Regret. This is, perhaps, the word I have repeated the most after playing the PC port of The Last of Us Part 1, the remake of the original game that was released last September. I’m not going to debate whether this remake of Naughty Dog’s game was more or less necessary -it’s an obsolete debate that is not relevant-, but how a golden opportunity was lost for PC gamers because of a lousy port.
As I said before, the word is pity. Pity, perhaps. Or sadness, if I dare. Because The Last of Us is a game that has captivated millions of people around the world, many more after the success of its series on HBO. I’ve played through this game a total of 8 times since 2013. I really wanted it to reach as many players as possible, but the PC version is anything but.
This version, developed by Iron Galaxy and Naughty Dog, is a disaster. Unmitigated. As an absurd fact, only in compiling the shaders it took 26 timed minutes of clock time in the main menu. If the equipment was old, this time would be understood, but The Last of Us Remake has been tested with an RTX 3090, 32 GB of RAM and a Ryzen 9 5900X-12 processor. What I want to get to say: it is a high-end computer, hence the criticism of users who have been for more than an hour compiling shaders on those PCs that have lower specifications are understandable.
Once they were finished compiling, the highlight of the port itself is how poorly optimized it is. As a sample to exemplify this, the metric values recorded below: the graphics consumed almost 350 W, with a maximum temperature of 80 degrees. These are very high figures. As much as the game was running at Ultra in almost all sections, I had never experienced these numbers with this rig. The CPU, in addition, was going up to 88 degrees at some points.
Once the shaders were compiled, it is worth noting that during the hour we played we did not have the big problem mentioned on launch day: crashes. After all, it should be noted that we were able to test The Last of Us Part 1 with the patch released urgently by the company, which solves some of the game’s closing errors. Of course, others such as stuttering were still present, which made it somewhat difficult to play smoothly. Due to the values that the PC was showing, the best thing to do was to remove the game because of the risk that the components would end up suffering.
With all this behind us, the question is as simple as it is easy to answer: is it worth getting the PC port of The Last of Us Part 1? And the answer is a resounding “no”. A game of this caliber, PlayStation’s sacred cow at the moment, can’t afford to have such a version.
Most likely, this release will not stop releasing updates in the short term -in fact, at the time of writing this text, Steam has a new update-. Its optimization is dire, it continues with several of the problems of day 1 and we can only recommend that you wait to buy it. In the future it will be fine, of course, but how much has this version already been damaged by its lousy work?
Right now, in an alternate universe, this text will be full of cheers and odes for having the best way to play The Last of Us in the last decade. However, we’re in this universe and we’ve been stuck with the worst version of all, one that is not worthy of Joel and Ellie’s adventure. One that should never have come out.
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