04 April 2023 , 10:30
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The PC port of Naughty Dog’s beloved game is still plagued by technical woes despite several hotfixes, so Steam is making it easier for players to get their money back.
What a week it’s been for The Last of Us Part 1 port on PC. Upon launch, players were reporting countless instances of crashes, issues with maxing out RAM and just a general lack of polish. Three things we’ve not come to expect from PlayStation given its previous PC offerings such as Horizon Zero Dawn and God of War – even we experienced more than a few technical hiccups on our day one stream last week. Naughty Dog has been quick to act, yet player patience is teetering on the edge.
Naughty Dog took to Twitter yesterday to try and temper the ongoing outcry, writing in a post that “we will have a new hotfix live for The Last of Us Part I on PC tomorrow, and a patch on Friday” before going on to explain that the Steam Deck version is also being looked at. This post comes mere days after Naughty Dog previously released update v1.0.1.5, which focused on “stability and performance improvements”. However, v1.0.1.5 wasn’t intended to resolve all of the PC port’s issues, hence why a hotfix is rolling out today with a larger patch coming on Friday.
Some players don’t wait to wait that long, though, and have already had enough to the point that they’re seeking refunds. Usually, Steam’s policy is to refund any game – without question – providing it has not been played for longer than two hours and was purchased less than two weeks ago. We’ve not quite reached that distance from the port’s release yet, but the time limit appears to have gone out the window in the case of The Last of Us.
In a post located over on the PC Gaming subreddit, user SyFy97 said: “Steam is [accepting] Refunds For The Last Of Us Regardless Of playtime”, claiming to have played roughly 3.7 hours of the game before electing to get their money back. It’s not clear whether this is a blanket policy temporarily introduced by Steam specifically for The Last of Us Part 1's PC issues or an instance of a few cases slipping through the net.
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Mighty thin ice
PC players still having issues getting The Last of Us Part 1 running smoothly is disappointing but not especially shocking. As already alluded to, previous PlayStation PC ports didn’t suffer from anywhere close to the same level of bugs and glitches, indicating that Naughty Dog and co-developer Iron Galaxy had a rough time getting the port out the door. I applaud Naughty Dog for moving so fast when trying to fix the issues, but they’re clearly so widespread the game should have incurred another delay.
Right now I don’t think I could recommend the PC port over last year’s dedicated PS5 remake. The latter was an excellent translation of an already great game, and I suffered very few hitches (if any at all) while playing. Joel and Ellie’s heartfelt road trip through the zombie-filled apocalypse was wonderfully brought to life in a way that took advantage of the console’s current-gen hardware – despite my questioning the need for a remake at all. PlayStation’s knowledge of PC architecture quite clearly isn’t there yet.
It's yet more proof of the smooth experience home consoles like PS5, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch offer when compared to the general PC gaming experience, which often requires a lot of tweaks just to even get running to the same level of quality. All PC players can hope for is that Friday’s patch will bring in some serious improvements. Otherwise, it might incur a lot more Steam refunds than would have been expected.