I'd been toying with the idea of buying this on PC until the first steam reviews trickled in...

Will wait until it gets cleaned up or falls in price. Also it will inevitably show up on PS Plus at some stage...
 
Glad I played it on PS4 Pro with ~60 fps, looked great on my OLED. I would not want to play this game on a smaller PC monitors, especially not with keyboard and mouse, that is for sure.

Its a very good game, however I liked Uncharted series more.
 
Glad I played it on PS4 Pro with ~60 fps, looked great on my OLED. I would not want to play this game on a smaller PC monitors, especially not with keyboard and mouse, that is for sure.

Its a very good game, however I liked Uncharted series more.
The PS4/Pro version is the remaster, this is the (so-called) Remake, from the "ground-up".
 
I have zero interest in the game, but I almost bought it just to see how bad it really is...almost. Maybe that's the angle they were going for.
 
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