After last year’s run of great success, Sony kicks off 2023 rather lamely – with the PC version of The Last of Us: Part 1 turning out to be an immature technical mess that’s making players and critics furious
Sony has changed its mind about the PC world in recent years and has begun to gradually remove the exclusive status of its biggest hits from the PlayStation world, offering polished, advanced and high-quality conversions of them for PC gamers. It worked exceptionally well during 2022 with five different launches that were all well received by users, from God of War launched for a mature action-loving audience at the beginning of the year to Sackboy: A Big Adventure aimed at younger players towards the end.
This year also started well with the launch of the port for Returnal, which although experienced quite a few technical problems when it first became available but managed to rebound thanks to several patches distributed since then and now holds an average of 81 percent positive reviews and recommendations on the Steam platform.
This good streak is set to continue with the PC version of the successful remake The Last of Us: Part 1, which arrived at great timing with the end of the first season of the TV series based on it from HBO which significantly increased the degree of familiarity and appreciation of consumers for the brand. However, it seems that the love story between Sony and PC is cut short here – with an especially large amount of issues at launch becoming something that no one can remain indifferent to or ignore.
Massive stuttering almost regardless of the system’s hardware power, frequent crashes every few minutes or several tens of minutes and a particularly long time to build the shaders when running the title are just a few selected points from a long list of complaints, which is reflected in only 42 percent of positive reviews above to 11,000 different users on Steam – with this figure also representing a slight increase after a few quick patches that slightly improved the situation, after the starting point immediately upon launch was only 35 percent positive votes. Beyond Steam, Metacritic scores for The Last of Us for the PC are extremely low: 1.8 out of 10 from users and only 56 out of 100 from critics – a historically low score for a Sony title.
It is worth noting that currently there are only 6 reviews in the database for the PC edition, yet this is a kind of precedent. Quite a few big games have been launched with a host of difficult technical problems, including those of Sony itself, but they have often received a somewhat forgiving approach from professional critics who chose to focus on aspects of gameplay and display instead of more technical issues such as stability or performance. Is the case of TLOU evidence that critics are also fed up with the situation? We’ll see.
It can be expected and hoped that most of the title’s problems will be gradually fixed with updates and patches over the coming months, so that players who purchase it at a later stage will have a hard time understanding what all the fuss was about – but it is impossible to ignore the fact that in the modern age titles are launched when they are not sufficiently ready and polished in relation For their price has become a common norm. We can only hope that Sony will learn the lesson from this jarring experience, and make sure to return to its high-quality success track with the next episodes that it chooses to bring to the PC (and also to the consoles).